Fort Worth groups call for police reforms enforced by judge

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Community leaders on Wednesday called on the Trump administration to open a civil rights investigation into the Fort Worth Police Department in the wake of a white officer's fatal shooting of a black woman in her home, saying the goal should be a far-reaching police reform plan enforced by a federal judge.

But it's unclear if that objective is realistic given the disfavor, even hostility, the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump has shown toward such court-supervised plans, called consent decrees, which agency policymakers say too often ties the hands of officers while imposing burdensome costs.

Pastor Kyev Tatum, among those who gathered at a news conference in Fort Worth to make the request, said attempts to get the city to end the kind of abuses that contributed to the killing of Atatiana Jefferson Saturday hadn't worked. No mechanism exists to hold city officials accountable, he said.

"It's time for somebody else to take control," he said.

Tatum and others sent a letter to the Justice Department asking it to determine whether there has been "a continued pattern and practice of using excessive force" against minorities in Fort Worth.

Officer Aaron Dean, 34, resigned and was arrested Monday for firing a single bullet through a windowpane while investigating a neighbor's report about the front door being open at Jefferson's home.

"The only alternative to prevent future unlawful killings," the coalition letter said, "is to place the city under a federal consent decree."

The Department of Justice conducted civil rights investigations of nearly 70 police departments between 1994, when Congress authorized them, and the end of President Barack Obama's administration. But the agency's current policy, established by then-U.S....