This story was updated on May 27, 2025, with the correct spelling of Tyré Nichols name.
When the Department of Justice released its pattern or practice report findings about Memphis on the evening of Dec. 4, I immediately began reading all 73 pages. The stories, in detail, are depressing. This summation in the report doesn’t lie:
MPD’s intrusive and unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests violate the rights of people through Memphis. The impact of being unlawfully stopped, frisked, detained, handcuffed, searched or arrested is hard to quantify. The damage to one’s dignity, reputation, and self-image can be lasting and traumatic.
The next day, at their press conference, I was surprised to hear Mayor Paul Young and interim Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis say they hadn’t yet read the report.
This begs the question, “Why rush to hold a press conference to answer questions about a report you didn’t read?”
The answer, I think, is to control the narrative around the report.
The mayor did release a statement, one he read during the press conference. The city would “review this lengthy report with an open mind.” In her statement, the interim police chief said the DOJ’s investigation had been done “with little transparency” because the identities of those being interviewed were unknown, and they had no access to the data analysis for the findings. She, too, mentioned an open mind.
The city attorney, who said Memphis will not enter into negotiations to establish a consent decree in a letter sent to the DOJ on Wednesday, bemoaned that the findings took “only 17 months to complete, compared to an average of 2-3 years in almost every other instance, implying a rush to judgment.”
On Dec. 6, in his weekly newsletter, the mayor repeated all of these points, in particular noting that “we must pursue change without putting an undue financial burden on our city.” He noted the costs of the consent decrees in Chicago ($500 million), Seattle ($200 million) and New Orleans (over $100 million). In some cases, he says, the decrees can last decades, and crime rates have gone up under them.
It’s a bit disingenuous to link crime rates and consent decrees. Consent decrees aren’t meant to lower a city’s crime rates; they’re meant to reform police departments. Those crimes aren’t recorded in police-reported statistics.
Chicago has been under a consent decree for five years, and apparently, there will be another three years. I’m not sure where the mayor got his $500 million figure from. But a ProPublica investigation shows that while the Chicago City Council approved $667 million to go toward implementing the decree since 2000, at least a quarter of the annual allotment goes unspent each year. A related analysis shows that since the decree took effect on March 1, 2019, the monitoring team has billed taxpayers more than $20 million.
That’s a lot of money, but it’s less than the $74 million taxpayers spent in 2023 for police misconduct. You see, the problem is that Chicago’s police department has met just 6% of the court order’s requirements. The people with the power of oversight (police officials and the city council) have allowed the department to be lax.
New Orleans entered into its consent decree in 2013. City leaders want to wind it down in two years; it indeed has cost an estimated $150 million. In that two-year period, the NOPD would have to prove the changes they’ve made to reduce biased policing and unlawful searches and arrests are effective. Yet there’s been resistance to it ending from the community; people don’t trust the police not to backslide. I wouldn’t argue that these community members don’t care about cost. But perhaps they care about a police force that doesn’t terrorize them more.
Seattle had most of its consent decree provisions terminated in September 2023; at that point, the SPD had reduced the use of serious force by 60%, among other changes, created a crisis intervention program and developed policies and training to secure rights during investigative stops. The main issue keeping the agency from the finish line is the lack of measures taken to ensure accountability.
And that’s what I’m left with after my little dive into consent decrees. They’re costly and long-lasting because changing the culture of a police department and disrupting the way its officers have been groomed to treat residents isn’t a quick or easy process. The MPD has been this way for decades; it’s never NOT treated Black Memphians with scorn. Heck, according to Davis, in the last three years, the MPD has made more than 700 changes to policies and procedures, and within that time, a special unit of officers killed Tyré Nichols, and a network of officers tried to cover it up.
Side note: Is it comforting or disturbing that the MPD needed 700 changes?
During the press conference, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism’s government accountability reporter, Katherine Burgess, asked the mayor why the people should trust the city and the MPD to reform themselves without oversight. The mayor replied that Memphis has a “creative community,” and he would tap into that to come up with ways to make the MPD better during community meetings.
The thing is, it’s the policing community that needs to get on board. The people, in telling their horror stories to the DOJ, have revealed themselves to be, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “veterans of creative suffering.” It doesn’t take creativity to see Black Memphians, poor Memphians, young Memphians and Memphians with behavioral health disabilities as human and then treat them humanely.
The mayor and the interim police chief want the narrative to be about bureaucracy and cost savings. But in the end, this is a story of whether a violent system actually wants to change.
Adrienne Johnson Martin is co-executive director of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact her at adrienne.martin@mlk50.com
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