The Justice Department's Pattern-or-Practice Police Reform Program, 1994–2017: Goals, Achievements, and Issues

The Department of Justice's pattern-or-practice police reform program has been an unprecedented event in American policing, intervening in local and state law enforcement agencies as never before and requiring a sweeping package of reforms. The program has reached reform settlements with forty agencies, including twenty with judicially enforced consent decrees. Academic research on the program, however, has been fairly modest. Social scientists have largely focused on a few selected issues. There is no study of the full impact of the program on one agency, and there is no comprehensive study of the impact of the program as a whole. Evaluations of individual agencies have been generally favorable, although with backsliding in some agencies. This review argues that the combination of several major goals and the various elements of specific consent decree reforms have created a web of accountability that is unmatched by any previous police reform effort. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Stormwater Management at the Lot Level: Engaging Homeowners and Business Owners to Adopt Green Stormwater Infrastructure

The Clean Water Act of 1972 was the impetus for stormwater management in the United States, followed by the need for many cities to comply with consent decrees associated with combined sewer overflows. With rapidly growing urban centers and the attendant increasing costs of managing stormwater with larger stormwater facilities, green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) was deemed a useful measure to distribute the management of stormwater across the landscape. The management of stormwater has evolved from simply removing it as quickly as it is generated in order to prevent flooding, to intentionally detaining stormwater on the landscape. Typically, low-frequency large events are detained in central stormwater holding facilities, while GSI is employed to manage smaller high-frequency events, slowing and treating stormwater on the landscape itself. Installing GSI close to the source of runoff production ensures that stormwater directed towards these facilities are small enough in volume, so as not to overwhelm these systems. Within these GSI systems, the natural assimilative capacity of soils and plants slows and breaks down many of the pollutants that are found in stormwater runoff. The requirement for a broad spatial distribution of GSI across the landscape necessitates an acceptance of these technologies, and the willingness of the managers of these urban landscapes to maintain these systems on a continual basis. The policies put in place to transfer the responsibility of stormwater management onto individual lot owners range from regulations imposed on those that develop the landscape for commercial and industrial purposes, to incentives offered to individual lot owners to install GSI practices for the first time on their properties. GSI is, however, not a silver bullet for all stormwater ills, and care has to be taken in how it is deployed in order not to exacerbate systemic environmental and racial inequities. A careful and considered adoption of GSI that includes the desires, values, and the needs of the community in conjunction with the environmental goals they are designed to address is critical.

Willingness to Pay for Police Reform

Consent decrees, authorized by Section 14141 of the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act, represent one of the most powerful governmental tools used to encourage—and possibly force—police reform. The consent decree process, however, carries a significant fiscal burden; in some cases, the cost of police reform inhibits agencies’ cooperation with the decrees. One possible solution to this problem calls for the creation of a public-supported police reform fund, whose monies are reserved strictly for consent decrees. Guided by focal concerns theory, this study reports on a factorial survey experiment used to assess variation across individuals’ willingness to pay for police reform. Results indicate that the seriousness of a police reform issue and the agency’s ability to pay for reform act as significant drivers of endorsement of a police reform fund.

A Decade's Tale

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (US DOJ, 2016), African Americans have experienced disproportionate instances of police use of excessive force as a result of discriminatory practices and insufficient training. Officers are permitted to use appropriate force in specific situations; however, when force is excessive and deemed unnecessary, it then becomes an issue of concern. The U.S. Department of Justice was invited to investigate police departments that participated in the use of excessive force and a consent decree was developed with those departments to remedy the DOJ's findings. The researchers conducted a consent decree analysis examining government investigations of police practices throughout the U.S. between 2008 and 2018 comprising the following terms: police reform, consent decrees, settlement agreement, investigation reports, use-of-force, and policy to determine how prevalent excessive force was used towards African Americans. Findings indicated that within the decade, 14 cities were investigated, 12 were identified as using excessive force, with nine having their use-of-force policies available, and four municipalities using excessive force against African Americans. Social work values, advocacy, and cultural training were also identified to aid in the decrease of excessive force complaints.

Evaluating the Accessibility of Online University Education

The rights of disabled students are protected law in nearly every country. However, the lack of awareness of the laws and the need to make web pages accessible has created barriers to fully implementing the intent of these laws. These laws typically go beyond web pages to include all instructional devices including e-readers, social networking sites, and smart phone apps. This paper takes a look at the requirements of accessibility laws, the formation of the accessibility initiative, and the resulting WCAG 2.0 standard. Accessibility testing tools for websites and web content are discussed and then used to measure the level of compliance for a number of universities. It was found that almost all university sites checked had multiple accessibility errors. Finally, a number of recommendations are made based on the compliance issues found and on the terms of several U.S. Department of Justice consent decrees.

Administração pública consensual e a responsabilidade subsidiária da Súmula nº 331 do TST

<p>Consensual public administration and secondary liability in TST Precedent Nº 331</p><p> </p><p>O presente artigo propõe a adoção de instrumentos consensuais de solução de controvérsias, como o termo de ajustamento de conduta e a mediação, por parte da administração pública, para a destinação aos trabalhadores terceirizados das verbas retidas nos contratos de prestação de serviços. Faz uso do método teórico para a análise das fontes bibliográficas sobre o assunto e do método empírico (indutivo) para a análise dos casos concretos. Ao final constata que os instrumentos consensuais propostos oferecem melhor solução para a proteção dos direitos sociais dos trabalhadores envolvidos.</p><p> </p><p>This article proposes the adoption of consensual mechanisms for dispute resolution, such as consent decrees and mediation, by the Public Administration, for the allocation of the monies withheld in services agreements to outsourced workers. It makes use of the theoretical method for analysis of sources on the subject and the empirical (“inductive”) method for the analysis of specific cases. The conclusion is that the proposed consensual mechanisms offer better solutions for the protection of social rights of workers.</p>

Excessive Use of Consent Decrees by the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the legal regulation of the Brazilian capital market, through literature research and assessment of documents and data, with focus on the revision of the regulatory instrument known as consent decree (settlement). A total number of 405 terms were approved by the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) between 2009 and 2014, characterizing a wide use of such regulatory instrument. The present analysis concluded that, although the settlement is considered an important mechanism in the context of capital market regulation, its excessive use constitutes a distortion of both its purposes and of the foundations of normative discipline of the market, and even of the set of functions assigned to the CVM.