Local Police Lament Dismantling of DOJ ‘Peacemakers’ Service (1)

Sanford, Florida’s city manager braced for a days-long ordeal when a group of students blocked the public entrance to police headquarters to pray following the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

But a little-known Justice Department office dedicated to “peacemaking” stepped in to negotiate with the protesters and reached a deal with them within hours. The students agreed to leave in exchange for a public meeting to address the situation, Sanford city manager Norton Bonaparte said.

“They were there, behind the scenes and in the background,” Bonaparte said, crediting the government conciliators for allowing the police station to reopen to the public and helping local officials manage furtherdemonstrations.

Now, that office, known as the Community Relations Service, is on life support, as current and former law enforcement officers and local officials praise it as a critical tool for managing conflict in their communities.

The office’s roughly 50-person staff is now down to fewer than 20, according to current and former employees. CRS has already halted its conciliation work, community engagement leaders said in interviews, and the office hasn’t issued a press release since January.

President Donald Trump proposed eliminating the office in his fiscal 2026 budget request, and House Republicans suggested doing the same in their spending proposal released Monday. The Senate version—typically more bipartisan—advanced Thursday but hasn’t been publicly released.

A DOJ document detailing the request said that CRS “does not comport with Attorney General and Administration law enforcement and litigating priorities.” A Justice Department official said that CRS is being moved into the Executive Office for United States Attorneys.

Pam Peoples-Joyner, the community engagement director for the Winston-Salem, North Carolina police department, said she was “devastated” to learn the office she’s grown to rely on may be eliminated.

Before its work stopped, CRS was scheduled to host a conversation between police and a nonprofit organization, she said. And after facing recent budget cuts that affected youth programs, she said she “actually picked up the phone” to call her local CRS office, but they were no longer working.

“I can’t even imagine life without CRS,” Peoples-Joyner said.

Several former law enforcement leaders also called the move hypocritical, given the Trump administration’s stated support for the police.

“My reaction was disappointment, and also a sense of profound irony,” said Noel March, former chief of police for the University of Maine and former US Marshal in Maine. “We’re now about to lose a little-known but valuable resource through defunding. It’s vicarious defunding of the police.”

Bridging Gaps

The Community Relations Service was established by the 1964 landmark civil rights law to prevent violent conflicts within local communities. CRS is headquartered in Washington and has over two dozen field offices, whose officers come to communities facing tensions or conflict to facilitate events and training programs.

A January press release touting CRS’ achievements during the Biden administration noted it deployed for multiple high profile incidents, including the Minneapolis trial of Derek Chauvin after the murder of George Floyd.

Rick Myers, former police chief in Sanford, said he couldn’t have connected with community leaders without CRS’ help to manage tensions after the killing of Martin, who was unarmed.

“They could walk that tight rope between formal institutional bodies like the police department, like city government, and disenfranchised members of the community,” Myers said. “Every time there was a gap, they’d lay down yet another section of bridge.”

The office also worked with protesters to ensure demonstrations outside the 2024 political conventions proceeded safely and with schools and religious groups to guard against hate crimes, the release said.

Angeline Cheek, a member of the Fort Peck tribe in Montana, said CRS helped ensure demonstrations related to the Keystone XL pipeline remained peaceful and facilitated cultural competency training to help law enforcement better work with indigenous communities.

CRS also helped the Colorado US attorney’s office facilitate conversations and make introductions between the US attorney’s office and Muslim community after a hate crime at a mosque in the Denver area, said Bob Troyer, the former US attorney in Colorado during the first Trump administration.

He cited a law enforcement aphorism that “once a crisis has started, it’s too late to form the necessary relationships to solve it.”

“We started at an eight instead of at a one because of CRS,” Troyer said.

Still, Trump has long targeted the office.

The first Trump administration earlier proposed eliminating the office and transferring its activities to the Justice Department’s civil rights division in multiple budget proposals.

Congress didn’t ultimately defund it then, but the office staff declined from an estimated 58 people in 2016 to 34 people in 2020, before being rebuilt under the Biden administration, according to budget documents.

Legal challenges

It’s unclear if the office’s functions can legally be fully wiped out, and challenges could follow any effort to do so.

After the Trump administration’s government efficiency unit decimated the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which provides arbitration and other conciliatory services for negotiations between labor and management, a group of unions sued in a Manhattan federal court.

The organizations argued that the agency was created by statute, and the president can’t terminate it “by executive fiat.” The federal government has asked the judge to toss the legal challenge, and its request is pending.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said at a hearing on combatting antisemitism that the administration “illegally gutted” CRS, which he described as “a crucial tool for countering hate crimes by working directly with communities around the country.”

Subsuming CRS within the Justice Department unit that supports US attorneys’ offices comes with its own concerns, law enforcement leaders said.

“It’s harder to be the messenger when you’re the prosecutor,” Troyer, the former Colorado US attorney, said.

More than two dozen House Democrats urged Attorney General Pam Bondi in a May letter to reconsider the decision to nix CRS, saying the office “is unique and cannot be easily replicated or undertaken by another department.”