The Trump administration has dropped the Biden administration’s push for onerous consent decrees on police and fire departments. These legal settlements micromanaged police operations and mandated DEI-based hiring and promotion practices.
“These radical requirements seem disconnected from how police departments actually work,” said Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon on Friday. “They tie officers’ hands and make communities less safe.”
The proposed consent decrees required departments to change how they tested prospective hires, increasing the share of black and female candidates hired.
Dhillon also warned that consent decrees drain resources, saying, “Once a judge imposes a consent decree, cities typically spend $10 million or more each year to comply with endless legal demands.”
Such money could instead go toward actually policing our streets.
Data on DEI
DEI practices have been pushed on police departments by Democrat presidents for decades, and economists have studied how such decrees impact the effectiveness of police forces, particularly when they change or eliminate testing standards to reshape the racial or gender makeup of departments.
There can, however, be advantages to hiring minority officers. In many cases, residents of minority communities are more likely to cooperate with officers who share their background. Minority officers can also serve undercover more effectively.
Consent decrees increase minority hiring by eliminating or reducing intelligence test standards. Since all new hires take these tests, the practice risks lowering the quality of new hires across the racial spectrum. Such recruiting has led to increased crime rates, and the largest increases have occurred in more heavily minority areas.
The effect is quite significant. On average, cities that had consent decrees for hiring imposed on them saw their violent and property crime rates falling relative to other cities before the consent decrees and rising relative to other cities afterward. The average yearly decline relative to other cities before the consent decree was -5.3 percent for violent crime, and the average yearly increase afterward was 4.8 percent.
Police departments that hired more black officers after changing their hiring rules also tended to lower their hiring standards the most. A 1 percent increase in the share of black officers correlated with a 4 percent rise in property crime and an almost 5 percent increase in violent crime. These crime spikes hit hardest in areas with the largest black population.
Hellbound and Down 