DOJ abandons police reform settlements over deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department is dropping negotiations for court-approved settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville police agencies, despite having found that authorities routinely violated the civil rights of Black people.
The two cases sparked worldwide outrage over fatal police encounters in 2020, during the final year of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Federal authorities also are closing investigations and retracting findings of wrongdoing against police departments in Phoenix; Memphis, Tennessee; Trenton, New Jersey; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City; and the Louisiana State 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,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general overseeing the department's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement May 21.
Negotiations dropped before anniversary of George Floyd's death
The announcement came days before the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, when then-police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd's neck as he pleaded that he couldn't breathe.
The Louisville case involved the March 13, 2020, killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot by police executing a no-knock warrant.
But Dhillon said the Biden administration wrongly attributed disparities in the treatment of racial minorities with intentional discrimination. She said the department would retract accusations that the departments violated Floyd's and Taylor's constitutional rights.
The sweeping court agreements being negotiated with the police departments in both cities would have micromanaged management, training, performance evaluations, discipline, recruitment and hiring, Dhillon added.
“Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees," Dhillon said.
Biden negotiations failed to yield court agreements called consent decrees
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 including those in Phoenix, New York City, Trenton, Memphis and Lexington, Mississippi.
But during those four years it failed to enter into any court-binding consent decrees, an issue that legal experts warned could put the departments' police accountability work at risk of being undone.
Civil Rights Division lawyers depart under Dhillon's leadership
Under Dhillon's leadership, the DOJ's civil rights division has lost more than 100 of its attorneys through deferred resignation agreements, demotions and resignations.
"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 conservative commentator Glenn Beck on his podcast April 26.
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 investigations of suspected 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 scrutinized suspected 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 landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.
Contributing: Reuters