The Department of Justice is dismissing lawsuits against several local police departments, ending critical investigations into allegations of constitutional violations and civil rights abuses in the wake of high-profile police killings.
DOJ officials announced Wednesday they were pulling Joe Biden-era lawsuits targeting police departments in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, which came under scrutiny following the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, whose deaths galvanized racial justice protests in 2020.
The department is also ending investigations into law enforcement agencies in Memphis, Oklahoma City and Phoenix as well as Trenton, New Jersey and Mount Vernon, New York. A case against the Louisiana State Police also was dropped.
Justice Department probes into police departments in Louisville and Minneapolis — known as pattern-or-practice investigations — revealed histories of excessive force, discrimination against Black residents and First Amendment violations.
Those investigations followed criminal trials into the officers involved in the killings of Floyd in Minneapolis and Taylor in Louisville.
The Justice Department under Donald Trump’s administration is now retracting those findings.
The Justice Department now claims that the consent decrees reached with those agencies and the federal government to rectify civil rights violations “went far beyond the Biden administration’s accusations of unconstitutional conduct” and “would have imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.”
Trump’s appointed chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, has recast the agency’s mission into one that leans into the president’s grievances and shifts its focus away from critical missions like police oversight and combating racial discrimination.
“Overbroad police consent decrees divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda,” Dhillon said in a statement Wednesday.
“Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees,” she said.
The announcement, days before the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s murder, is a “terrible step backward,” according to civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented Floyd’s family.
In 2023, the Minneapolis Police Department reached a separate settlement agreement with the state’s Human Rights Department to overhaul the city’s police department under court supervision. Despite the end of the federal agreement, the state’s consent decree “isn’t going anywhere,” according to Minnesota Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero.
“Under the state agreement, the city and MPD must make transformational changes to address race-based policing,” Lucero said in a statement on Wednesday. “The tremendous amount of work that lies ahead for the city, including MPD, cannot be understated.”
Dozens of civil rights division staff and career prosecutors have left the Justice Department following Dhillon’s appointment, which she said is “fine.”
“We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence,” she told conservative commentator Glenn Beck last month. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws — not woke ideology.”
