Justice Department begins dismissing Biden-era police lawsuits against Minneapolis and Louisville

The Justice Department on Wednesday said it is dismissing Biden-era lawsuits against the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments and is in the process of unwinding investigations into several other police departments, describing the actions as sweeping and overly broad.

Speaking to reporters on a press call Wednesday, Justice Department Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said DOJ is taking all necessary steps to dismiss “with prejudice” the Louisville and Minneapolis lawsuits, and to close the investigations into the departments – calling them as expensive, overly broad and failing to address the problems they set out to solve. 

Many of the consent decrees they reviewed were “reliant on faulty legal theories,” DOJ officials said, though they declined to provide specifics citing the privileged nature of the investigations. 

In both Louisville and Minneapolis, Justice Department officials said, the Biden-era lawsuits accused the city police departments of “widespread patterns” of unconstitutional police practices – something DOJ officials attributed to be the result of “wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination,” and relying “heavily” on what they said were “flawed methodologies and incomplete data.”

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The U.S. has a long history of so-called 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 Los Angeles, Calif., Ferguson, Mo., and other places where law enforcement personnel have been accused of using force without justification or otherwise abusing power.

The news comes just four days before the five-year anniversary marking George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in 2020. His death touched off widespread protests and riots across the country, as well as pleas for police department reform. 

The consent decree in Louisville was pending approval from a judge. The department was previously investigated following the killing of Breonna Taylor at her apartment in 2020. 

The department is also undertaking a review of all pending federal consent decrees opened by DOJ’s Civil Rights Division in recent years, officials said, “with a view to whether they should be concluded.”

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Justice Department officials noted these consent decrees often last more than a decade, involve tens of millions in federal funding – while doing little, in the Trump administrations’s view, to solve the underlying problem,

On average, officials said the decrees last more than a decade and carry a hefty price tag, with the average compliance cost for a large department costing roughly $10 million dollars annually. 

“That’s over $100 million in taxpayer expense, often without significant impact to the underlying issues that the DOJ identified,” Dhillon said.

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The 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, Arizona; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Louisiana state police, officials announced.

“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,” Dhilon said.

“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,” she 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.”