Trump Administration Drops Local Police Investigations

The Trump administration announced Wednesday it is moving to drop lawsuits and abandon agreements intended to provide oversight of local police departments accused of abuses, including civil rights violations. The reversal applies to departments including those in Louisville and Minneapolis, NPR reports. Monday is the fifth anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed when a white Minneapolis officer pressed his knee into the man's neck for more than 9 minutes—which inspired protests and calls for change and oversight like the effort being dropped now by the Justice Department. Developments include:

• The explanation: "Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division's failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees," said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, in a written statement. She said the agreements were "micromanagement" of police and could cost them millions of dollars to comply. The consent decrees established requirements for officer training and discipline and called for an outside monitor and a judge to ensure compliance.
• The timing: Dhillon said the action was taken now because of upcoming court deadlines, upcoming court deadlines, not the anniversary of Floyd's death, per the New York Times.
• Civil rights investigations: City police departments in Memphis; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Trenton, New Jersey, and Mount Vernon, New York, will no longer be under investigation. Nor will the Louisiana State Police.
• Louisville: The city has agreed to a monitor to help improve police practices, Dhillon said, endorsing steps "for local control to lead to necessary reform." The Justice Department opened its investigation under President Biden in 2021, a year after police killed Breonna Taylor while carrying out a search warrant at her home. The city's mayor and police chief issued statements saying they plan to make the agreed-upon reforms despite the dismissal of the lawsuit.
• Minneapolis: The city's police department has a court-ordered regimen in place with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights that the Justice Department believes "is more than sufficient." City officials in Minneapolis have said that they'll proceed with the agreement's provisions with or without federal oversight, per the Times. When the results of the federal investigation of the city's police were announced in 2023, President Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the "patterns and practices of conduct" the Justice Department found "made what happened to George Floyd possible," per NBC News.

• Response: Civil rights advocates immediately criticized the Trump administration decisions. "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 of the American Civil Liberties Union. Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney who assisted the Floyd and Taylor families, said that "the DOJ is not just rolling back reform, it is attempting to erase truth and contradicting the very principles for which justice stands."

Other cities that have been found by the Justice Department to have extensive records of misconduct and abuse have not wanted to enter such agreements with the federal government. Experts say the arrangements can bring about lasting change. "On the one hand, consent decrees can be onerous, bureaucratic and costly," said Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum, a research group in Washington. "And on the other hand, the irony is that cities that most need help to update their policies and training would not get the resources without the federal consent decree."