By Jack Phillips
Contributing Writer
The U.S. Department of Justice has announced it will end its agreements to secure court-approved settlements with the cities of Minneapolis and Louisville after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor five years ago.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the DOJ’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 on Wednesday.
The office, she added, will end what she called a “failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”
The Civil Rights Division will now be moving to dismiss both Louisville and Minneapolis lawsuits that were previously brought by the Biden administration “with prejudice” and will attempt to close investigations into both cities’ police departments.
Dhillon added that the DOJ division will shut down its investigations and retract Biden administration-era findings in other cities’ police departments, including Phoenix; Memphis; Oklahoma City; Trenton, New Jersey; and Mount Vernon, New York. An investigation into the Louisiana State Police will also be closed, she said.
Floyd’s death in 2020, as well as the shooting death of Taylor by police executing a warrant, sparked protests and riots across the United States during that summer, which also was the final summer of President Donald Trump’s first term in office.
Louisville and Minneapolis were the two most high-profile cities to be investigated during the Biden administration for what it said was alleged police abuse. They were the only two cities that agreed 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 on similar grounds over its police department’s conduct.
Congress authorized the DOJ 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 by Los Angeles police officers. That incident also sparked riots in 1992 across Los Angeles, which led to 63 deaths and a rash of gang-related violence, lootings and robberies.
During Joe 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 more.
Under Dhillon’s leadership, the Civil Rights Division has lost more than 100 of its attorneys through deferred resignation agreements, demotions, and resignations, she said in an interview in April.
“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, while adding that her office does not “want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute” police departments.
In the announcement, the DOJ also said that it will “offer its full support to police departments across the country, including through grants and technical assistance,” and is “confident that the vast majority of police officers across the nation will continue to vigorously enforce the law and protect the public in full compliance with the Constitution and all applicable federal laws.”
But it warned, “When bad actors in uniform fail to do so, the department stands ready to take all necessary action to address any resulting constitutional or civil-rights violations, including via criminal prosecution.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
