Justice Department pulls civil rights investigations into local police departments

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is dismissing lawsuits against a number of local police departments and ending investigations into patterns and practices of unconstitutional behavior, officials announced Wednesday.

The pullback from police oversight comes amid major change at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division since the start of the Trump administration and the confirmation of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who is leading the division.

Officials said lawsuits filed during President Joe Biden’s administration against two city police departments — Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis — would be dismissed.

The lawsuits followed Justice Department investigations into those two police departments, which described patterns of use of excessive force, discrimination against Black people and free speech violations in both jurisdictions. Those investigations were separate from criminal trials of police officers from those departments, who were charged over the high-profile killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville.

Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a 2023 statement announcing the results of the Minneapolis investigation that the “patterns and practices of conduct the Justice Department observed during our investigation … made what happened to George Floyd possible.”

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

Other investigations into policing in Phoenix; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City; and the Louisiana State Police will also end.