President Donald Trump recently took a step toward winding down court-enforced police reform deals known as consent decrees. The move gave the impression that Trump is looking for ways to scuttle Obama-era agreements like Cleveland’s.
But for now, the U.S. Department of Justice is standing up for Karl Racine, the Democratic former attorney general of Washington, D.C, who oversees Cleveland’s consent decree.
This week the Justice Department took Racine’s side in a legal fight over his latest report on Cleveland’s progress under the 2015 consent decree. The specifics are a little in the weeds.
Cleveland City Hall has asked a federal judge to order Racine to produce data and a methodology to back up his latest semiannual report on the Division of Police. The city’s attorneys argued that Cleveland is “further along in the compliance process than the Monitoring Team recognizes.”
The Justice Department replied that Cleveland’s monitors historically haven’t had to produce a methodology for their semiannual reports. The reports serve as updates for the judge but don’t replace the monitors’ more in-depth audits, they wrote. The federal government’s attorneys called City Hall’s move “yet another distraction from the important, and sometimes difficult, work of reforming the Cleveland Division of Police.”
A few days later, three of the attorneys who signed on to that motion withdrew from the case. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio declined to comment.
Ultimately, Racine and his team work for U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr., who oversees the consent decree. Oliver doesn’t sound like someone ready to pull the plug. He extended the monitoring team’s term through mid-October 2026.
