Latest news with #consentdecree
Washington Post
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Keith Ellison on countering Trump: courage, imagination and lots of lawsuits
The person least surprised by the Justice Department's decision this week to drop the consent decree granting federal oversight of the Minneapolis police department might have been Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. I got Ellison on the phone last week to talk about our nation in the five years since the slow-motion murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. Ellison told me then they were 'anticipating' that Trump would do away with the Minneapolis consent decree to address the police accountability issues unearthed by Floyd's killing. Five days later, that's exactly what happened. The agreement was just signed in January.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
What May Happen to Policing as Federal Oversight Ends
Twenty years ago, the reputation of the New Orleans Police Department was in tatters. Officers had opened fire on a group of civilians leaving the city after Hurricane Katrina, and then tried to cover it up. They killed other people with impunity, a Justice Department investigation found. They forgot to lift fingerprints at homicide scenes. Police dogs attacked their handlers. Today, the department's stature has vastly improved, even in the eyes of some of its most stringent critics. 'I have seen dramatic improvements in many aspects of N.O.P.D.'s handling of misconduct,' said William Most, a civil rights lawyer who regularly represents clients who are suing the police. Mr. Most attributes the improvement to a consent decree, an agreement that has kept the department under strict federal oversight for more than a decade. Such agreements are rarely used but can bring extensive change. They are the federal government's most powerful tool to overhaul troubled departments, and they set a de facto standard for American policing. But they also have critics, who say that the agreements are written with little regard for their practical effects, and that they go beyond correcting unconstitutional behavior to impose a progressive vision of policing. On Wednesday, the Trump administration, which has been critical of consent decrees, announced that it was dropping the consent decree process in eight jurisdictions. The moves dashed the hopes of residents who saw federal intervention as their best hope of forcing change, but pleased those who saw the agreements as too broad, too restrictive of the police and too ideological. Consent decrees and investigations are based on 'unrealistic, idealistic expectations,' said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department's civil rights division. She accused federal investigators of trying to 'micromanage' local police departments. Ms. Dhillon and other critics argue that crime can increase after an agreement begins, although research shows that the increase is temporary and that use of force by police and lawsuits against them eventually decline. At their most basic, law enforcement consent decrees work like this: The Justice Department, or in some cases a state agency, opens an investigation and then identifies a 'pattern or practice' of civil rights violations in a police department — wrongs that go beyond the actions of one or two officers. These can be broad, such as excessive force, unjustified searches, racial bias or, in the case of Ferguson, Mo., the use of questionable arrests to wring money from residents in the form of fines and fees. Or they can be more specific, like unlawful body searches or mishandled sexual assault cases. Sometimes an investigation is precipitated by a high-profile incident like the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., and Tyre Nichols in Memphis. The Justice Department found in an investigation of the Louisville police that officers had ordered a dog to repeatedly bite a 14-year-old who was not resisting arrest, for example. In Memphis, it found that police officers shoved and pepper-sprayed people after they were handcuffed. The investigations are not always targeted at major cities. In Lexington, Miss., a town of about 1,200 people and 10 officers, the Biden administration found that officers used retaliation, racial slurs and excessive force, detained poor people who could not pay their fines, and made arrests for conduct that was not criminal. Jason Johnson, who was a deputy police chief in Baltimore overseeing compliance with that city's consent decree, and who is now the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund said the investigations relied on 'inflammatory' anecdotes and did not make their methodology clear. 'There's a lot of innuendo and you have to make a lot of logical leaps when you read their findings reports,' he said. 'We don't really know if they're warranted or not.' The cities targeted by these investigations may face a civil rights lawsuit, but most agree instead to correct the violations voluntarily — in other words, by consent. They negotiate an agreement, or consent decree, usually with the Justice Department. Because the goal is systemic change, the agreements can be enormous documents that dictate a top-to-bottom overhaul. They may require changes to policies, training, disciplinary procedures, recruitment and promotion criteria. The process evolved to become more comprehensive, former Justice Department lawyers say, as they learned from experience and tried to guard against backsliding once the monitors were gone. The Biden administration touted reductions in police use of force and the number of critical incidents, as well as metrics specific to certain departments. In Baltimore, for example, where Freddie Gray died in 2015 after a ride in a police van, the Justice Department has monitored injuries during police transports. There have been 11 injuries, out of 16,000 transports, a department spokeswoman said last year. In an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Ms. Dhillon said the Biden administration's methods 'were based on faulty legal theories, incomplete data and flawed statistical methods.' But many community members say the consent decree process helps restore some trust in the police. 'The problems don't completely disappear,' said Lawrence Hamm, chairman of the People's Organization for Progress, a civil rights group in Newark, where the department entered a consent decree in 2016. 'But at least there are policies in place that make it clear that this is not the way the department wants to go. And not only that, you could possibly be penalized for engaging in that behavior.' The agreements can be costly to put into effect. During the Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick Garland took steps to cap the fees paid to monitors and trigger an automatic review of a consent decree after five years. Defenders say that police departments where officers regularly violate people's rights can end up paying far more in misconduct settlements than what the consent decrees require. Cities like Newark and Minneapolis have paid tens of millions of dollars in such settlements. On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced that it was retracting the findings of eight investigations conducted by the Biden administration, including in Minneapolis, Louisville, Phoenix, Oklahoma City and for the Louisiana State Police. In Louisiana, state troopers punched and dragged a shackled Black man named Ronald Greene, and then attributed his ensuing death to a car accident and tried to conceal the camera footage. Thirteen consent decrees will remain in effect between the federal government and police departments, including in New Orleans. These can be ended only with a judge's approval. Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the deputy project director on policing for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that residents must continue to press for changes. The A.C.L.U. is already working with local groups to try and pick up where the federal government is leaving off. 'Trump and D.O.J. can abandon police reform,' Ms. Borchetta said. 'But if local people are still pushing for it, it will succeed.'
CBS News
21-05-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Minneapolis police consent decree "isn't going anywhere," says state human rights head
The Minnesota Department of Human Rights says its consent decree with the Minneapolis Police Department "isn't going anywhere" amid reports on Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Justice seeks to dismiss the federal decree. CBS News reports the department is "ending Biden-era investigations and proposed police consent decrees" in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky. The news comes just four days before Minneapolis marks five years since George Floyd's murder by a now-former officer, which sparked global protests and became a major catalyst for police reform in the city and beyond. In January, the Minneapolis City Council approved its decree with the Biden administration's department of justice, nearly two years after the police department approved a first-of-its-kind settlement agreement with the Minnesota's human rights department. On Wednesday, Rebecca Lucero, commissioner of the state's human rights department, said the state's decree will stand irrelevant of what happens on the federal level. "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 isn't going anywhere," Lucero said. "Under the state agreement, the City and MPD must make transformational changes to address race-based policing. The tremendous amount of work that lies ahead for the City, including MPD, cannot be understated. And our Department will be here every step of the way." Lucero's office underlined that the decree won't be removed until the state's judiciary "determines that the City and MPD have reached full, effective, and sustained compliance with the terms of the agreement." The federal decree had been held up in the courts since U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi took office. In June 2023, Merrick Garland's justice department released a searing report following its investigation into Minneapolis police practices, saying the department had a pattern of using excessive force, including "unjustified deadly force," which was disproportionately used against the city's Black and Indigenous residents. The police department also discriminated against people of color and residents living with behavioral health disabilities, according to the report's findings. Both the federal and state decrees require Minneapolis police to meet certain benchmarks before oversight can be eliminated, including use-of-force policy reforms, restricting the use of military-style tactics during protests and a ban on handcuffing children younger than 14. Bondi's justice department accuses Garland's department of "wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination," and relying on "flawed methodologies and incomplete data" while investigating Minneapolis and Louisville police. "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," Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote in a statement released on Wednesday. The justice department also announced its civil rights division will stop Biden-era probes into several other police departments, including in Phoenix, Memphis and Oklahoma City.
CBS News
21-05-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
How to watch: Minneapolis officials react to DOJ's plan to dismiss consent decree focused on police reforms
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other officials are reacting after the U.S. Department of Justice announced it would start the process of dismissing a consent decree with the city that ordered expansive reforms to the police department. Frey and Police Chief Brian O'Hara planned to address the DOJ's motion at a 10:45 a.m. news conference. How to watch What: Minneapolis city officials react to DOJ motion to dismiss federal consent decree Minneapolis city officials react to DOJ motion to dismiss federal consent decree When: 10:45 a.m. 10:45 a.m. How to watch: You can watch live in the player above, on the CBS News Minnesota or on Pluto TV The dismissal comes nearly five years to the day since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, part of the impetus for the DOJ's investigation into the city's police department. The Minneapolis City Council approved the consent decree on Jan. 6 and subsequently filed it in federal court. The 171-page agreement said the Minneapolis Police Department would require its officers to "promote the sanctity of human life as the highest priority in their activities," and must not allow race, gender or ethnicity to "influence any decision to use force, including the amount or type of force used." The DOJ said the consent decrees proposed by the Biden administration sought to subject the Minneapolis police to sweeping arguments that went beyond accusations of unconstitutional conduct and would have led to "years of micromanagement." The decree requires law enforcement to meet specific goals before federal oversight is removed, a process that often takes years and millions of dollars. Some of the reforms outlined include changes to the use of force policy, limiting military-style tactics during protests and banning handcuffing children under 14. A settlement agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, which was filed in March of 2023 after the department found the city and Minneapolis police engage in a pattern of racial discrimination in violation of state law, will continue to stand.
CNN
21-05-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Justice Department ends police reform agreements and halts investigations into major departments
The Trump administration is dismissing investigations into several major US police departments, as well as consent decrees in Louisville and Minneapolis reached following the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor and police killing of George Floyd. The move, announced by the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, reflects the administration's opposition to agreements that require reforms of police departments where the DOJ found a pattern of misconduct. A consent decree is a federal agreement that is approved by a judge and is used as a monitoring system for police departments when an investigation finds that reform is needed. The Civil Rights Division is closing investigations into local police departments in Phoenix, Arizona, Trenton, New Jersey, Memphis, Tennessee, and Mount Vernon, New York. '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,' Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement. This story is breaking and will be updated.
