A federal judge has ended court oversight of the Oakland Police Department, twenty-three years after a police brutality lawsuit produced the settlement that started it. It’s the longest such monitoring in the country’s history, and the ruling says the department mostly complied. I keep circling that word, “mostly.” Apparently that’s what the finish line looks like.

What strikes me is the timescale. Oakland has gone through a stack of mayors and chiefs since 2003, and the monitoring outlasted nearly all of them. That was the point. A consent decree is one of the few tools American government has that outlives the political attention span, so a reform can’t be quietly abandoned when the headlines move on. It also means a reform stops being a project and becomes a fixture. Officers who joined in 2015 never knew the department without a monitor. For them the oversight is just part of how a police department works.

I’m curious what happens now. Do the habits hold once the monitor leaves, or were they being held up from outside? Twenty-three years is long enough to hope they’re internalized, and short enough that nobody has run the experiment before.

Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, a couple got $575,000 after 55 swatting calls, with officials knowing the calls were hoaxes and armed police showing up anyway. It’s the same subject seen from the other end: a city that had no monitor and no reliable reflex to stop. Sometimes the check on a police department is a decree, and sometimes it’s a settlement check paid after the fact. I know which one I’d rather be relying on.

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