Nearly five years to the week since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, a consent decree that was supposed to usher in significant law enforcement reforms in the city is no more, dissolved by court order at the Trump administration’s request.
The Justice Department is also pulling out of a similar consent decree in Louisville, Ky., that emerged following the police killing of Breonna Taylor in a botched 2020 raid. And it is closing out nearly a half-dozen investigations into alleged police abuses in Memphis, Tenn.; Mount Vernon, N.Y.; Trenton, N.J.; Oklahoma City, Okla.; and the Louisiana State Police.
It’s all part of an intentional and wholesale retreat from federal involvement in the oversight of police, and one the White House may yet come to regret.
President Donald Trump has made no secret of his longstanding distaste for consent decrees, labeling them a “war on police.” The decrees are court-ordered, negotiated agreements between the Justice Department and local law enforcement to impose needed reforms and provide federal oversight.
At a September campaign stop, Trump told a rally crowd, “We have to let the police do their job. And if they have to be extraordinarily rough …” He was talking about shoplifters at the time, later adding, “One rough hour! And I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately.”
But it is the rough stuff, and its unequal application, that has landed so many law enforcement agencies in hot water over the years, putting them at odds with the very population they are sworn to protect.
Over the last decade, the federal government took a different tack, bringing its resources to bear in the search for more effective and humane methods of policing that would rebuild community trust and improve public safety. Another potential benefit: reducing the staggering payouts local taxpayers have borne after police misconduct.
A 2022 Washington Post report drawing on data from the 25 largest police and sheriffs’ departments showed more than $3.2 billion in settlements paid out in the previous decade.
In Minneapolis, where the police-civilian tensions existed long before Floyd’s murder, the yearslong investigation ordered by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed what the community had long seen: patterns of “excessive force, including unjustified deadly force” and unlawful discrimination in enforcement against Black and Native American people.
But it’s President Trump’s Justice Department now. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant U.S. Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, called the decree “overbroad,” and “factually unjustified,” giving too much power to “unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda.”
Dhillon celebrated U.S. District Court Judge Paul Magnuson’s motion to dismiss, which she described on X as “driving a stake through the heart of the non-case and then backing up over it.”
President Joe Biden’s DOJ may bear some culpability here for failing to provide sufficient evidence of its findings. Magnuson, a well-respected jurist in the local legal community, dismissed the decree “with prejudice,” meaning it cannot be refiled later, and expressed his “grave misgivings” about the agreement. Of particular concern, he wrote, was that the investigation produced no data to back up its findings of civil rights violations. The $750,000 annual cost for federal oversight, he noted, would be better used to “fund hiring police officers to bolster the City’s dwindling police force.”
As a journalist in the Twin Cities at the time, I was a witness to the riots and unrest that followed Floyd’s murder. Later I saw the rise of an ill-conceived “defund the police” movement, and watched as a majority of Black voters citywide rose up to defeat the ballot measure that would have passed it.
But there is still hunger for reform — and a need for federal involvement. If cities could fix police departments on their own, they would have by now.
Now reformers are losing their biggest champion: a Justice Department with the resources, experts and authority to make change stick.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told me that he is undeterred by the dismissal and intends to follow through with the agreed-upon reforms.
The city, he said, has already made dozens of positive changes to hold officers more accountable and to apply new standards in recruiting. Pay and retention bonuses have gone up considerably, and more attention is being paid to the tremendous stressors officers undergo.
Frey argues that Trump is selling police short. “This is an honorable and distinguished profession,” Frey told me. “Officers don’t benefit from being held to a lower standard. It demeans the work and the profession. We have officers now who are joining the force because of the changes being made, not in spite of them. And we are seeing results: a drop in crime, higher officer morale.” Minneapolis Police also remain under the supervision of a state consent decree, but that is not as broad as the federal decree.
In handing off such decisions strictly to state and local jurisdictions, Trump is both abdicating his responsibility to exert needed leadership and forgoing an opportunity to exert influence on an issue close to his base.
There is real work to be done on both sides of this equation: protecting police and the communities they serve. Red and blue states continue to search for that balance. They need the Justice Department to be their partner, not to walk away.
