Justice Department ends police department reform agreements, investigations, lawsuits

The Justice Department announced Wednesday that it has ended investigations into two police departments over questionable practies, in addition to reform agreements and lawsuits.

The department's Civil Rights Division said it is dismissing lawsuits against the police departments of Louisville, Ky., and Minneapolis, which the Biden administration filed after President Trump's election victory.

The lawsuits sought to subject the police departments to consent decrees after accusing them "of widespread patterns of unconstitutional policing practices by wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination and heavily relying on flawed methodologies and incomplete data."

The Biden administration filed the lawsuits years after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd during confrontations with police in Louisville and Minneapolis, respectively.

The division is also closing its investigations into the police departments of Phoenix, Ariz.; Trenton, N.J.; Memphis, Tenn.; Mount Vernon, N.Y.; Oklahoma City, Okla.; and the Louisiana State Police. The DOJ is also retracting the Biden administration's findings of constitutional violations on the part of the police departments.

“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,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement. “Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”

Rep. Abe Hamadeh, R-Ariz., said he had advocated for an end to the investigation of the Phoenix Police Department.

“Promise made. Promise kept,” Hamadeh said on Tuesday, after meeting with Dhillon. “I promised our law enforcement officers before taking office that I would end the weaponization of our judicial system and work with President Trump’s Department of Justice to undo the damage wrought by the Biden Administration.”

“The Trump Administration has now shown that it will not tolerate attacks on our law enforcement officers – either through physical violence or bureaucratic machinations,” Hamadeh added.