WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Wednesday, May 21st, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said it will begin dismissing Biden-era lawsuits against the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, police departments as well as unwinding investigations into several other police departments across the country.
According to Fox News, speaking to reporters, Justice Department Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said that the DOJ is taking all necessary steps to dismiss “with prejudice” the Louisville and Minneapolis lawsuits, and to close the investigations into the departments. Dhillon called them “expansive, overly broad, and failing to address” the problems they set out to solve.
Many of the consent decrees that the DOJ reviewed were “reliant on faulty legal theories,” although they declined to provide specific details. DOJ officials said that in both Louisville and Minneapolis, the Biden-era lawsuits accused the city police departments of “widespread patterns” of unconstitutional police practices — something DOJ officials attributed to being the result of “wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination” and relying “heavily” on what they said were “flawed methodologies and incomplete data.”
The United States has a long history of “consent decrees,” which allow federal oversight into the actions of local police departments. They have been used as a means of investigating city police departments in Ferguson, Missouri, Los Angeles, and other places where law enforcement personnel have been accused of using excessive force or otherwise abusing their power.
The consent decree in Louisville was pending approval from a judge. The Louisville Metropolitan Police Department (LMPD) was previously investigated following the officer-involved fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor at her apartment in 2020.
The DOJ is also undertaking a review of all pending federal consent decrees opened by the department’s Civil Rights Division in recent years, “with a view to whether they should be concluded.” DOJ officials noted that the consent decrees often last more than a decade and involve tens of millions in federal funding. As far as the Trump administration is concerned, the do very little to solve the underlying problem.
On average, officials said the decrees carry a hefty price tag, with the average compliance cost for a large police department costing roughly $10 million annually. Dhillon said, “That’s over $100 million in taxpayer expense, often without significant impact on the underlying issues that the DOJ identified.”
The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division will also be closing its investigations into and retracting the Biden administration’s findings of constitutional violations on the part of police departments in Phoenix; Trention, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City; and Louisiana State Police.
Dhillon 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.”
She added, “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. Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”
