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Brooklyn Law professors look at policing policies in final legal lunch

April 19, 2017 By Rob Abruzzese, Legal Editor Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Associate Dean Stacy Caplow and Professor Jocelyn Simonson hosted Brooklyn Law School’s final Legal Lunch of the semester where they examined the new administration and policing policies on Monday.
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The new presidential administration has brought with it a bit of anxiety and many questions, and the Brooklyn Law School has tried to answer some of those questions by hosting Legal Lunches for the past three months.

The lunches, which are free and open to the public, have covered various topics including presidential powers, international trade and climate change. On Monday, professor Jocelyn Simonson and Associate Dean Stacy Caplow covered the Trump administration and policing policies and, just as was discussed during past lunches, the U.S. is in for some big changes.

Everything from the role of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to the use of private prisons, to immigration policy, to Sanctuary City issues, to protests has either already been changed, under the process of change, or is expected to change.

“We saw the role that the DOJ played in investigating and pursuing police departments, sheriff departments and other law enforcement agencies and intervened in cases of persistent and systemic civil rights abuses,” Caplan said.

“What Attorney General Jeff Sessions has done is he has announced a policy to step back from what has been a pretty active role the DOJ has played in intervening to correct civil rights violations at the local level and to review all of their agreements,” Caplan continued. “The message is maybe the federal government shouldn’t play as significant and as active a role as it has played since 1997.”

Since 1997, the DOJ had conducted 60 departmental investigations and entered into 40 agreements to bring about changes in local police departments. When former President Barack Obama left office, there were 18 open agreements, five open investigations and once case of active litigation. The biggest tool the DOJ had to implement these changes were “consent decrees,” however, Sessions has declared that the DOJ should cease entering into them.

For the most part, police departments haven’t resisted changes, but the professors expect that could change with Chicago, which was negotiating a consent decree, but between Sessions’ statements and a recent police union election in Chicago, could lead to resistance from the department.

Immigration has also been a big change with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stepping up their efforts beyond the scope they had been under the Obama administration. In New York City, this has already led to unintended consequences.

“This calendar year, at least once a week there has been an ICE agent reported in a courthouse,” Simonson said. “The result of someone walking into a courtroom with a big ICE vest is that every non-citizen in the courthouse leaves. Warrants are issued, trials don’t happen and ultimately some local precincts, including Sunset Park, are describing a decrease in victims coming to the police station reporting fewer crimes. Their hunch is not that there are fewer crimes, but just that people are afraid to report.”

This has led to the rise of sanctuary cities, but the federal government has resisted by threatening to withhold federal funding to localities that don’t cooperate with federal employees like ICE.

Private prisons have also had a resurgence under the Trump administration. Before he left office, Obama signed an order stating that the government would no longer enter into contracts with private prisons, however, that has quickly changed.

“Obama started to phase out the private prisons because of their notoriously poor conditions,” Caplow said. “That initiative has stopped and immediately the stock for the Correction Corporation of America rose as a result of the election.”

These types of issues seem to go on and on with big changes happening at many levels. Even protests, which have risen in numbers since the election, could be under more scrutiny under Trump.

“There are a whole stream of new laws that I believe, if fully enforced, would be very suspect under the first amendment,” Simonson said. “You can also require permits, and all kinds of administrative hoops that you must jump through and you don’t jump through those hoops than you could arrest everyone who is protesting. First Amendment case law is all over the place. What we have not seen, yet, is legal challenges to these new laws.”

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