The police reform racket

Matthew Nesvet spent a year in New Orleans working as an auditor with the consulting team monitoring the NOPD consent decree.  He shares his experiences and observations in this article.

I watched as police officials and the third-party contractors overseeing court-ordered changes worked together to obstruct real change. I observed how selective metrics, scapegoating low-level officers to deflect blame from high-ranking officials, suppressing unfavorable audit reports, coaching officers scheduled to undergo third-party audits, and ignoring obvious conflicts of interest and wrongdoing by officials allowed misconduct to remain unchecked.

Thanks to Kamala Harris, there's been a lot of discussion this week about neoliberal policies that create vast complicated systems for addressing or working on serious problems but not actually fixing them. The surest path to success in politics, and in most things, really, is to make sure your career agenda aligns with that of existing institutional power.  This is how we end up with so much "reform" that doesn't actually change anything. We address the housing crisis by "incentivizing" luxury development. We combat climate change by trading carbon credits. We provide "access to" health care through a Rube Goldberg nightmare of shifting plans, premiums, and subsidies all meant to protect the profits of insurers above all else.

As it turns out, criminal justice reform is no different.  Why should it be?  According to Nesvet, in fact, it is big business. 

Police consent decrees are overseen by court-appointed criminal justice experts, including former police chiefs, private attorneys, and academics. These experts audit compliance with reform agreements and advise police on how to make changes. Consent decree monitoring is big business. Teams of expert monitors, often based outside the cities where they oversee police, bid for what can be multimillion-dollar contracts. In New Orleans, where the cost of the consent decree is approximately $55 million and rising, a joint committee of city and federal officials chose a monitoring team led by Jonathan Aronie, a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of the corporate law firm Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton. 

These monitoring teams work with officials like former New Orleans police commissioner Murphy and his boss Harrison to develop metrics that assess the department’s progress. But as Murphy liked to say, quoting a member of the Sheppard Mullin team, “you manage what you measure.” In New Orleans, Murphy and Harrison teamed up with compliance auditors and the Sheppard Mullin experts to focus on quantitative metrics. The compliance “scorecards” Murphy created report the percentage of police districts and units fulfilling audit standards constructed from the terms of the decree.

But the design of many of the metrics allowed police to check boxes rather than demonstrate real improvement.

In other words, the name of the game here is grade inflation.  Kind of reminds you of another "reform" racket in the news lately.