Justice Department moves to cancel police reform settlements reached
with Minneapolis and Louisville
[May 22, 2025]
By STEVE KARNOWSKI and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The Justice Department moved Wednesday to cancel
settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville that called for an overhaul
of their police departments following the killings of George Floyd and
Breonna Taylor that became the catalyst for nationwide racial injustice
protests in the summer of 2020.
The Trump administration also announced it was retracting the findings
of Justice Department investigations into six other police departments
that the Biden administration had accused of civil rights violations.
The moves represent a dramatic about-face for a department that under
Democratic President Joe Biden had aggressively pushed for federal
oversight of local police forces it accused of widespread abuses. The
Trump administration accused previous Justice Department leadership of
using flawed legal theories to judge police departments and pursuing
costly and burdensome court-enforced settlements known as consent
decrees to address alleged problems it argues are better dealt with at
the local level.
“It’s our view at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under
the Trump administration that federal micromanagement of local police
should be a rare exception, and not the norm,” Assistant Attorney
General Harmeet Dhillon, the new leader of the division, told reporters.
The Justice Department announced its decision just before the five-year
anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. Then-officer Derek Chauvin
used his knee on May 25, 2020, to pin the Black man to the pavement for
9 1/2 minutes in a case that sparked protests around the world and a
national reckoning with racism and police brutality.
The Biden administration launched pattern-or-practice investigations
into police departments across the country, uncovering issues such as
racial discrimination and excessive force. The Justice Department in the
final weeks of the previous administration reached consent decree
agreements with Minneapolis and Louisville but the settlements had yet
to be approved by a judge.
Police reform advocates denounced the move to walk away from the
agreements, saying a lack of federal oversight will put communities at
risk.
“This move isn’t just a policy reversal. It’s a moral retreat that sends
a chilling message that accountability is optional when it comes to
Black and Brown victims,” said the Rev Al. Sharpton, who worked with the
Floyd and Taylor families to push for police accountability. “Trump’s
decision to dismiss these lawsuits with prejudice solidifies a dangerous
political precedent that police departments are above scrutiny, even
when they’ve clearly demonstrated a failure to protect the communities
they’re sworn to serve.”
Kristen Clarke, who led the Civil Rights Division under the Biden
administration, defended the findings of the police investigations of
her office, noting that they were “led by career attorneys, based on
data, body camera footage and information provided by officers
themselves.”
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“To wholesale ignore and disregard these systemic violations, laid
bare in well-documented and detailed public reports, shows patent
disregard for our federal civil rights and the Constitution,” Clarke
said in a statement to The Associated Press.
The Trump administration said it was also reviewing more than a
dozen police consent decrees that remain in place across the U.S.
The Justice Department would have to convince a judge to back away
from those already-finalized settlements — a move that some
communities may oppose.
Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division chief, noted that both Louisville
and Minneapolis are already taking action at the local level to make
changes and impose oversight without the federal government's help.
She cited the hefty cost on communities to comply with federal
oversight — sometimes for more than a decade — and what she
described as problems and abuses in the consent decree monitoring
system.
“There is a lack of accountability. There is a lack of local
control. And there is an industry here that is, I think, ripping off
the taxpayers and making citizens less safe,” Dhillon said.
The Minneapolis Police Department is operating under a similar
consent decree with the Minnesota Human Rights
Department.Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian
O’Hara pledged at a news conference Wednesday that the city will
abide by the terms of the federal agreement as it was signed.
“We will comply with every sentence of every paragraph of the
169-page consent decree that we signed this year,." said Frey. “We
will make sure that we are moving forward with every sentence of
every paragraph of both the settlement around the Minnesota
Department of Human Rights, as well as the consent decree.”
In Kentucky, the city of Louisville had reached an agreement with
the Justice Department to reform its police force after a federal
probe that found Louisville police engaged in a pattern of violating
constitutional rights and discrimination against the Black
community.
Louisville Mayor Mayor Craig Greenberg said the city remains
committed to reforming its police force and will be soliciting
applications from candidates who want to serve as an independent
monitor.
“Throughout all of that process, we never hesitated, we never
delayed, we never took a step back in trying to learn how to do our
jobs better and serve the community better," said Louisville Police
Chief Paul Humphrey. “It’s not about these words on this paper, it’s
about the work that the men and women of LMPD, the men and women of
metro government and the community will do together in order to make
us a safer, better place.”
____
Richer reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Dylan
Lovan and Bruce Schreiner in Louisville contributed reporting.
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