A Minneapolis Police cruiser drives by as people demonstrate outside the Hennepin County Government Center on March 9, 2021 in Minneapolis.
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Stephen Maturen/Getty Images North America
The Justice Department is backing away from cases against police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky., reversing course on the use of consent decrees to help ensure accountability for law enforcement agencies.
The move comes only days before the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota nearly five years ago by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer. Chauvin was captured on video pressing his knee onto Floyd’s neck for more than 9 minutes as Floyd lay on the pavement face-down and handcuffed.
The killing of Floyd, a Black man, incited protests across the country against police brutality and racial injustice. Chauvin was later convicted on murder and federal civil rights charges.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced the plan to dismiss the lawsuits, close the underlying investigations and retract findings by the Biden administration’s Justice Department about alleged constitutional violations.
Dhillon told reporters Wednesday the timing of the move had nothing to do with the solemn anniversary of Floyd’s death, but rather looming deadlines in court cases.
“Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees,” Dhillon said in a written statement.
She said those sweeping deals amounted to “micromanagement” of local police, that would carry a price tag of potentially millions of dollars in compliance.
Dhillon says there’s already a court-ordered regimen in place in Minneapolis with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights that the Justice Department believes “is more than sufficient.”
Louisville, meanwhile, has agreed to voluntarily hire its own monitor to help the city improve its police practices, she said.
“We think is a great way for local control to lead to necessary reform,” Dhillon added.
About a dozen investigations under Biden
The Biden-era Justice Department opened the investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department in 2021, a year after police shot and killed Breonna Taylor while executing a search warrant at her home.
That probe was one of around a dozen “pattern or practice” investigations the department launched during the Biden administration into police departments around the country over allegations of unconstitutional policing.
On Wednesday, the Trump Justice Department said it would retract findings of constitutional violations and close investigations into police in six other jurisdictions: Phoenix, Az.; Trenton, N.J.; Memphis, Tenn.; Mount Vernon, N.Y.; Oklahoma City, Okla.: and the Louisiana State Police.
Dhillon said these are just a portion of the federal consent decrees currently on the books. She said the department is reviewing all pending oversight agreements to determine whether they should be scrapped.
Dhillon said she is confident the vast majority of police officers and departments act in line with the law. But when they fail to do so, DOJ said it will “take all necessary action” to respond to civil rights and constitutional violations, including criminal prosecutions.
The head of the department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration, Kristen Clarke, defended the investigations during her tenure.
“These investigations were led by career attorneys, based on data, body cam footage and information provided by officers themselves, and the reforms set forth in consent decrees were carefully negotiated with the full support of law enforcement leaders and local officials,” Clarke said in a statement. “To wholesale ignore and disregard these systemic violations, laid bare in well-documented and detailed public reports, shows patent disregard for our laws and the Constitution.”
Civil rights advocates also sharply criticized the department’s decision to drop the investigations into unconstitutional policing.
“The DOJ under Biden found police were wantonly assaulting people and that it wasn’t a problem of ‘bad apples’ but of avoidable, department-wide failures,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the deputy project director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union. “By turning its back on police abuse, Trump’s DOJ is putting communities at risk.”
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump also slammed the decision, saying “the DOJ is not just rolling back reform, it is attempting to erase truth and contradicting the very principles for which justice stands.”
