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.”








