The City of Ferguson has been under an agreement with the federal government since 2016, after the U.S. Department of Justice found the city engaged in unconstitutional practices that primarily targeted Black residents. That consent decree ordered the city to make significant reforms to its policing, municipal courts and municipal code. It came two years after a white Ferguson police officer killed Michael Brown Jr., a Black teenager.
Since 2016, the city has spent about $6 million on the consent decree but in June decided it had enough: The city council voted 4-3 to phase out consent decree funding after the end of the year. Proponents of the slimdown said that Ferguson has spent too much money on the decree and that cuts wouldn’t affect police training. Opponents of the cuts, including the St. Louis County NAACP, argue it will stall the city’s progress.
The Ferguson Police Department hired Patricia Washington as the city’s consent decree coordinator last year. St. Louis Public Radio’s Chad Davis spoke with Washington in an in-studio interview about the almost 10 years since the court-ordered consent decree was implemented and the roadblocks and strides the city has made over the past few years.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Chad Davis: Before you got into that position, how much of the consent decree’s goals were accomplished and how would you describe the compliance of the consent decree?
Patricia Washington: When I initially came to the police department, the first thing that I wanted to know for myself was where was the city with the consent decree. I couldn't get a straight answer anywhere. It was, “a lot of things had been done, a lot of work had been done, a lot of hard work around community building,” but nobody could definitively tell me, "This is where we are and this is what we need to do.” So the first thing that I did, even before becoming the consent decree coordinator, was to create my own sort of little spreadsheet tracking sheet: This is what I know has been done. That is what led me to realize, “Oh my goodness, there's a lot more work to do.”
Davis: If you had to think about a percentage of where it was at that time, roughly what would that percentage have been?
Washington: I have to look at it in terms of percentages in the various areas. Municipal courts was maybe 70% done. The city was maybe 70%, 80%, and the police department was lagging behind. We might have been 50% to 60% complete with the work that we needed to do.
Davis: You've been the consent decree coordinator for about a year and a half. What have you accomplished at this point, and how much still needs to be done?
Washington: One of the first things that I did was create our exit strategy: How do we finish this work, and how do we make sure that the systems that we put in place are lasting? We had a strategic plan put together and then started just breaking everything off by those categories. What needs to be done in courts? We have an amazing court administrator. Michelle Richmond is phenomenal. She and her team have courts in 99% compliance, and that's everything from rewriting policies to how people pay for their court fees and fines. We meet internally every week and we look at our work, check our work and check ourselves in terms of, “OK, what can be done now, have we run into a roadblock, which we often do, and then, how do we get around that?”
Davis: What are some of those roadblocks?
Washington: One of the biggest things that we're facing in the police department is just staffing. The biggest component of the consent decree for the police department is around training and community policing. Training is very, very difficult when you don't have a full contingent of officers. If you want officers to come in and do a half-day or a full-day training, or three-day training, somebody's got to still patrol the streets.
Initially, it was getting all the training approved because there's such a process for that. You can't just say, "Oh, we're going to do some training on the First Amendment." No, you have to identify a subject matter expert, and they have to develop a curriculum. That curriculum has to be approved by the training committee, which is one of the aspects of the consent decree that's mandated. So there's a civilian training committee, then it goes to the DOJ for approval, then it comes back from the DOJ and goes to the monitor for approval. Once all these approvals are done, you have to figure out how to schedule it. So it could take months just to get one training session offered.
Davis: Specifically with the police department, how have these trainings gone and what's still left?
Washington: But the biggest thing is changing the culture about training, thinking about training so that it's not a punishment. It really is to make you sharper, to make you better. And we're seeing a lot of that. We just finished our scenario-based training around use of force this past week, and that is all inline learning. They are there all day, and as soon as you see something in a scenario, maybe there's a skit or something, you stop right there and you course correct. And if someone doesn't demonstrate the knowledge that you would expect in terms of that particular exercise, you're stopped.
Davis: One of the things that I keep hearing from you and the judge and others is that progress is finally being made when it comes to compliance with the consent decree. Why did it take a long time for momentum to ramp up?
Washington: There were so many factors in terms of the consent decree progress or the lack thereof, whether it was personnel changes at the police department, city council change, changes within the people who were working on the consent decree. But I think the biggest thing was just this refusal to accept that we have to do this — and that was across the board, whether it was council members, members of the community, people responsible for it. So even though people were working very, very hard to get things done, there's still that pervasive attitude, a reluctance to embrace it and see it as a positive tool, which it is. And so I think a lot of the early work was stymied because you got to remember the consent decree is 170-something pages. The biggest part of that was around municipal reform of the different municipal codes and different laws, and reform of the court. That's work that people don't see.
So a lot of that early work, that heavy lifting, was being done, but it was stymied because of the different personnel changes.
Davis: The Ferguson City Council voted to cut half the funding by the end of this fiscal year or so. When that vote was happening, what was going through your head?
Washington: You can't do the work without the funding. You want us to be in compliance, you want to be able to redirect those resources. So to me, the fastest way and the most efficient way to do that is to put the necessary resources in so that we can work more efficiently, faster and get it done. So that was my immediate concern.
Then some of the council members shared that well it’s not about defunding the program side and the training side, we're going to leave all the money in there for training. We’re going to leave half of the money in there for community policing and community engagement. No, the biggest part is legally ensuring that we are doing the work. That takes attorneys. And I get it, the legal work is expensive, but it is also required.
Davis: I know you're talking about a timeline too, what does that look like?
Washington: The council had initially said that by December 31, 2025, they wanted us to be out of the consent decree, and I don't think that that was very realistic. I don't think they had a full understanding of just the process alone. So we've had some additional conversations around that, and they know it's not going to be December 2025, maybe 2026 or early 2027, with the support that is needed. So I am hopeful that we can all come to a compromise because at the end of the day, what we all want is true reform in Ferguson, across the board.
Davis: What does success look like for you?
Washington: Instead of negative thinking toward the consent decree there, we have embraced it as the performance management tool that it is and that it's in our culture, it's in our DNA.
