Trump's DOJ to halt police reform deals in Louisville, Minneapolis
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People gather at KULA Gallery during an unveiling of a Breonna Taylor painting in Louisville, Ky. Photo: Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The Justice Department announced Wednesday it will seek to dismiss pending police reform agreements in Louisville and Minneapolis, days before the fifth anniversary of George Floyd's murder.
Why it matters: Scrapping proposed consent decrees for two of the nation's most scrutinized police departments is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is backing away from federal oversight of alleged police misconduct.
The big picture: Federal probes into nearly a dozen other city police departments, initiated by President Biden's Justice Department, are now unlikely to reach reform agreements.
Driving the news: The DOJ said Wednesday it will begin the process of dismissing lawsuits against the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments.
- The DOJ also said it is dropping a years-long civil rights investigation into the Phoenix Police Department and rescinding its findings of numerous constitutional violations.
- The Biden administration's DOJ found that agencies engaged in widespread patterns of unconstitutional policing practices.
- Trump's DOJ said those investigations "wrongly [equated] statistical disparities with intentional discrimination and heavily [relied] on flawed methodologies and incomplete data."
- Pending agreements also sought to subject the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments to sweeping reforms that went "far beyond the Biden administration's accusations of unconstitutional conduct," the DOJ said.
State of play: Floyd's 2020 murder by Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck triggered international protests and calls to tackle systemic racism.
- Breonna Taylor was killed that same year after Louisville police shot multiple rounds into her apartment in a raid that led to her death. A former detective was convicted of violating her rights by using excessive force.
Zoom in: Under the Minneapolis consent decree, officers would have been prohibited from cuffing people age 14 or younger, and would be required to receive specific training on working with youth.
- The agreement would have limited how much force police can use to handle crowds at demonstrations, and barred officers from detaining or destroying the equipment of reporters covering a news story.
What they're saying: "Overbroad police consent decrees divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda," said Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for DOJ's Civil Rights Division.
- "Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division's failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees."
Yes, but: Police reform advocates argue consent decrees are necessary to force departments to make systemic changes in tactics, hiring, abuse and oversight.
Reality check: Some city leaders and public safety experts tell Axios that federal oversight of police departments has had mixed results. In some cases, they've driven up costs while doing little to curb violent crime, they say.
- A consent decree in Oakland, Calif., for example, has been in place for more than two decades.
- Police in Ferguson, Mo., are more racially diverse after federal authorities intervened in 2016 following the killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man.
The other side: The Minnesota Department of Human Rights, the state's civil rights enforcement agency, said a state agreement on police reforms will remain in place.
- "While the Department of Justice walks away from their federal consent decree nearly five years from the murder of George Floyd, our Department and the state court consent decree aren't going anywhere," said Minnesota Department of Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero.
- "Under the state agreement, the City and MPD must make transformational changes to address race-based policing."
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pledged to continue to implement the changes laid out in both the federal consent decree and the state agreement, saying the city is "serious about our commitment to police reform, even if the president of the United States is not."
- "Here is the bottom line: We're doing it anyway," he told reporters at a news conference Wednesday. "We will comply with every sentence, every paragraph of the 169-page consent decree that we signed this year."
Between the lines: Trump's reversal of police reform comes amid a decline in Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
- In Washington, D.C., Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House was quietly dismantled in March after funding threats from Republicans — a symbolic setback in what once was the epicenter of 2020's racial reckoning.
Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional details and a statement from the Minneapolis mayor.
