Officials in Memphis reiterated on Thursday that the city would not immediately agree to negotiate an overhaul of the Memphis Police Department with the federal government, with Mayor Paul Young warning that doing so could be “bureaucratic and costly.”
Mr. Young’s comments came a day after the Justice Department released the findings of a 17-month-long investigation into the department, including that its officers unlawfully used excessive force, disproportionately targeted Black people and mistreated children and those with mental health issues.
Both Mr. Young and Cerelyn Davis, the city’s interim police chief, declined to weigh in on the details of the 73-page report, saying they were still absorbing it. But in pushing back against the Justice Department’s request to negotiate a legally binding improvement plan, or consent decree, Mr. Young pointed to changes that the police department already introduced after several of its officers fatally beat Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, last year.
Those changes and others still to come, he said, would constitute “an effective improvement plan that transcends what is undoubtedly a bureaucratic and costly consent decree.”
Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights and who oversaw the investigation, said that the Justice Department could sue Memphis given the scope of the constitutional violations that its investigation found. But time constraints would most likely make that challenging: President Biden has less than two months left in office, and the incoming Trump administration may not want to see the case through.
The unusual resistance to negotiating a consent decree, which would allow for federal oversight of the police department, comes as the Justice Department is scrambling to finish at least six investigations into police conduct before President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration in January.
Republican administrations have historically been far less aggressive than Democratic ones in pursuing such investigations. During Mr. Trump’s first term, the Justice Department walked away from policing cases pursued by the Obama administration.
“There are a lot of reasons to believe the next Trump administration would not be any friendlier to these cases than the last one was, and there’s reason to believe it would be even more extreme in opposition to this work,” said Christy Lopez, a Georgetown University law professor who oversaw Justice Department investigations of police departments during the Obama administration.
Mr. Young, a Democrat, denied that the outcome of the presidential election had any effect on the city’s position, saying that “we believe we can make more effective and meaningful change by working together with community input and independent national experts.”
The department first came under national scrutiny last January, when an encounter between a group of Black police officers and Mr. Nichols, a Black FedEx worker, quickly became violent. Surveillance and body camera footage showed some of the officers punching, kicking and beating Mr. Nichols, who was 29 and was driving home from work. He died in the hospital days later.
The brutality captured on video deeply affected Memphis, a majority-Black city that has long struggled with high rates of crime and oppression of its Black residents. Five officers were charged in federal and state court in connection with Mr. Nichols’s death, and the elite policing unit that they belonged to was disbanded. Ms. Davis, the interim chief, said changes had also been made to staffing and oversight.
But the Justice Department investigation found that Black residents are still far more likely to be accosted and cited by the police than those of other races.
In their own news conference on Thursday, Justice Department officials invoked the city’s prominent role in the civil rights movement as they condemned what the report described as a series of violent and unconstitutional actions, left unchecked by police leadership.
“The misconduct that we observed offends the dignity of Memphis residents,” Ms. Clarke said, adding that “the people of Memphis deserve fair, transparent, nondiscriminatory, constitutional policing, nothing less.”
She rejected Mr. Young’s assertion that a consent decree would be costly and ineffective, pointing to cities like Baltimore, Seattle and Albuquerque, where such agreements have led to improvements. And she warned that without a consent decree, the city would face costs, including legal fees, as a result of continued police misconduct. (Mr. Nichols’s family has sued the city and police department in connection with his death.)
“The pattern or practice of constitutional violations our investigation identified costs the city, too, and will not be stopped by hopeful words or preliminary changes,” Ms. Clarke said. “Achieving meaningful constitutional policing reform costs time and resources, but not implementing systemic reforms also imposes enormous costs.”
Mr. Young, who was elected to office after the investigation began last July, said he would hold a series of town halls to discuss the Justice Department’s findings and possible changes beyond those the city has already made since Mr. Nichols’s death.
Ms. Davis, who was the police chief at the time of the beating, said that “at this point, we are moving forward with working with our officers internally, working with the community, as the mayor said, to have open conversations about what this report means.”
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