Wonkblog: St. Louis protests show the many civil rights and criminal justice battles awaiting Eric Holders successor
More than 1,000 protesters march overnight at St. Louis University to condemn the recent fatal shootings of two black teenagers by police. (Reuters)
The continuing protests in St. Louis over the shooting death of a young black man offer a stark reminder that whoever replaces Eric Holder as attorney general will arrive at the Justice Department at a unique momentfor the agency's civil rights and criminal justice work. While thedepartment over the past 13 yearshas been preoccupiedwith terrorismand Wall Street's infractions, the next attorney general's tenure could well be shaped by confronting the legacy of racism in America.
Holder often spoke loudly on these issues, saying what President Obama decided he could not, but his successor will have to wrestle with a complex array of issues.Racial tension over the police shooting of an unarmed teen in Ferguson, Mo., awakened this summer national concern about the makeup of local police departments and the bias and behavior of officers.
States have recently passed an array ofnew voting laws, from mandates to obtain a voter ID to limits on early voting, that raise civil-rights red flags as well. In confronting these new regulations, the DOJ now must respond without the power of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that was dismantled last year by the Supreme Court.
Seismic changes are also underway in how the DOJ approaches sentencing guidelines and the war on drugs, which have long driven the unmatched rise of incarceration in America, and the parallel surge in costs particularly for minority communities. As a result of a shift in thinking about the goals of prison policy (and the effectiveness of the war on drugs), the federal prison population is now declining for the first time in three decades, a trend prison-reform groups are anxious to see continue.
For all of these reasons, criminal-justice and civil-rights advocates are counting on another vocal leader to replace Holder. They are looking for someone who will prioritize those roles of DOJ's mission policing discrimination, protecting voting rights, redirecting prison policy which have been periodically neglected, deemed outdated, or unwise.
The intensity with which these issues remain in the news, however, will complicate the confirmation process for Obama's nominee. It's harder today than just a few years ago to dismiss the persistence of racial bias in the criminal justice system, a topic that may be easier to openly acknowledge post-Ferguson. But there remains far less (if any) political agreement on the racial impacts of new voting laws.
"If you say at your confirmation hearings 'were going to spend a lot of time and effort on looking at these [state] statues that seem to restrict voting,' the Republicans are going to go crazy on that. Just crazy," says Richard Ugelow, a former longtime attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ and now a member of the faculty at American University's Washington College of Law.
Part of the department's challenge in its civil-rights work is that broad public disagreement over whether discrimination still exists has widened as discrimination itself has taken on subtler forms. Government agencies no longer openlybar minority job applicants. But recruiting practices may still have the effect of excluding them. Landlords no longer advertise when blacks aren't welcome. But the housing options available to minorities are still constricted by the fewer possibilities shown to them by landlords and real estate agents.
Likewise, public schools are no longer segregated by policy. But housing patterns have the effect of making them so, exposing children to unequal education. And literal poll taxes no longer exist. But voter IDs have been likened to them even by federal judges.
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Wonkblog: St. Louis protests show the many civil rights and criminal justice battles awaiting Eric Holders successor