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We’ve all committed a few fashion faux pas we’d rather not recall. But James Corden isn’t letting David Beckham forget his for a second. 

On his show this week, the comedian busted out a throwback photo series of David and his wife Victoria Beckham in coordinating outfits, in anticipation of the couple’s 18th wedding anniversary next month.

Corden was a merciless fashion cop, poking fun at the matching purple ensembles the couple wore on their wedding day in 1999.

He also had choice words for some some revealing pants-and-top combos they sported on the red carpet two years later.

Beckham refused to apologize for the duo’s outfits of yore.

“I’m not saying I regret them because at the time, it felt right,” he told Corden. “Now, I’m not so sure.”

See some of the pair’s highlights ― or are they lowlights? ― below and in the video above.

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CHICAGO ― After several bruising years for the Chicago police and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, heightened by the fatal shooting of teenager Laquan McDonald by an officer, allegations of a City Hall cover-up and a damning Justice Department probe, the city is poised to begin its police reform efforts. But now there are serious doubts about whether a toothless plan can address the deep problems.

News trickled out of city hall last week that Emanuel planned to seek a “memorandum of understanding,” rather than an enforceable consent decree, as part of an effort to remedy the widespread unconstitutional practices the Justice Department identified in a report released just before Trump’s inauguration. The sweeping federal report, issued after the biggest investigation of a city police department in Justice Department history, concluded that reform efforts in Chicago were “not likely to be successful” without a consent decree and independent monitoring.

The city has not yet established a timeline for an independent monitor.

“At this point, there’s still ongoing discussions between ourselves and the DOJ,” Walter Katz, Emanuel’s chief liaison with the CPD, told HuffPost. Katz noted that the city has already undertaken some reform efforts, including revamped police rules on use of force, an expanded bodycam program and a planned Civilian Office of Police Accountability, set to open in September.

Success will be defined by “substantial compliance with the agreement,” Katz said, adding that prior consent decrees and memorandums of understanding have been effective for measuring compliance.

High tensions over crime and policing in the city were aggravated with the November 2015 release of a police dashcam video that showed a more than year-old incident of an officer shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times as the teen walked away. The video contradicted the narrative by police that McDonald had been imminently threatening officers, and the legal fight to keep the tape under wraps prompted critics to accuse Emanuel of intentionally covering up the video until after his reelection, a charge he has denied. The officer who shot McDonald is awaiting trial on multiple charges, including first-degree murder.

When the Civil Rights Division’s report came out on Jan. 13, the Justice Department and Emanuel’s administration announced they had reached an agreement in principle, a two-page document in which both parties committed to “negotiate in good faith to reach a comprehensive settlement in the form of a consent decree.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions does not believe in police consent decrees. Shortly after his Feb. 8 confirmation, Sessions conceded he hadn’t read the Chicago report but called it “anecdotal.” Sessions separately suggested that such binding legal agreements amounted to “harmful federal intrusion” that could “cost more lives by handcuffing the police instead of the criminals.”

The Trump administration also attempted to back out of a firm agreement with the city of Baltimore. After a federal judge approved the Baltimore deal over DOJ’s objections, Sessions issued a statement saying he had “grave concerns” that the “rushed” agreement “will reduce the lawful powers of the police department and result in a less safe city. 

Theoretically, the Trump DOJ is bound by the previous agreement to work in “good faith” toward a consent decree with Chicago. But Adam Collins, a spokesman for Emanuel, noted the stark ideological differences between the Obama-era DOJ and the department under President Donald Trump.  

“Obviously there’s a different administration in D.C. right now that has a different attitude on consent decrees,” Collins said. “The public comments from the DOJ are very clear about their attitudes about how it relates to consent decrees and that they don’t believe they’re a good model.”

Nevertheless, Collins said Police Supt. Eddie Johnson “has been clear that the city of Chicago is on the road to reform.” 

Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Civil Rights Division, says that commitment isn’t enough. Gupta, who now heads the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told HuffPost that Chicago has seen “over and over again” that deals without court enforcement mechanisms don’t work. The memorandum of agreement will “become yet another set of recommendations for the Chicago Police Department that will have no teeth.”

“History has demonstrated that memoranda of agreement, which are not court-enforceable, are not robust enough to remedy longstanding problems,” Gupta said.

Gupta noted that, even with the new administration, the agreement signed in January had “not been publicly disavowed by either party” and that both sides had recognized “the gravity and scope of the constitutional violations required a court-enforced agreement.”

Gupta said it is “absolutely critical” that the career Civil Rights Division officials who investigated the Chicago Police Department “find that whatever agreement is reached will actually remedy the serious findings” the report brought to light.

Groups like the ACLU of Illinois concur with Gupta’s concerns, slamming the memorandum of agreement as a “half-measure” that will not amount to meaningful change.

“This proposal is a non-starter for anyone committed to real reform of Chicago’s broken system of policing,” Karen Sheley, director of the ACLU of Illinois Police Practices Project, said in a statement. “The City is proposing to sign a set of promises with a DOJ that is hostile to real police reform.”

A spokesman for ACLU of Illinois said that it had not yet determined if they would go to court over the city’s decision but that it would “continue to talk with other advocates and consider all options.” 

Chicago was the last police department to undergo an investigation into its “patterns or practices” in the Obama-era Justice Department.

The number of DOJ-enforced consent decrees grew under Obama’s tenure compared with his most recent Republican and Democratic predecessors. From the start of Obama’s first term in 2009 to the conclusion of his second term this year, 14 police departments — including Seattle; Cleveland; Ferguson, Missouri; and Puerto Rico ― agreed to consent decrees. By contrast, only three consent decrees each were reached in Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s two-term administrations.

While consent decrees have been welcomed by police reform advocates, they’re often oppose by police unions as burdensome and restrictive. Since consent decrees are effectively lawsuits brought by the Justice Department against the city to ensure reform measures are implanted, the agreements can also come as huge expenses to taxpayers. Sessions himself hit on the cost in his statement following the approval of the Baltimore consent decree, saying the deal would force the city to fund a “highly-paid monitor to govern every detail of how the Baltimore Police Department functions for the foreseeable future.”

But in Chicago, a lack of police reform has already taken a massive financial toll: Since 2004, the city has paid out roughly $662 million for police misconduct in the form of multimillion-dollar settlements, legal fees and other penalties.

City Hall is standing by the decision as its option for achieving the badly needed overhaul. Collins cited Washington as an example the city views as a case study on successful police reform achieved without a consent decree.

“It’s a model that’s worked in other cities,” Collins added, noting that D.C.’s former police chief Charles Ramsey — a former CPD official who now serves as an adviser on reform for the police department ― “spoke highly” of the process.

Emanuel aide Katz said he was confident the city’s efforts will be successful because the city, its police and its residents want the same basic outcome.

“What we’re focused on is the fact that people want to live in a community that is safe,” Katz said.

 The ACLU’s Sheley expressed doubt that anything short of a consent decree would make a difference. She noted in a statement that the kind of agreement Chicago is pursuing “could not be enforced by the monitor, by the community or by anyone else ― since it is not planned to be overseen by a federal court.”

“The only real path to police reform in Chicago is through a consent decree overseen by a federal judge,” Sheley added.  “That is what the City committed to when the DOJ completed its scathing report in January.”

 Gupta also believes that Chicago’s proposal will fall short of implementing the necessary reform.

“There is no political solution that will fix the problems that the career Justice Department team found. Congress gave career lawyers at the Justice Department the mandate to remedy patterns and practices of unconstitutional policing when found,” Gupta said. “It is their judgment that matters and that has not changed.”

A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. 

Kim Bellware reported from Chicago and Ryan Reilly reported from Washington, D.C.

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SANTA ANA, Calif. ― An Orange County judge who ordered hearings related to the misuse of jailhouse informants inside county jails said that after weeks of inconsistent testimony from sheriff’s officials, he now wants to hear from the sheriff herself.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals said Thursday that he will order Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens to testify about a sophisticated and secretive jailhouse informant program that has already led to the unraveling of more than a dozen cases and threatens to upend countless others.

“Based on what we’ve heard, the sheriff needs to testify,” Goethals said Thursday. “I don’t particularly care who calls her to testify.”

Over the last three weeks of hearings, a steady theme has emerged from testimony delivered by sheriff’s department leadership ― if deputies inside county jails were illegally working with informants and violated the rights of numerous defendants, it was just a handful of overzealous, rogue deputies doing so, and they did it behind the backs of their managers, who knew nothing of those improprieties at the time they took place.

But, this week, troubling questions were raised about the credibility of the supervisors’ version of events. And those questions were punctuated by testimony from a sole sheriff’s deputy who said that his fellow deputies in the jail did work with informants, but did so under the supervision, and approval, of those above them in the chain of command.

The hearings were ordered as part of the penalty phase of the case against Scott Dekraai, who pleaded guilty to murdering eight people in 2011. Dekraai’s sentencing has remained in limbo amid allegations of malfeasance by county prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies over their misuse of an informant that officials allegedly illegally planted in jail next to Dekraai.

OCSD leadership shifts blame to allegedly rogue deputies

A commander and multiple sheriff’s lieutenants and sergeants have all testified that they did not know that their deputies were working extensively with informants in county jails. They also said they didn’t know that much of that work may have been illegal.

The sheriff’s department’s denial of the jail informant program is nothing new. Hutchens has said consistently that her deputies do not develop informants and direct them to elicit statements from other inmates.

But Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, Dekraai’s attorney, has for years alleged that a long-concealed, illegal snitch program has been operating inside county jails, perhaps for decades. Under the program, he alleges, deputies placed informants next to targeted inmates and directed them to fish for incriminating evidence to help prosecutors secure convictions.

Last year, an 1,157-page formerly secret document, known as the Special Handling log, became public and bolstered Sanders’ allegations significantly. Maintained by OCSD jail deputies for years, the thousands of log entries shed new light on the scope of the misconduct surrounding the jail informant program. Goethals has said the evidence that has already surfaced points to a snitch program in the jail, and his findings were affirmed in a 2016 California appeals court ruling.

“The magnitude of the systemic problems cannot be overlooked,” the appeals court ruling said.

However, in surprising testimony this week that the judge called “the biggest piece of evidence” yet, Cmdr. Jon Briggs became the first command-level staffer to contradict Hutchens. Briggs said he believes it’s “obvious” that a tainted informant program was being used by some deputies inside county jails and that significant misconduct had been going on, possibly for years.

Deputies were trying to “one-up each other, like it is a fraternity and they are trying to do better than the other guy,” he said.

Briggs also said poor management from sergeants and lieutenants was largely to blame for the rampant misconduct described in the log ― a point other officers also made under oath.

“We had constant turnover of supervisors. Constant turnover of lieutenants,” Briggs said. “The deputies were kind of ― if you want to refer to it as ― the inmates were running the asylum on that occasion,” Briggs said. “With all the accolades being given to the deputy sheriffs ― they were senior deputies, trusted deputies ― by all accounts everybody thought they were doing a great job, so nobody looked into it.”

Briggs also said one deputy, Seth Tunstall, poisoned the behavior of other Special Handling deputies in the two jails in the county where informants are housed.

Tunstall has become a central figure in the Dekraai proceedings. In his 2015 opinion removing the entire Orange County District Attorney’s office from the case, Goethals singled out Tunstall and a fellow deputy for misleading the court. Tunstall worked in a unit that dealt with inmates and informants inside county jails before it was recently disbanded. He was also assigned to a gang task force with the Santa Ana Police Department, where Briggs believes Tunstall encouraged deputies to engage in the improper conduct with informants in the jails that is described in the log.

“You believe Seth Tunstall was changing the way Special Handling at both jails was doing business?” Sanders asked Briggs.

“Yes, sir,” he responded.

Cracks emerge in the sheriff’s department’s version of events

Yet just moments after Briggs pegged Tunstall as the source of the misconduct of other deputies in the jail, he appeared to back down after Sanders confronted him with an internal department memo celebrating the “intelligence gathering” skills of the Special Handling unit at one county jail.

The memo states that the jail unit “possesses an excellent expertise in the cultivation and management of informants” ― expertise “recognized by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office as well as numerous law enforcement agencies throughout Southern California.” The memo, dated March 2007 and sent from an OCSD sergeant up the chain of command to a captain, was written during a period before Tunstall was working in the jails.

After showing Briggs the memo, Sanders asked: “Do you think, looking at that, maybe your thesis about Seth Tunstall being the motivating factor could have been wrong?”

“I guess it could have been, yes,” Briggs replied.

Sanders also showed Briggs a 2009 internal OCSD memo sent to command staff that requested permission, which was granted the same day, to place an informant next to an inmate charged with murder and then record the conversation. According to the testimony of OCSD officials, however, command-level staff weren’t aware of informant operations in the jail.

“Sergeants and lieutenants are actively deceiving this court” in their effort to claim ignorance about the informant operation within the jail, Sanders later told Goethals.

California Deputy Attorney General Mike Murphy, the lead prosecutor, disagreed, saying the evidence thus far did not indicate a “greater cover-up.” 

On Thursday, additional inconsistencies emerged through the testimony of sheriff’s deputy Zachary Bieker.

Bieker said he and his fellow deputies worked with informants in the jail and documented that work in the Special Handling log. That contradicted a steady stream of sergeants and lieutenants who claimed to be unaware of the log, even though their deputies made daily entries in it. Bieker testified that the log was re-started in 2011 at the direction of a supervisor, and that he had discussions with supervisors about it.

According to Bieker, the work of a Special Handling deputy included not only making decisions about housing movements and maintaining jail safety, but working with informants. He said his efforts were fully known by his supervisors in the jail. Beiker added he was comfortable speaking with supervisors about what he described in the log.

Asked about the sophisticated jail informant operations Bieker said deputies were at times involved in, Bieker said: “I don’t think it would be possible to hide it from a supervisor.”

Dekraai victim’s husband speaks out, wants OCSD officials held ‘accountable’ for misconduct 

Despite the misconduct that has already tainted the Dekraai case, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced in March that his office would continue to pursue the death penalty against Dekraai.

On Monday, Paul Wilson, whose wife Christy was one of the eight people killed by Dekraai at a Seal Beach hair salon in 2011, told Goethals that he would “absolutely” prefer that Goethals drop the death penalty and instead sentence Dekraai to eight consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole ― an option Goethals has said he’s considering.

It’s a “huge wound this continues to open by coming to court,” Wilson said on what would have been Christy’s 53rd birthday. “I can’t tell you what this does to me.”

“The testimony we’ve heard in here, from people who knew exactly what they were doing, is pathetic.”

Hearings will resume next week.

Catch up on what happened during the hearings in week one, All The New Questions We Have About The Orange County Jail Informant Scandal, and week two, Key Witnesses In A California Jailhouse Snitch Scandal Refuse to Testify.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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