Today, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division announced beginning the process of dismissing lawsuits against the Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, Minnesota police departments.
These lawsuits, which the then-President Joe Biden administration filed after President Donald Trump’s reelection, accused Louisville and Minneapolis of widespread patterns of unconstitutional policing practices by wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination and heavily relying on flawed methodologies and incomplete data.
They also sought to subject the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments to sweeping consent decrees that went far beyond the Biden administration’s accusations of unconstitutional conduct; the decrees would have governed many aspects of those police departments, including their management, supervision, training, performance evaluations, discipline, staffing, recruitment, and hiring, noted the Justice Department.
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, the department claimed in a statement on Thursday.
“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,” added Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”
The Civil Rights Division, the Justice Department said, would be taking all necessary steps to dismiss the Louisville and Minneapolis lawsuits with prejudice, to close the underlying investigations into the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments, and to retract the Biden administration’s findings of constitutional violations.
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 Phoenix, Arizona, Trenton, New Jersey, Memphis, Tennessee, Mount Vernon, New York, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and the Louisiana State Police.
The Department of Justice added that it would continue to offer its full support to police departments across the country, including through grants and technical assistance.
