Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week ordered the Justice Department to review all police reform agreements. The DOJ will conduct sweeping reviews on pacts known as consent decrees between the department's civil rights division and thousands of local police departments.
Sessions' order came as lawyers for the Justice Department asked for a 90-day delay in a consent decree on Baltimore PD.
While Houston PD is not under a consent decree, Baltimore, Chicago and many other cities are.
"A lot of cities are mandated things in consent decrees that they eventually just can't afford to pay for," says Chuck Canterbury, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police. "Soon as they're out from under a consent decree, they stop doing it."
"With a collaborative agreement, all the parties sit down," he says. "The rank and file, the community groups, the city and Justice Department."
"In a consent decree, the only two parties that make the decisions are the city and the DOJ."
He says police in Steubenville, Ohio were stuck taking the same class seven years in a row.
"The same instructor, the same textbooks, it was just overkill," says Canterbury. "They were taking 35 man hours a year off the street to listen to the same class over and over and over again."