U.S. abandons police reform accords sought over deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor

Globe and Mail

21-05-2025

The U.S. Justice Department is abandoning efforts to secure court-approved settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville, despite its prior finding that police in both cities routinely violated the civil rights of Black people, a senior official said on Wednesday.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the department's Civil Rights Division, said her office will seek to dismiss the pending litigation against the two cities and retract the department's prior findings of constitutional violations.
'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,' Dhillon said in a statement.
She also announced that the department will be closing out investigations and retracting prior findings of wrongdoing against the police departments in Phoenix, Arizona, Memphis, Tennessee, Trenton, New Jersey, Mount Vernon, New York, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and the Louisiana State Police.
The move comes four days before the May 25 five-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer who knelt on his neck as Floyd repeatedly pleaded that he couldn't breathe.
Floyd's killing, as well as the killing of Breonna Taylor who was shot to death by Louisville Police executing a no-knock warrant, sparked worldwide protests about racially-motivated policing practices during the final year of President Donald Trump's first term in office.
Louisville and Minneapolis were the two most high-profile cities to be investigated during former Democratic President Joe Biden's administration for systemic police abuse, and were the only two cities that agreed in principle to enter into a court-approved settlement with the DOJ known as a consent decree.
Minneapolis also separately entered a similar type of settlement with the state of Minnesota to reform its police practices.
Congress authorized the Justice Department to conduct civil investigations into constitutional abuses by police, such as excessive use of force or racially-motivated policing, in 1994, as a response to the beating of Rodney King, a Black man, by white Los Angeles police officers.
During Biden's presidency, the Civil Rights Division launched 12 such 'pattern or practice' investigations into police departments including Phoenix, New York City, Trenton, Memphis and Lexington, Mississippi.
But during those four years it failed to enter into any court-binding consent decrees, an issue that legal experts warned could put the department's police accountability work at risk of being undone.
Under Dhillon's leadership, the Civil Rights Division has lost more than 100 of its attorneys through deferred resignation agreements, demotions and resignations.
'Over 100 attorneys decided that they'd rather not do what their job requires them to do, and I think that's fine,' Dhillon told Glenn Beck on his podcast on April 26.
Last month, Dhillon demoted senior attorneys who handled police abuse investigations to other low-level assignments, such as handling public records requests or adjudicating internal discrimination complaints.
Those moves are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to upend the Civil Rights Division's traditions of pursuing cases to protect the civil rights of some of the country's most vulnerable and historically disenfranchised populations.
Since January, it has paused probes of alleged police abuse, launched its first investigation into whether Los Angeles violated gun rights laws, and following Trump's lead, changed the department's stance on transgender rights and probed alleged antisemitism at U.S. colleges involving pro-Palestinian protesters.
The department also recently ended a decades-old school desegregation order in Louisiana that came about in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education case.