Justice Dept. to drop police reform deals with Minneapolis, Louisville [View all]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/05/21/justice-department-policing-louisville-minneapolis-consent-decree/

Justice Dept. to drop police reform deals with Minneapolis, Louisville
Civil rights division chief Harmeet K. Dhillon announced the decision days before the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis.
May 21, 2025 at 10:03 a.m. EDT
By Mark Berman and Perry Stein

The Justice Department said Wednesday that it plans to drop police-accountability agreements with Minneapolis and Louisville, abandoning the Biden administration’s attempt to reshape law enforcement in cities where high-profile killings by officers ignited widespread outrage.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, also said the government would close Biden-era investigations that found multiple other local police departments — including in Phoenix, Memphis and Oklahoma City — violated the Constitution.

Dhillon announced the decision days before the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s death at the hands of officers in Minneapolis in 2020 which helped set off worldwide racial justice protests that summer.

She noted that Minneapolis already had a court-enforceable consent decree with the state government, and said that Louisville — where the police shooting of Breonna Taylor weeks before Floyd’s death also drew national outrage — will hire its own monitor to enact the Biden-era demands.

Abandoning the federal agreements is part of Dhillon’s broader push to reshape the civil rights division, discarding a focus on racial discrimination to instead take aim at alleged antisemitism on college campuses and investigate diversity initiatives and other issues opposed by the Trump administration. About half of the division’s lawyers have left since Dhillon was sworn in last month.

During President Joe Biden’s administration, the Justice Department championed greater federal scrutiny of police, launching a dozen investigations into local and state agencies, and releasing critical, in-depth reports on the departments in cities including Minneapolis, Louisville, Phoenix and Memphis.

But when Biden left office in January, the department had reached agreements with only two places — Minneapolis and Louisville — on consent decrees that would impose changes on their local police forces.

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