On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced plans to dismiss pending investigations of several major police departments, including those in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, where the 2020 killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, respectively, sparked widespread protests and demand for police reform. The decision comes just days ahead of the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s murder.
By withdrawing the investigation, the DOJ will also abandon plans for federal consent decrees with Louisville and Minneapolis.
In a news release, the Justice Department said its Civil Rights Division will “be taking all necessary steps to dismiss the Louisville and Minneapolis lawsuits with prejudice, to close the underlying investigations into the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments, and to retract the Biden administration’s findings of constitutional violations.”
By withdrawing the investigations, the DOJ is also abandoning plans for federal consent decrees with Louisville and Minneapolis. The agreements would have mandated reforms for the cities’ police departments.
“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, who leads the division.
Ending consent decrees was a proposal suggested in Project 2025’s chapter on the Justice Department, which called for the DOJ to “[p]romptly and properly eliminate … all existing consent decrees.”
In 2023, under the Biden administration, the Justice Department found that both departments had engaged in widespread unconstitutional policing practices, including the use of excessive force and patterns of discrimination.
Louisville police fatally shot Taylor during a botched raid of her apartment on March 13, 2020. In 2024, a jury convicted Brett Hankison, a former detective, of violating her rights by using excessive force.
Two months later, Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, who was recorded kneeling on the 46-year-old father’s neck for 9½ minutes on May 25, 2020, set off international racial justice protests and calls for systemic police reform. In 2021, Chauvin was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
Despite the DOJ’s dismissal, officials in Minneapolis say they plan to adhere to the consent decree, which was approved unanimously by the City Council in January. “Here is the bottom line: We’re doing it anyway,” Mayor Jacob Frey said Wednesday during a news conference. “We will comply with every sentence of every paragraph of the 169-page consent decree that we signed this year.”
Under the agreement, the Minneapolis Police Department requires its officers to “carry out their law enforcement duties with professionalism and respect for the dignity of every person.” The agreement also states they must not allow race, gender or ethnicity “to influence any decision to use force, including the amount or type of force used.” At the news conference, Fray blasted the administration for the timing of the announcement, stating that “all Donald Trump really cares about is political theater.” “They had every opportunity to move for a dismissal in the months previous to right now,” Frey continued. “But instead, they delayed. They asked for extension after extension, and of course, it is predictable that they would move for a dismissal the very same week that George Floyd was murdered five years ago.” Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said his city was moving forward with its plans for police reform. “While this is not the outcome we hoped for … it is an outcome that we have planned for,” he said Wednesday. “We as a city are committed to reform.” The Civil Rights Division also announced it would close investigations into police departments in Phoenix; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; and Oklahoma City and with the Louisiana State Police.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
Latest Post
Recommended
