DOJ Dismisses Consent Decrees Affecting Louisville and Minneapolis Police

The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has begun the process of dismissing lawsuits against the Louisville and Minneapolis departments.

These lawsuits, which were filed at the last minute by the Biden administration 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. 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, DOJ said in a press release .

“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 will 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, the following additional local police departments:

• Phoenix, Arizona

• Trenton, New Jersey

• Memphis, Tennessee

• Mount Vernon, New York

• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

• Louisiana State Police

The Department of Justice will continue to offer its full support to police departments across the country, including through grants and technical assistance. The Department is confident 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. When bad actors in uniform fail to do so, the Department stands ready to take all necessary action to address any resulting constitutional or civil-rights violations, including via criminal prosecution.

The National Fraternal Order of Police has praised the DOJ decision.

“Consent decrees have never worked and will never work. We need to focus on constructive and collaborative paths to reform without the destructive impacts like the increased crime and inflated costs that always come along with consent decrees,” National FOP President Patrick Yoes declared. “We are grateful to U.S. Attorney General Bondi and her team at the Justice Department for this quick and decisive action.”