By Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump administration is dropping efforts to secure agreements for federal oversight of police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, despite a prior government finding they routinely violated the civil rights of Black people.
In a major rollback of federal civil rights investigations, the Justice Department said on Wednesday it was also ending investigations and rescinding findings of misconduct into six other police departments, deeming the probes – many launched following a 2020 wave of worldwide protests over racial justice – as overreaching.
“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,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division. Her office will seek to dismiss the pending litigation against the two cities and retract the department’s prior findings of constitutional violations, she added.
Sunday will be the five-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis 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 Republican President Donald Trump’s first term in office.
Dhillon also said 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.
She added that the department is also undertaking a review of all federal consent decrees, many of which date back to the Obama era, to determine if they should continue.
“Federal micro-management of local police should be a rare exception, and not the norm,” she told reporters.
The moves announced on Wednesday would largely undo years of work on police oversight during Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration and represent a scaling back of the department’s historic role to investigate and monitor troubled departments.
Minneapolis and Louisville were the two most high-profile cities to be investigated during 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.
The mayors of Minneapolis and Louisville both said they would continue to implement reforms mandated in the federal agreements despite the Justice Department’s move.
Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said the city would hire its own independent monitor to assess the police department’s progress, setting aside $750,000 in the city’s budget. “The goals for reform and the objectives for improvement are exactly the same as they were,” Greenberg said during a press conference. “It will just be a different process.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said that the city would continue to “implement every reform outlined in the consent decree.”
“Accountability isn’t optional,” Frey said in a statement.
Minneapolis also separately entered a similar type of settlement with the state of Minnesota to reform its police practices. That agreement, which includes many but not all of the reforms mandated in the federal agreement, will remain in effect.
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.
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.
Since Trump returned to power in January, the Civil Rights Division has lost more than 200 attorneys, Dhillon told reporters on Wednesday.
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.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)
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