Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are unambiguous: They believe racism pervades policing and all other aspects of the criminal-justice system. Just a day before the networks declared Biden the president-elect, he claimed a “mandate” to eliminate “systemic racism.” During the campaign, the ex-veep routinely announced that black parents were right to worry that their children would be shot by the police.

Biden’s plan for “strengthening America’s commitment to justice” reads like a Black Lives Matter wish list; there is no reason to think that a Biden-Harris Justice Department won’t implement it. Among its most consequential proposals, it calls for a return to the practice of imposing weakly justified consent decrees on police departments.

During the Obama years, career attorneys in the Justice Department regularly opened civil-rights probes into police departments without credible evidence that an agency was systematically violating citizens’ constitutional rights. {snip}

President Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, reformed that practice. {snip}

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This sensible set of guidelines will now be torn up, if Biden’s narrow victory holds. Biden’s criminal-justice plan promises to “reverse” the Trump “limitations” and to “prioritize” the use of consent decrees. Police departments are on notice: They may expect a knock on the door at any time from a Washington attorney demanding truckloads of documents as the prelude to years of federal interference and budget-busting compliance rules and fees.

Strikingly, the justice blueprint goes further than even Obama-era policy by calling for investigations of prosecutors’ offices, on the ground that they, too, engage in “systemic misconduct.”

The Biden administration will create a federal task force to combat alleged discrimination in arrest and charging decisions. But while the Biden plan would strip police officers and prosecutors of their discretion regarding whom to arrest and whom and how to charge, it would return unchecked discretion in sentencing to federal judges by seeking to eliminate all mandatory-minimum federal sentences for violent street crime and drug trafficking.

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