Monday marks three years since the death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Even after four of the officers connected to Taylor’s death were indicted for making false statements, we continue to learn more about a culture of discrimination and abuse within the Louisville’s Metro Police Department (LMPD). This culture not only created the conditions that ultimately resulted in Taylor being killed, but was also responsible for multiple violations of the civil rights of Black people in Louisville. Last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the results of the Department of Justice’s two-year civil rights investigation into LMPD, concluding that LMPD maintained a pattern or practice of discriminatory conduct on the basis of race and in violation of the federal and constitutionally-protected rights of Black people in Louisville. LMPD officers’ behavior included violations ranging from the unlawful execution of search warrants without knocking, to using pre-textual traffic stops to conduct unlawful searches, to the use of excessive force, chokeholds, and unlawful detention.

For many, Garland’s announcement and the brutalities uncovered in the investigation are likely to be met with myriad emotions. On one hand, the immediate response is one of anger and frustration that after all of the body cam footage, all of the marches, the hashtags, and harrowing cell phone footage we are again reminded of just how broken American policing is at the systemic level. At the same time, the investigation results may be unsurprising to many who have been paying attention to the LMPD in the years following Taylor’s death. Of greatest concern, however, might be a sense of apathy for many about what happens next. Garland’s press conference also announced that LMPD will enter into a court-enforceable consent decree containing various provisions and mandates for LMPD to be overseen by an independent monitor to ensure compliance. During Democratic administrations, these consent decrees have been a typical federal response to pattern and practice abuses, which raises questions around whether this latest one will yield any sustainable culture change within a police department littered with systemic problems.

We’ve seen this movie before and the results of police department consent decrees remain mixed. In New Orleans, for example, a DOJ investigation resulted in a similar consent decree after a series of officer-involved shootings and dubious investigations. The consent decree created a degree of accountability where none had previously existed and led to legitimate more legitimacy in investigations of officer-involved shootings. Likewise, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a DOJ investigation into the police also found widespread abuse and patterns of racial discrimination against Blacks. Again, a consent decree was entered and six-years later the once all-white police department has a greater number of Black officers within its force, more training, and a greater level of accountability through new vehicles to process citizen complaints. But, there have also been less successful stories involving consent decrees and police departments. For example, in the years following a similar agreement in Albuquerque entered n 2014 community members remain critical of a lack of progress and skeptical of the cost to the city.

The truth is consent decrees can only go as far as the mandates contained within and only as long as the duration of the agreement itself. Success is often measured by the benchmarks of how much more training is offered, increased percentages of minority hires, and new systems for complaint review and investigations. It is difficult to actually bring down the number of citizen complaints, and equally as challenging to gauge whether the increased training results in the culture change it intends to affect. While consent decrees often impose hard boundaries for improvement, addressing the mindset of officers in a way that helps to chart real culture change is a much harder task. Critically, the Trump administration—and particularly Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice—showed how easy it is for adversarial Republican presidents to block the progress of new consent decrees and short-circuit existing ones. All it will take is for Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump to win the presidency in 20 months and Louisville could be right back where it started.

Ultimately, an essential element of culture change within any organization is accountability. Even as consent decrees can be effective in creating accountability where none may have previously existed, the judge-concocted doctrine of qualified immunity still remains a significant barrier in holding officers responsible for wrongdoing and providing individual victims in communities substantive redress when their rights have been violated. In Louisville, for example, even as systemic racism was found to exist, the DOJ report was silent on identifying specific officers who would be held liable for various civil rights offenses, including calling Black people in the city “monkey” and “boy.” Such outrages are not issues that result from a lack of training and are indicative of a mindset that is hard to uproot. If this feels familiar, it is because it is. The pattern or practice determination in Garland’s report is the most significant declaration of its kind, but falls short in this familiar way. Even in Ferguson, the DOJ failed to identify any individual actors as responsible, ultimately leaving community members to try to figure out how to transform a declaration of system-wide abuse into tangible remedies.

Three years after the horrific killing of Breonna Taylor, the problem of systemic abuses in policing in America remain a fundamental threat to our democracy and must be corrected. Beyond increased training and citizen complaint boards, this imperative beckons a shift from the current police culture of violence and aggression to a true public safety model. Culture change, in any organization, occurs first through leadership and is then maintained through accountability. The penchant to rely on consent decrees as a catalyst in stimulating that culture change is a step in the right direction, but doesn’t go nearly far enough.