After DOJ Investigation, Phoenix Residents Say City is Faking Police-Reform Efforts

Nearly four months have passed since the U.S. Department of Justice released its damning investigation into the Phoenix Police Department—but city leaders are still rejecting federal oversight. 

Instead, council members passed a series of lackluster reforms that will give more money to a department that, according to the DOJ, wantonly violates the civil rights of Phoenix residents.

In June, the DOJ released the findings of its three-year investigation, which found that Phoenix police officers regularly use excessive force, unlawfully detain unhoused people, discriminate against Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people, and violate the rights of protesters and people with disabilities. 

Since then, city leaders, the Phoenix police chief, the Phoenix police union, and the county’s top prosecutor have dismissed the report as a work of fiction authored by “carpetbaggers” from Washington, D.C.

“Everyone needs to recognize that the carpetbaggers from the Department of Justice are not the solution,” Mitchell said at a press conference held by the Phoenix police union. “This report is nothing more than a politically-driven document prepared by a federal agency focused on undermining local law enforcement.”

DOJ officials have indicated they want Phoenix to sign a legal settlement known as a consent decree, which requires agencies to submit to independent federal monitoring to ensure that reforms are implemented. Some city officials traveled to D.C. at the end of September to meet with DOJ representatives, but the parties have not reached an agreement. If Gallego and councilmembers continue to refuse federal oversight of the police department, DOJ attorneys are likely to sue the city to force compliance.

At the Sept. 24 city council hearing, city leaders and police officials once again bucked the DOJ. John Maxwell, secretary for the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association (PLEA), Phoenix’s police union, dismissed the DOJ’s findings as false and urged the council to reject federal oversight. 

“The department has always been a self-assessing, self-correcting organization,” Maxwell said. “The DOJ report withheld important data and information regarding specific cases referenced in the report. Their cherry-picked information does not prove a pattern of practice in the department.” 

The council ultimately chose to funnel more money to the embattled department. The city voted unanimously last week to create four new positions within the Phoenix Police Department to monitor reform efforts. Those four jobs will cost $500,000 annually. The city also approved the creation of a new “Inspections Sergeant” position in “all precincts and other bureaus” to investigate low-level misconduct allegations. Phoenix police have eight precincts.

The decision to give the scandal-plagued department even more money did not sit well with Phoenix residents.

“How dare you, after months of trying to discredit the findings of this report, put forth these last-minute recommendations,” said Viri Hernandez, executive director of the police accountability group Poder in Action. Hernandez characterized the city’s actions as “bullshit committees” and “false reforms” and said the city should remove police from homeless services and mental health calls.

“This whole meeting is again another attempt to evade accountability and instead put forth a false narrative that this department is self-reforming when we know it’s not,” she said. 

Councilmembers touted long-stalled reform efforts that predated the DOJ report and passed them off as new. The city resolved to research an “early intervention system” to catch problem officers faster—something councilmembers already said they’d do in 2019. 

Councilmembers recommended the police department conduct more thorough internal investigations, collect more data on officer stops, and complete more de-escalation training—all of which the city previously agreed to do several times after task forces in 2010, 2015, and 2019 suggested the same thing. Phoenix has failed to reform the department so many times that, in 2019, the city created a task force to review recommendations from previous task forces.

Gallego and council members also lauded the work of the Office of Accountability and Transparency (OAT), a police oversight body—even though lawmakers have gutted the agency. Four years ago, when OAT was first established, Gallego lobbied to create a more toothless version of the agency. After that effort failed, the state in 2022 enacted a law prohibiting civilian investigations of police. In 2024, OAT’s then-director resigned amid allegations that Phoenix city officials were kneecapping OAT’s independence behind the scenes. 

During September’s hearing, Gallego said the OAT’s Civilian Review Board will ensure the police department complies with reforms. But the council previously barred anyone who has sued Phoenix police in the past ten years from serving on the board, preventing members of many police accountability organizations and police misconduct survivors from joining. Though OAT was established in 2020, the city only appointed staff to the review board last week.

The focus on stalled, old plans frustrated those who’ve been watching the department closely.

“I couldn’t possibly count how many times in the last 11 years I’ve appeared before you and your predecessors on this council to talk about the exact issues that we are talking about here today,” Jeremy Helfgot, a former human relations commissioner for the city of Phoenix who served on one of the city’s many prior police reform task forces, said during the meeting. “Some of these recommendations, in whole or in part, are practically verbatim to recommendations that were made by the Community Outreach and Engagement Task Force back in 2011. And we are still here debating their implementation, which means, clearly, in over a decade, the city hasn’t been able to correct itself.”

At the council meeting, Phoenix Police Chief Michael Sullivan repeatedly dismissed the DOJ’s findings as “accusations.”

But Phoenix residents say the DOJ report accurately reflects the trauma and violence they have endured. The DOJ came to town after Phoenix police shot at more people than any other police department in the country and created a fictional gang to criminalize Black Lives Matter protesters. Those scandals and many others led to the ouster of Sullivan’s predecessor. The DOJ based its investigation on hundreds of interviews with community members, city leaders, and police, thousands of documents, and hundreds of hours of body-worn camera footage, among other materials.

Many of the incidents the DOJ flagged were well-documented publicly. In 2019, the Phoenix New Times published screenshots of Facebook posts made by 72 members of the Phoenix Police Department. In the posts, officers and sergeants joked about Muslim people using goats as sex slaves, shooting former President Barack Obama in the face, and killing protesters. In 2020, ten years of police use-of-force data obtained by The Arizona Republic showed that Phoenix officers used force against people of color at higher rates than they did against white people. In 2021, ABC15 obtained a trophy coin Phoenix police officers created to celebrate an occasion when police shot a Trump protester in the groin with less-lethal ammunition.

Family members whose loved ones were killed or brutalized by Phoenix police criticized the city’s actions at the Sept. 24 meeting. Roland Harris, whose son, Jacob, was killed by Phoenix police, demanded accountability for his son’s slaying and lambasted the city’s bloated police budget.

“I had to do the three hardest things as a parent on January 11, 2019,” Harris said. “I had to call Jacob’s mother and notify her that her son was murdered by Phoenix PD. I had to tell Jacob’s nine-year-old sister that she will never see her brother again. And because Phoenix PD lied to the apartment complex that I lived at and told them they apprehended a murder/robbery suspect in that apartment, subsequently getting us evicted that day, I then had to bury my son while finding a place to live with me and my daughter.”

The department’s treatment of Harris’s family and countless others is not news to city leaders. In 2019, Harris and others recounted their experiences directly to Mayor Kate Gallego and former Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams at an impromptu community meeting that drew thousands of people. The meeting was sparked by a spate of high-profile instances of excessive force and racist social media posts by Phoenix police officers. 

Given the many brazen instances of misconduct and abuse, Phoenix’s justice reformers warned that political leaders are purposefully undercutting the DOJ.

“There’s a lot of tactics that are happening at different levels of government—all the way up to the congressional level—to discredit this report,” said outgoing Arizona State Senator Anna Hernandez. Hernandez, whose little brother was killed by Phoenix police during a mental health crisis, is running for a seat on the Phoenix City Council. “I think in the long run, it is a disservice to our communities because it’s going to prevent actual changes from taking place.”