The last time President-elect Donald Trump swept into the White House, the agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the Baltimore Police Department to correct its “pattern and practice” of unconstitutional policing nearly unraveled.

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s first inauguration, the Justice Department filed a complaint in federal court against the department, detailing its findings on how Baltimore police made improper stops and searches, disproportionately targeting Black residents, among other issues.

But months later, the Justice Department changed its posture, asking U.S. Judge James Bredar for a 90-day pause in April 2017 to “review and assess” the proposed agreement that would reshape policing in Baltimore.

If not for Bredar’s insistence on moving forward, and a largely supportive city government, the agreement could have backslid, or fallen apart altogether, according to several people familiar with the court proceedings.

Now, in the months preceding Trump’s return to power, legal experts who study how the Justice Department enforces its policing agreements in various cities say it remains to be seen what will happen in Baltimore, where the court case monitoring the police is nearing its eight-year anniversary.

When former Attorney General Jeff Sessions took over the Justice Department during Trump’s first term, its Civil Rights Division essentially stopped initiating new “pattern and practice” investigations into local police departments. But after a rocky period in the spring of 2017, existing consent decrees, such as Baltimore’s, lurched forward.

Christy Lopez, a Georgetown University law professor and former attorney in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said the best-case scenario would be the “mild enforcement” of existing agreements — but no new ones.

And the worst-case scenario, Lopez said, could be “noisy” or “quiet.”

“Noisy is going in and trying to undo a lot of these cases, either changing them fundamentally or withdrawing them entirely,” she said. “The quiet way has more to do with modifying these decrees.”

Lopez referenced plans outlined in Project 2025, a lengthy transition document seen as a blueprint for Trump’s second term, despite the president elect’s disavowals of it while campaigning. The plans discuss reassigning Civil Rights Division attorneys to investigate the administration’s own special interests.

The attorneys “just wouldn’t be there to oversee these agreements,” Lopez said.

In Baltimore, the Police Department describes its commitment to the process as “unwavering regardless of political changes”.

“Amid this progress, BPD has achieved sharp reductions in gun violence, increased proactive policing efforts, and strengthened community engagement,” said department spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge.

A spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Scott said the city will “continue working on the reforms mandated by the consent decree and driving down violence in Baltimore, no matter who is in the White House or the amount of assistance they provide.”

The Justice Department declined to comment on any potential ramifications of a second Trump term. A spokesperson for Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Residents are already fatigued’

The optimistic view of how things move forward in Baltimore is more or less the status quo, although most agree the role of the Justice Department could be considerably diminished.

That view centers on the role of Bredar, who’s kept the case monitoring the Police Department on track.

A lifetime-appointed judge who technically retired in May but has continued overseeing the decree, Bredar is known to opine at quarterly hearings about sticking to the agreement, despite political pressures.

Any attempt to end the consent decree would have to be approved by Bredar, said Ayesha Bell Hardaway, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who studies police reform. Hardaway pointed to Bredar’s handling of the first Trump term and said she’d be surprised if he “allowed the silence of the Department of Justice to derail implementation entirely.”

“I don’t think that any of the parties ... the career DOJ lawyers, nor the Baltimore Police Department and their stakeholders, want to walk away from all that good work without the approval of Judge Bredar,” Hardaway said. “Because these decrees sit squarely with the judge, I don’t see him allowing a party to just walk away without having the judiciary speak up. With that being said, it’s really hard if the plaintiff is gone.”

Michael Harrison, the former Baltimore Police commissioner who’s now a consultant, also emphasized Bredar’s role.

“Once the decree is signed, it’s in the hands of the judge who oversees it. Not even the president of the United States can make it go away,” Harrison said.

But Harrison, who consulted the Justice Department on its recently completed investigation into Memphis Police, said it’s likely the DOJ will “probably be a little less active and a little more passive, but still sit at the table.”

Others are less optimistic.

Heather Warnken, executive director of the Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the University of Baltimore School of Law, is “concerned” about the future of Baltimore’s consent decree, which many residents said hasn’t driven transformational change.

“Many residents are already fatigued, given the slow pace of progress and huge price tag, and are rightfully questioning consent decree activities that feel more focused on box checking compliance than capable of driving and measuring true transformational change,” Warnken said. “The U.S. DOJ is supposed to play a critical ongoing role in holding the city, BPD and monitoring team accountable, and that’s hard to imagine under an administration openly hostile to police reform.”

Justice Department a ‘wild card’

Even under President Joe Biden, the Justice Department made tweaks to how it manages police consent decrees.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit Washington-based think tank, said the Justice Department imposed some limits on the decrees in September 2021 after a review by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta.

Those changes, which Wexler welcomed, were aimed at improving the “efficiency and efficacy” of the agreements, Attorney General Merrick Garland said when he announced them.

Wexler anticipates the next administration would take a look at those guidelines, then potentially take them further.

“You can expect that they’re going to bring their own lens,” Wexler said, though he added he’s unsure how that might play out. “That’s the wild card in all of this. What will the DOJ do?”

Stephen Rushin, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, said he expects the second Trump-led Justice Department to operate similarly as the first, which rolled back enforcement of the federal law that makes pattern and practice investigations possible.

“You’ll have an attorney general who echoes his [Trump’s] political opinions that the federal statute in question should generally not be enforced, if possible, and that they should take a step back from federal police reform,” Rushin said.

As for the possibility the Justice Department could go even further in a second Trump term, Rushin said it was hard to envision what that would look like.

“In my mind, what the Trump administration did the first time around was fairly unusual compared to what the Bush administration and other administrations did when it came to their enforcement approach, or lack thereof,” he said.

Moving the goalposts

There are efforts already underway to slightly scale back some aspects of the Baltimore consent decree.

Earlier this week, the chief of the Police Department’s internal affairs unit told the city’s Police Accountability Board that the agency was in “preliminary discussions” with the Justice Department and Bredar about altering the requirement that misconduct investigations must be completed within 90 days.

Though experts in police consent decrees say such adjustments are not necessarily unusual, the example of misconduct investigations does provide a window into an area where a reshaped Justice Department could be felt.

Harrison said the 90-day window to complete investigations was always a “very ambitious goal.”

“Let’s not forget, they were taking a year or longer,” Harrison said.

Will Snowden, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, said that the pressure to exit the costly oversight agreement has bolstered police requests for more resources and technology, while also providing political cover for elected officials to maintain it.

“People act differently when they know they’re being watched,” Snowden said. “If we get rid of consent decrees, they are going to do whatever they want, and sometimes whatever they want is not consistent with the Constitution.”