_WHAT’S HAPPENING_
The Justice Department (DOJ) announced Wednesday it will dismiss lawsuits against the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments, effectively ending Biden-era consent decrees that would have imposed federal oversight on these agencies.
Consent decrees are court-approved agreements designed to fix issues like misconduct or civil rights violations — often leading to federal oversight of local police departments for years.
The decision rejects the Biden-Harris administration's findings of unconstitutional policing in both cities in the aftermath of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020.
_THE FACTS_
DOJ is withdrawing consent decrees for Minneapolis and Louisville police, calling them “factually unjustified.”
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said the Biden DOJ cherry-picked statistics and ignored context in its investigations.
In Memphis, the Biden administration suggested that police were racially discriminating against the homeless. However, the city and police department are both majority-black, as is 75 percent of the homeless population.
DOJ is also ending investigations in Phoenix, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Trenton, Mount Vernon, and the Louisiana State Police.
Biden-era decrees would have governed officer training, hiring, discipline, and use-of-force policies in local police departments for years.
Dhillon said the decrees would cost taxpayers hundreds of millions and reduce police effectiveness.
Many of these investigations were initiated by former Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, an open supporter of defunding the police.
_INSIGHTS_
This reversal by the Trump administration marks a dismantling of a key piece of Biden's criminal justice agenda and a swift departure from the BLM era. However, these policies date back well before the Biden administration.
The 2014 Ferguson unrest sparked the Obama administration's aggressive expansion of consent decrees, with the Justice Department landing 14 of them nationwide. The decrees often failed to produce results. In Ferguson, Missouri — ground zero of the Black Lives Matter movement — crime has risen even with the decree in place, as it has in DOJ-controlled cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and Cleveland.
