The consent decree set to be hammered out between the City of Cleveland and the U.S. Department of Justice will define the terms that will govern the reformation of the troubled Division of Police. A federal judge (who will have a monitor keep track of the progress being made, or not made) will be selected by a random process and will oversee the implementation of decree. In other words, the city’s fate will depend on the luck of the draw.
Under a perfect legal system — something that exists nowhere in the known world — this wouldn’t be a problem since all jurists would dispense justice in exactly the same fashion … to the letter and spirit of the law. However, in the imperfect real world we live in, judges — in spite of the purest of intentions — sometimes bring their own biases onto the bench with them. Just look at the wide swings of opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest in the land.
For instance, the oftentimes conflicting legal rulings in cases having to do with hot-button issues such as abortion, gay rights, or guns … where one court overrules or reverses a ruling by another court are proof positive that nothing, at least from a judicial standpoint, is set in stone.
While a conservative judge, like Sara Lioi, who usually sides with the prosecutor might feel that police are always right, a progressive judge, on the other hand might, presented with the same set of facts, come to an opposite conclusion. The hope of course is, the legal gods will be with us and a jurist that plays it right down the middle is assigned to administer the consent decree case.
With a fair-minded judge overseeing negotiations, the formulation of the consent decree portion of the process could be wrapped up in a year or two, and that could be a critical timeline. Obama has less than two years left in office, and if that initial portion of the process is not wrapped up by then, our fate could be cast to the sometime capricious winds of partisan politics.
Just as Republicans are gleefully waiting until the president is out of office to attempt to undo the progress he’s made on issues such as Obamacare and immigration reform, so too might they try to tell the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to stand down on efforts to make police more accountable. After all there are cases similar to Cleveland’s going on in 20 other cities around the country.
And stand-downs have happened before; when Bush took office in 2002, he basically de-funded Civil Rights, something Attorney General Eric Holder alluded to during his remarks here in Cleveland, when he said, “For the last six years the Civil Rights Division has been back in business,” obviously referencing the fact that as soon as Bill Clinton left office the Division was, for the most part, out of business.
So time is of the essence … the window of opportunity is wide open at present, and it behooves us to take advantage of the Zeitgeist, because, no window stays open forever.
And, speaking of Republicans, while the Jackson administration might think it’s far-fetched, the folks at the Republican National Committee that are in charge of planning for their 2016 national convention here are probably as nervous as a bunch of whores in church over the negative publicity the city is currently receiving. Can you imagine how big a blow that would be to Cleveland’s image if the RNC took their convention to another city? While some say that can never happen, I hope they’re not whistling past the graveyard. Just the thought of such a possibility makes me shudder.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.