The Justice Department said Wednesday it is ending its previous agreements with two cities that were accused of unconstitutional policing practices following the nationwide outrage and protests over the 2020 deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police officers.
Under former President Joe Biden, the Justice Department released a report in 2023 detailing the Minneapolis Police Department's pattern of excessive force and discrimination against Black residents following an investigation into its practices after the death of Floyd.
The city approved a consent decree in the final days of the Biden administration, on the anniversary of Floyd's death, agreeing to overhaul its police training and policies with court supervision.
A similar agreement was reached with the city of Louisville, Kentucky, where Taylor was killed.
Now, the Trump administration is terminating those agreements and retracting all of the constitutional violations — including things like excessive force, discriminating against Black people and discriminating against people with behavioral health disabilities — that were during investigations into these police departments under the Biden administration.
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"These lawsuits, which were filed at the last minute by the Biden administration after President Donald Trump’s reelection, accused Louisville and Minneapolis of widespread patterns of unconstitutional policing practices by wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination and heavily relying on flawed methodologies and incomplete data," the Justice Department said in a statement. "In short, these sweeping consent decrees would have imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so."
In addition to dismissing the lawsuits against Minneapolis and Louisville, the Trump administration said it is closing investigations into a handful of other cities whose law enforcement was found to be violating constitutional rights under the Biden administration.
Those include:
- Phoenix, Arizona
- Trenton, New Jersey
- Memphis, Tennessee
- Mount Vernon, New York
- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
- Louisiana State Police
