The administration of President Donald Trump has begun the process of ending the federal government’s involvement in reforming local police departments, a civil rights effort that gained steam after the deaths of unarmed Black people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
On Wednesday, the United States Department of Justice announced it would cancel two proposed settlements that would have seen the cities of Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, agree to federal oversight of their police departments.
Generally, those settlements — called consent decrees — involve a series of steps and goals that the two parties negotiate and that a federal court helps enforce.
In addition, the Justice Department said it would withdraw reports on six other local police departments which found patterns of discrimination and excessive violence.
The Trump administration framed the announcement as part of its efforts to transfer greater responsibility towards individual cities and states — and away from the federal government.
“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,” said Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, said.
She argued that such federal oversight was a waste of taxpayer funds.
“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.
But civil rights leaders and police reform advocates reacted with outrage over the news, which arrived just days before the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s murder.
Reverend Al Sharpton was among the leaders who called for police departments to take meaningful action after a viral video captured Floyd’s final moments. On May 25, 2020, a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, leaned his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, causing him to asphyxiate and die.
“This move isn’t just a policy reversal,” Sharpton said. “It’s a moral retreat that sends a chilling message that accountability is optional when it comes to Black and Brown victims.”
He warned that the Trump administration’s move sent a signal to police departments that they were “above scrutiny”.
The year of Floyd’s murder was also marked by a number of other high-profile deaths, including Taylor’s.
The 26-year-old medical worker was in bed late at night on March 13, 2020, when police used a battering ram to break into her apartment. Her boyfriend feared they were being attacked and fired his gun once. The police responded with a volley of bullets, killing Taylor, who was struck six times.
Her death and others stirred a period of nationwide unrest in the US, with millions of people protesting in the streets as part of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter. It is thought that the 2020 “racial reckoning” was one of the biggest mass demonstrations in US history.
Those protests unfolded in the waning months of Trump’s first term, and when Democrat Joe Biden succeeded him as president in 2021, the Justice Department embarked on a series of 12 investigations looking into allegations of police overreach and excessive violence on the local level.
Those investigations were called “pattern-or-practice” probes, designed to look into whether incidents of police brutality were one-offs or part of a larger trend in a given police department.
Floyd’s murder took place in Minneapolis and Taylor’s in Louisville — the two cities where the Trump Justice Department decided to drop its settlements on Wednesday. In both cities, under Biden, the Justice Department had found patterns of discriminatory policing.
“Police officers must often make split-second decisions and risk their lives to keep their communities safe,” the report on Minneapolis reads.
But, it adds, the local police department “used dangerous techniques and weapons against people who committed at most a petty offence and sometimes no offense at all”.
Other police departments scrutinised during this period included ones in Phoenix, Arizona; Memphis, Tennessee; Trenton, New Jersey; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and the Louisiana State Police.
Dhillon, who now runs the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, positioned the retractions of those Biden-era findings as a policy pivot. She also condemned the consent decrees as an overused tool and indicated she would look into rescinding some agreements that were already in place.
That process would likely involve a judge’s approval, however.
And while some community advocates have expressed concerns that consent decrees could place a burden on already over-stretched law enforcement departments, others disagree with the Justice Department’s latest move, arguing that a retreat could strip resources and momentum from police reform.
At the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD), Chief Paul Humphrey said the commitment to better policing went beyond any settlement. He indicated he would look for an independent monitor to oversee reforms.
“It’s not about these words on this paper,” he said. “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.”
And in Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey doubled down, saying he could keep pushing forward with the police reform plan his city had agreed to.
“We will comply with every sentence of every paragraph of the 169-page consent decree that we signed this year,” he said at a news conference.
“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.”