Heather MacDonald has this (non-election related) article in the Weekly Standard about the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division.  Some interesting tidbits quoted from the article:

* According to DOJ’s civil rights division, the LAPD does not investigate racial profiling complaints with sufficient intensity. The department seems to tolerate a “culture that is inimical to race-neutral policing,” say the federal attorneys. These accusations are nothing short of delusional. The LAPD is arguably the most professional, community-oriented police agency in the country, having been led for most of the last decade by modern policing’s premier innovator, William Bratton.

* This September, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Perez announced a litigation campaign against school districts for so-called “disciplinary profiling”—disciplining black students at a higher rate than white students. He used student population ratios as the benchmark for appropriate rates of student discipline. “The numbers tell the story,” he said. “While blacks make up 17 percent of the student population, they are 37 percent of the students penalized by out-of-school suspensions and 43 percent of the students expelled.” 

* If the Justice Department were serious about police reform, it would publish its standards for opening a pattern or practice investigation so that police agencies could take preventive action on their own. It has never done so, however, because it has no standards for opening an investigation; the initial recommendation to do so is based on the whims of the staffers, such as: “I feel like going to Seattle and my Google sweep picked up a few articles on the police there” or “My buddy at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund called me and asked us to open up an investigation in Des Moines.”