When I first met him before arraignment, there it was, a perfect Glock-shaped contusion of many colors on the left side of his face. I pointed it out to the magistrate, who duly shrugged before adjourning the case for a detention hearing. The AUSA explained that he fell hard and hit the pavement, and it was purely coincidental that the bruise was in the exact shape of a Glock. Go figure?

And right after this unfortunate fall, which had nothing to do with the agents, he confessed. At the suppression hearing, the emergency room physician’s assistant testified that she could not state to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the bruise that bore the exact shape of a Glock was caused by a Glock. The judge shrugged. Denied.

These were the protectors and defenders of our constitutional rights.

In quiet little corners of the country, local sheriffs and police chiefs run their own little fiefdoms, with the cooperation, if not endorsement, of the judiciary. It’s not a big secret. Local defense lawyers and public defenders know all about it, and fight it, and occasionally scream about it into the void.

Every once in a while, it is heard outside of the fiefdom, and somebody, maybe even a blawger, will learn in amazement that there are still places in this country where nobody seems to be aware of, and certainly doesn’t give a damn about, law or constitutional rights. Sure, the Supreme Court makes big rulings, and we all debate and dissect their decisions, and life goes on in these fiefdoms blissfully unaware of any of it.

If nobody gives a damn about flagrant abuse in big blue cities, why would anybody care about what they do in places like Evangeline Parish, Louisiana?

Somehow, the Department of Justice caught wind of bad things happening in that little fiefdom and swooped in. Their Office of Civil Rights took 20 months to study the place, its big city being Ville Platte. It’s in the Western District of Louisiana, and its United States Attorney is Stephanie Finley.

Somehow, she knew nothing about this. Or at least didn’t find it to be a problem like her cohorts at Main Justice’s OCR did. But then, maybe she was busy getting bad dudes,* and didn’t have time to concern herself with how Evangeline Parish ignored constitutional rights.

For a shocking glimpse of what’s been happening in the name of criminal justice in America, look no further than a Justice Department report last week on police behavior in Louisiana. Officers there have routinely arrested hundreds of citizens annually without probable cause, strip-searching them and denying them contact with their family and lawyers for days — all in an unconstitutional attempt to force cooperation with detectives who finally admitted they were operating on a mere “hunch” or “feeling.”

This wholesale violation of the Constitution’s protection against unlawful search and seizure by the police in Evangeline Parish, including in its largest city, Ville Platte, was standard procedure for putting pressure on citizens who the police thought might have information about crimes, according to the findings of a 20-month federal investigation. The report described as “staggering” the number of people who were “commonly detained for 72 hours or more” with no opportunity to contest their arrest, in what the police euphemistically termed “investigative holds.”

Sure sounds pretty outrageous, and indeed, it was. And it still is. You see, for all this outrageousness going on in Evangeline Parish, there were no arrests, no cops led out in cuffs. There was a report. It told of all the bad things happening, the ones that were routine in Evangeline Parish and Ville Platte, the ones that United States Attorney should have stopped. The ones that her predecessor should have done something about.

And this time, the Office of Civil Rights spent 20 months, during which lots of nice folks continued to be kidnapped and held despite the law, and ended up with a report. The conclusion of the report?

THE PATH FORWARD

The findings detailed above show that EPSO and VPPD engage in a pattern or practice of violating the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. We are optimistic that we will be able to continue to work collaboratively with both agencies to forge a court-enforceable agreement that memorializes the reforms necessary to stop this unlawful practice, rebuild community trust, and ensure effective, constitutional policing. Absent such an agreement, the Civil Rights Division has the authority to initiate litigation to compel compliance with the Constitution and federal law.

Reform will require that both agencies institute new policies and procedures, reinforce those policies with training, and develop oversight mechanisms that ensure a sustained commitment to long-term institutional change.

Section headings like “the path forward” are crafted to sound inspirational, or at least more benign than “how the fuck do we stop these animals.” There were flagrant violations of the Constitution, “staggering” numbers of them, and with a report, the feds and the Evangeline cops are singing Kumbaya, hoisting a few, all “optimistic” about their working “collaboratively.”

How did this nasty little corner of America persist in ignoring the Constitution under the watchful eye of the United States Attorney? How did the deeply passionate civil rights lawyers at Main Justice know nothing about it until 20 months ago? For how many decades did thousands of people suffer the deprivation of their constitutional rights while the feds didn’t know or care that they existed?

Reforms have since begun, a tribute to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division’s Special Litigation Section, which carried out the investigation and demanded wholesale changes. This bureau has done notable work during the Obama administration, investigating 25 law enforcement agencies and requiring and overseeing major reforms. To fully secure national justice, its work must continue.

Chicago. Los Angeles, New Orleans. San Francisco. Seattle. Albuquerque, Detroit.** Newark. And more. All consent decrees, which is why these cities scrupulously honor constitutional rights and don’t needlessly kill people in the streets, beat them, maintain black interrogation sites, kidnap and hold people without charges, interrogate them, beat them again, deny them access to counsel or bring them before a judge for arraignment. Because very serious pundits tell us, “The importance of these consent decrees can’t be overstated.”

The guy with the Glock-shaped bruise of many colors on his face was never interviewed for a report. He ended up in the Metropolitan Detention Center in the bowels of Brooklyn, because that’s where they sent people in the Eastern District of New York under the auspices of Loretta Lynch when they hit the pavement and got a bruise that looked exactly like a Glock.

There is fear that we may lose all this with the change from Vanita Gupta, chief of OCR, to someone who is less devoted to protecting and defending people’s constitutional rights. Imagine a nation without reports and consent decrees. Places like Evangeline Parish will never get a stern talking-to, ending with a path forward.

*It would be unfair to suggest that the DoJ is never ahead of the curve. There is one instance where they were in the vanguard of protecting people’s rights.

**Detroit has finally emerged from its consent decree after 13 years. It’s now a paragon of constitutional policing because if it wasn’t, then the feds would never have agreed to terminate the consent decree.