The Justice Department moved Wednesday to cancel settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville that called for an overhaul of their police departments following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that became the catalyst for nationwide racial injustice protests in the summer of 2020.
The Trump administration also announced it was retracting the findings of Justice Department investigations into six other police departments that the Biden administration had accused of civil rights violations.
The moves represent a dramatic about-face for a department that under Democratic President Joe Biden had aggressively pushed for federal oversight of local police forces it accused of widespread abuses. The Trump administration accused previous Justice Department leadership of using flawed legal theories to judge police departments and pursuing costly and burdensome court-enforced settlements known as consent decrees to address alleged problems it argues are better dealt with at the local level.
“It’s our view at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under the Trump administration that federal micromanagement of local police should be a rare exception, and not the norm,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the new leader of the division, told reporters.
The Justice Department announced its decision just before the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. Then-officer Derek Chauvin used his knee on May 25, 2020, to pin the Black man to the pavement for 9 1/2 minutes in a case that sparked protests around the world and a national reckoning with racism and police brutality.
The Biden administration launched pattern-and-practice investigations into police departments across the country, uncovering issues such as racial discrimination and excessive force. The Justice Department in the final weeks of the previous administration reached consent decree agreements with Minneapolis and Louisville but the settlements had yet to be approved by a judge.
Police reform advocates denounced the move to walk away from the agreements, saying a lack of federal oversight will put communities at risk.
“This move isn’t just a policy reversal. It’s a moral retreat that sends a chilling message that accountability is optional when it comes to Black and Brown victims,” said the Rev Al. Sharpton, who worked with the Floyd and Taylor families to push for police accountability. “Trump’s decision to dismiss these lawsuits with prejudice solidifies a dangerous political precedent that police departments are above scrutiny, even when they’ve clearly demonstrated a failure to protect the communities they’re sworn to serve.”
Kristen Clarke, who led the Civil Rights Division under the Biden administration, defended the findings of the police investigations of her office, noting that they were “led by career attorneys, based on data, body camera footage and information provided by officers themselves.”
“To wholesale ignore and disregard these systemic violations, laid bare in well-documented and detailed public reports, shows patent disregard for our federal civil rights and the Constitution,” Clarke said in a statement to The Associated Press.
The Trump administration said it was also reviewing more than a dozen police consent decrees that remain in place across the U.S. The Justice Department would have to convince a judge to back away from those already-finalized settlements — a move that some communities may oppose.
Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division chief, noted that both Louisville and Minneapolis are already taking action at the local level to make changes and impose oversight without the federal government's help. She cited the hefty cost on communities to comply with federal oversight — sometimes for more than a decade — and what she described as problems and abuses in the consent decree monitoring system.
“There is a lack of accountability. There is a lack of local control. And there is an industry here that is, I think, ripping off the taxpayers and making citizens less safe,” Dhillon said.
The Minneapolis Police Department is operating under a similar consent decree with the Minnesota Human Rights Department.Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara pledged at a news conference Wednesday that the city will abide by the terms of the federal agreement as it was signed.
“We will comply with every sentence of every paragraph of the 169-page consent decree that we signed this year,." said Frey. “We will make sure that we are moving forward with every sentence of every paragraph of both the settlement around the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, as well as the consent decree.”
In Kentucky, the city of Louisville had reached an agreement with the Justice Department to reform its police force after a federal probe that found Louisville police engaged in a pattern of violating constitutional rights and discrimination against the Black community.
Louisville Mayor Mayor Craig Greenberg said the city remains committed to reforming its police force and will be soliciting applications from candidates who want to serve as an independent monitor.
“Throughout all of that process, we never hesitated, we never delayed, we never took a step back in trying to learn how to do our jobs better and serve the community better," said Louisville Police Chief Paul Humphrey. “It’s not about these words on this paper, it’s about the work that the men and women of LMPD, the men and women of metro government and the community will do together in order to make us a safer, better place.”
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