The Trump administration moved on Wednesday to scrap proposed agreements for federal oversight of police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, as part of a broader abandonment of efforts by previous administrations to overhaul local law enforcement across the United States.
Justice Department officials said they planned to drop cases filed after incidents of police violence against Black people in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky., and to close investigations into departments in Memphis; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Trenton, N.J.; and Mount Vernon, N.Y., as well as a case against the Louisiana State Police.
In those cities and states, Justice Department officials said, they were retracting Biden-era findings that police departments had violated the constitutional rights of residents and declaring those findings to be misguided.
The announcement came four days before the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died at the hands of the Minneapolis police. That act of violence, caught on video, inspired national outrage and worldwide protests against police violence targeting Black Americans.
It also resulted in a withering federal report that found that the Minneapolis Police Department had routinely discriminated against Black and Native American people and had used deadly force without justification. After nearly two years of negotiations, the Justice Department and the city submitted an agreement to a federal judge in January calling for federal oversight of the Police Department’s efforts to address the issues.
That arrangement, known as a consent decree, was similar to court-approved agreements between the federal government and at least 13 other cities whose police forces have been accused of widespread civil rights abuses, including Los Angeles, Newark and Ferguson, Mo. The decrees set requirements for how officers should be trained and disciplined, with an outside monitor and a judge to ensure compliance, sometimes for years.
Consent decrees do not go into effect until they are approved by a federal judge, and a judge would have to approve any motion to dismiss a case.
The Trump administration contends that such consent decrees are too punitive toward law enforcement.
“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,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said on Wednesday.
Ms. Dhillon said she was ending the Biden administration’s “failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”
The Minneapolis arrangement had yet to take effect. A consent decree was also awaiting a judge’s approval in Louisville, Ky., where the Police Department was investigated after the killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old medical worker who was shot in 2020 during the botched execution of a search warrant.
City officials in Minneapolis and Louisville had been expecting the Trump administration to scrap the proposed consent decrees for their cities, but the moves are sure to be met with consternation by leaders of the movement for racial justice that Mr. Floyd’s murder accelerated. The anniversary of his killing is expected to be marked in Minneapolis this weekend with remembrances and vigils.
Officials in Minneapolis have said that they would go ahead with the overhaul measures promised in the agreement, whether or not there was federal oversight. Since 2023, the state has also been party to a separate court-enforced agreement with the state of Minnesota to address race-based policing.
Still, proponents of consent decrees say that nothing works quite as well as federal oversight has. The agreements have been among the federal government’s most potent tools for overhauling law enforcement agencies that have been accused of civil rights abuses, experts say, and can result in lasting change.
Critics say that consent decrees are inflexible, expensive and prone to overreach, often costing cities millions of dollars over many years. Some cities, including Memphis and Phoenix, have resisted entering into such agreements, despite scathing reports by the Justice Department that detailed histories of abuses and misconduct.
“There’s two sides to consent decrees,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a research group in Washington. “On the one hand, consent decrees can be onerous, bureaucratic and costly. And on the other hand, the irony is that cities that most need help to update their policies and training would not get the resources without the federal consent decree.”
Federal oversight of state and local police departments began during the Clinton administration, when legislation was passed in response to the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police in 1991. Support for such oversight has seesawed in the decades since then, depending on which party held the White House.
Several major cities negotiated consent decrees with the Obama administration, prompted in part by widespread protests over police killings of unarmed Black people. The agreements called on officers in Ferguson to form partnerships with community groups, in Baltimore to receive training on de-escalation tactics, and in Cleveland to develop unbiased policing policies.
The first Trump administration limited the use of consent decrees, but those limits were rescinded under the Biden administration. On the campaign trail last year, Mr. Trump said repeatedly that he wanted to give officers “immunity from prosecution, so they’re not prosecuted for doing their job.”
Last month, Mr. Trump paved the way for Wednesday’s announcement when he signed an executive order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to review all federal consent decrees and to “modify, rescind or move to conclude” them within 60 days.
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis has said that his city remained committed to the major changes that the Police Department adopted after Mr. Floyd was killed. Those changes include seeking to limit the use of force, improve training and restore residents’ trust.
“We will implement every reform outlined in the consent decree,” he said in a statement, “because accountability isn’t optional.”
Shaila Dewan contributed reporting.
Jacey Fortin covers a wide range of subjects for the National desk of The Times, including extreme weather, court cases and state politics all across the country.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
Ernesto Londoño is a Times reporter based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and drug use and counternarcotics policy.
The post Trump Administration Pulls Back From Local Police Oversight Across U.S. appeared first on New York Times.
