The 2024 report, which claimed to have found a “pattern of practice” of civil rights violations in the Phoenix PD, led to a push for the city to engage in a consent decree with the DOJ. The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association and Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Thomas Galvin have vocally resisted the decree, which has generated enormous controversy in Arizona.
Chairman Galvin Letter to Attorney General Bondi on Priority of Public Safety in Maricopa County: My colleagues and I share a commitment to effective policing. Federal oversight is an affront to federalism. Please see below for my letter to @AGPamBondi https://t.co/cJX2EQ6zni
— Thomas Galvin: Chairman, Maricopa County BOS (@ThomasGalvin) April 15, 2025
Dr. Yates, a retired Police Commander, published his analysis on his Substack writing, “The report read like all of them before. It was vague on details with an opinion-driven narrative, but it worked. Using the report as leverage, the media ramped up their coverage of the agency.”
Of the 134 incidents cited by the Biden DOJ, Yates and Chaix found that a stunning 130 of them were determined by legally recognized experts to be “either factually or contextually inaccurate,” in a “97% rate of false reporting.”
Delving into how this could occur, Yates wrote,
“The answer lies in the DOJ’s investigative methodology—one that leans heavily on anecdotal narratives, hindsight bias, and advocacy framing rather than factual accuracy. While the individuals conducting this investigation are anonymous, it's clear that they lack expertise in police operations, policy, or law. In many cases, their descriptions misidentified lawful force as unconstitutional, ignored established case law standards, such as Graham v. Connor, and omitted critical contextual information, including suspect behavior, threats, or prior warnings.”
WATCH:
The analysis, at 257 pages in length, presents several breakdowns of the incidents described in the US DOJ report. One cited prominently was adjudicated in a federal civil rights lawsuit on January 15th, 2025. The DOJ report was submitted as evidence in this case with the claim that Phoenix Police officers “unfairly targeted two protesters because of their anti-police views.”
However, upon review of video evidence, a Phoenix jury cleared the police officer involved of any wrongdoing in the incident. Yates cites comments from Attorney John Masterson, who represented the officer and described the inaccuracies of the US DOJ report in his post-trial statement, “I think in this case the jury did a very good job of looking at the evidence that was presented to them rather than relying on some agency from Washington D.C. to tell them what to do.”
Further, Yates and Chaix present a serious critique of the Biden DOJ’s reliance on “approximately 0.000025% of police/public interactions based on public calls for service—an extraordinarily low statistical representation,” for its “pattern of practice” claims.
During the DOJ investigation, the Department had access to Phoenix Police data from 2016 to 2023, an enormous record of over 296,000 (296,733) arrests and more than 5,300,000 (5,305,646) calls for service, per the analysis, yet only cited 134 incidents to generate the alleged “pattern of practice.” And notably, the report “does not consistently adhere to a fixed time period of data analysis,” instead jumping from “analysis of incidents involving unhoused people,” from 2016-2022, to analysis of officer-involved shootings from 2018-2023.
The analysis found, “Given the magnitude of calls and arrests, one would expect that the US DOJ would have volumes of incidents to substantiate a ‘pattern or practice’ of unconstitutional policing. However, the US DOJ cited merely 134 incidents.”
1/2-Weitzel: "This is propaganda, or what I call 'legal extortion'. I have been a guest on Dr. Travis Yates' podcast on leadership; he knows his stuff. See post #2 for my column on consent decrees. @LawOfficer @MorningAnswer @TomSchuba @ChicagoContrar1 https://t.co/Q5e5CruLmL
— Chief Thomas Weitzel-Retired (@ChiefWeitzel) May 17, 2025
Breaking down the DOJ claims, the analysis found that based on a review of related police reports, body cam video recordings, and other evidence related to each incident: a total of 116 incidents were presented in a factually inaccurate manner via “Omission Missing/Misrepresentation of context,” “Deception or misleading description,” “Misapplication of case law,” “Conclusions formed using hindsight bias,” and “Integration of information not present in related materials and evidence.” Twelve incidents could not be identified by the Phoenix PD based on information provided by the DOJ, and a mere four were found to be factually accurate.
Doctors Yates and Chaix found, in direct contradiction to the DOJ report,
Yates credited The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association for opposing the Phoenix PD Consent Decree, writing, “The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association stood up and because of that, there is an opportunity for real accountability and real reform. I will be discussing that in another article, but for now, we owe a debt of gratitude to PLEA for doing what no one else has done to date—hold power accountable."“After reviewing the related police reports and police body cam videos—and to the contrary of the descriptions and overall determination of the US DOJ report—we found the overall professionalism of the Phoenix Police Department to be inspiring and exemplary. Whereby the US DOJ report asserted wrongdoing, we observed Phoenix police officers showing compassion by waiting much longer than required to use force, if not exhausting all other means and attempts beforehand. We also observed officers placing themselves in greater danger than necessary to avoid using force. And in many incidents, we saw officers take action in ways that should serve as models for other law enforcement agencies.”
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