Federal backlash overwhelms state resistance.
Gardner ’19 [Trevor; 2019; Assistant Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law; “Right at Home: Modelling Sub-Federal Resistance as Criminal Justice Reform,” Florida State University Law Review, Vol. 46, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238245]
All of this is simply to say that the federal government is well-positioned to aggressively challenge police misconduct at the sub-federal level even as local governments refuse to commit the administrative machinery of sub-federal government to controversial forms of federal criminal enforcement. The trouble with much of the current analysis of sub-federal resistance in pursuit of criminal justice reform is that it equates the withdrawal of support for federal criminal initiatives with the suspension of federal oversight of state and local police departments. The Obama administration's successful efforts to crack down on police misconduct in spite of the sub-federal resistance profiled in this Article offer another piece of evidence against this claim.