Attorney General Jeff Sessions intends to "pull back" on the Justice Department's efforts to help settle civil rights lawsuits against police departments accused of racial bias.
According to NBC News, Sessions told a group of state attorney generals in Washington, D.C. Tuesday the Obama-era policy isn't helping police fight crime.
"We need, so far as we can, to help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness," Sessions said. "And I'm afraid we've done some of that.
"So we're going to try to pull back on this."
Under the direction of former President Barack Obama, the Department of Justice studied and investigated police departments across the nation in recent years after claims of racial bias surfaced. Those actions helped settle almost two dozen civil rights lawsuits.
Obama himself said in 2015 he believed police in Ferguson, Mo. — where Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer after Brown attacked him — and other departments across the nation did their jobs with a racial bias.
"I think that there are circumstances in which trust between communities and law enforcement have broken down, and individuals or entire departments may not have the training or the accountability to make sure that they're protecting and serving all people and not just some," Obama said.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy told Newsmax in 2014 that former Attorney General Eric Holder was racially biased toward police.
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