Justice Dept. abandons police reform deals with Minneapolis, Louisville

The Justice Department moved Wednesday to drop police-accountability agreements with Minneapolis and Louisville, abandoning the Biden administration’s attempt to reshape law enforcement in cities where high-profile killings by officers ignited widespread outrage.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, also said the government would close Biden-era investigations of multiple other local police departments — including in Phoenix, Memphis and Oklahoma City — and retract the government’s conclusions that those agencies had violated the Constitution.

Dhillon announced the decision to back away from broader federal oversight of police just days before the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s death at the hands of officers in Minneapolis in 2020, which helped set off worldwide racial justice protests that summer.

“I was not confident that the Justice Department could stand up and justify these in court,” Dhillon said of the consent decrees with Minneapolis and Louisville. She criticized both agreements as “reliant on faulty legal theories.”

Leaders in both cities pledged to follow through on efforts to improve policing despite the Trump administration’s announcement.

“We will comply with every sentence, of every paragraph, of the 169-page consent decree that we signed this year,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) said at a news briefing.

Dropping the federal agreements is part of Dhillon’s broader push to reshape the Justice Department’s civil rights division, discarding a focus on racial discrimination to instead take aim at alleged antisemitism on college campuses and investigate diversity initiatives and other issues opposed by the Trump administration. About half the division’s lawyers have left since Dhillon was sworn in last month.

During President Joe Biden’s administration, the Justice Department championed greater federal scrutiny of police, launching a dozen investigations into local and state agencies, and releasing critical, in-depth reports on the departments in cities including Minneapolis, Louisville, Phoenix and Memphis.

But by the time Biden left office in January, the department had reached agreements with only Minneapolis and Louisville.

Both pacts were submitted to judges for approval. Neither has been formally adopted, and the Justice Department faced deadlines this week to submit briefs on the proposed decrees. On Wednesday, the department asked judges to dismiss both cases, writing in court papers that the agency no longer believed the consent decrees “would be in the public interest.”

Federal officials and police accountability advocates who support consent decrees have described them as a vital tool to ensure troubled police departments adopt substantive changes. Opponents of consent decrees, which can include police unions and some local officials, say they are too expensive and can stretch on too long with mixed results.

“Consent decrees have never worked and will never work,” Patrick Yoes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said in a statement after Dhillon’s announcement.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, the Justice Department shied away from intensive investigations into local police and pushed back on consent decrees. Days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration, the Obama Justice Department reached an agreement with the Baltimore police. After Trump was sworn in, his administration tried to abandon that agreement. A judge rejected those arguments and approved the consent decree, which remains in effect.

Under Trump, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions significantly restricted the Justice Department’s ability to use consent decrees, an order that was rescinded during the Biden administration.

Trump has been a proponent of police using more force and a critic of efforts to impose restrictions and more oversight on officers. Last month, he issued an executive order denouncing “local leaders [who] demonize law enforcement and impose legal and political handcuffs that make aggressively enforcing the law impossible.”

The president also directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to review all active consent decrees with state or local departments “and modify, rescind, or move to conclude such measures that unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.”

Dhillon assailed consent decrees at length on Wednesday, describing them as overly costly tools that strip away local control of police departments. She said her division would be willing to prosecute police officers when necessary but described the broad, negotiated agreements as a flawed way to try to improve policing.

Notably, Dhillon’s announcement did not include every investigation launched during Biden’s term.

The Justice Department did not retract its findings of wrongdoing in the Worchester, Massachusetts, and Lexington, Mississippi, police forces. The department also has launched investigations into the sheriff’s office in Rankin County, Mississippi, and the New York Police Department’s Special Victims Unit, but officials have not announced findings in either case.

Dhillon said the Justice Department was “undertaking a thorough review” of all findings by the agency.

Still, Wednesday’s announcement was much broader than the Justice Department’s efforts to back away from consent decrees during Trump’s first term, particularly the pledge to retract findings of wrongdoing in several departments, said Christy E. Lopez, who oversaw federal investigations into local departments during President Barack Obama’s administration.

Justice Department investigations launched under Biden documented myriad civil rights violations, including how officers in some cases sexually assaulted women, threatened minors, mistreated the homeless and punished protesters. “The Department of Justice can retract those findings reports, but they can’t retract those facts,” Lopez said.

Kristen Clarke, who led the civil rights division under Biden, said the investigations “were led by career attorneys, based on data, body camera footage and information provided by officers themselves.” The consent decrees “were carefully negotiated with the full support of law enforcement leaders and local officials,” her statement said.

Police-accountability advocates describe the Justice Department’s shift as a betrayal of local communities.

“These moves will only deepen the divide between law enforcement and the people they are sworn to protect and serve,” Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney who represented Floyd’s family, said in a statement. “Trust is built with transparency and accountability, not with denial and retreat.”

The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday said that it and local organizations were seeking public records in places where the Justice Department had investigated local police forces, hoping that gathering the information would help these communities push for accountability and reform.

The agreements reached in Louisville and Minneapolis followed extensive investigations into both departments. The Justice Department concluded in 2023 that officers in both cities acted unconstitutionally, used excessive force and discriminated against local residents.

The proposed Louisville consent decree was announced in December, nearly five years after Taylor’s death set off repeated demonstrations in that city. U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton, a Trump nominee, held a hearing and expressed skepticism about the consent decree, suggesting both sides could reach an agreement without court intervention. A hearing is scheduled in that case for Friday morning, though the Justice Department has asked the judge to postpone it.

No hearings have been held on the Minneapolis consent decree, which was announced in January. The Minneapolis police are already operating under a separate settlement with a state agency imposing changes to the local department.

Frey, the Minneapolis mayor, said Wednesday that the city was also proceeding under the consent decree it reached with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. The agency said in a statement that its agreement with Minneapolis “isn’t going anywhere.”

Frey sharply criticized the Trump administration for the timing of Wednesday’s announcement, citing the May 25 anniversary of Floyd’s death. There had been multiple previous deadlines for the Justice Department to submit legal filings in the Louisville and Minneapolis consent decree cases, but the agency repeatedly asked for more time, citing a need to brief its new leaders. That led to the deadlines this week in both court cases.

“They had every opportunity to move for a dismissal in the months previous to right now,” he said. “It is predictable that they would move for a dismissal the very same week that George Floyd was murdered five years ago.”

Dhillon denied that the timing was related to the anniversary, saying it was solely based on court deadlines.

At a separate briefing, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg (D) said his city was adopting its own police reform pact that would incorporate the goals detailed in the federal consent decree. This includes hiring an independent monitor to report on the police department’s progress.

“As promised, we are moving ahead rapidly to continue implementing police reform that ensures constitutional policing while providing transparency and accountability to the public,” Greenberg said.

Dhillon criticized the Justice Department’s findings of wrongdoing in Louisville and Minneapolis, alleging problems with the methodology and data. Greenberg emphasized that the city did not agree with her assessment.

“We accept the findings of the original DOJ report,” he said. But, Greenberg added, Louisville did not plan to contest the Justice Department’s effort to scuttle the consent decree to allow the city to move forward and focus on reform.