Police Achieve Milestone (*Updated)

Mayor Fenty and Police Chief Cathy Lanier announced today that the city has been allowed to terminate its Memorandum of Agreement with the Department of Justice, under which the police were subject to oversight by an independent monitor. The arrangement, created in 2001, came in the wake of a Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning series that detailed the police department's use of deadly force. The city apparently has made enough progress to be removed from the federal government's watch. The Justice Department's letter can been read here

*Update 5:27 p.m.: The police union is hailing (and taking partial credit for) the dissolution of the federal oversight requirement in a news release, calling the agreement "poorly thought out requirements" written by "inexperienced DOJ attorneys with little or no law enforcement experience."