In a significant policy shift, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division announced Wednesday it is initiating the process of dismissing lawsuits against the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota police departments.
These lawsuits, filed late in the Biden administration, accused both departments of widespread unconstitutional policing practices.
The Justice Department stated that the lawsuits “wrongly equated statistical disparities with intentional discrimination and heavily relied on flawed methodologies and incomplete data.”
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Furthermore, the department criticized the proposed sweeping consent decrees, arguing they “went far beyond the Biden administration’s accusations of unconstitutional conduct” and 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.”
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division sharply criticized the previous administration’s approach.
“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,” Dhillon stated. “Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”
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The Civil Rights Division confirmed it will take all necessary steps to dismiss the Louisville and Minneapolis lawsuits with prejudice, close the underlying investigations, and retract the Biden administration’s findings of constitutional violations in these cases.
In a broader move, the Civil Rights Division also announced it would be closing its investigations into, and retracting findings of constitutional violations concerning, the police departments in:
- Phoenix, Arizona
- Trenton, New Jersey
- Memphis, Tennessee
- Mount Vernon, New York
- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
- Louisiana State Police
Despite these dismissals, the Department of Justice affirmed its commitment to supporting law enforcement agencies nationwide through grants and technical assistance.
The department expressed confidence that “the vast majority of police officers across the Nation will continue to vigorously enforce the law and protect the public in full compliance with the Constitution and all applicable federal laws.”
It also reiterated its readiness to address any constitutional or civil rights violations by “bad actors in uniform,” including through criminal prosecution.
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