Justice Department moves to free Louisville, Minneapolis police from BLM-related monitoring

The Department of Justice said Wednesday it will move to release Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, from Black Lives Matter-inspired federal monitoring of their police departments, saying the previous administration wrongly pursued the cases.

Government lawyers will be in court this week to ask judges to cancel pending “consent decrees” that would have imposed the monitoring.

The Biden administration had struck the agreements in December and January, moving to beat the transition to the Trump administration. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said the deaths of Black residents at the hands of police had to be rectified.

But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said the actual investigations the department used to justify heavy-handed federal monitoring were “flawed to the extent that we don’t have confidence in these factual findings.” She said her lawyers couldn’t stand up in court and advocate for them anymore.

“In these cases we believe that when we’re accusing law enforcement we have to have a sound factual predicate for that. We don’t believe that existed,” said Ms. Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division.

The Justice Department will also end what it called pre-consent decree investigations into six other jurisdictions: Phoenix, Arizona; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City; and the Louisiana State Police.

The moves mark a major reversal in focus for the Justice Department. Ms. Dhillon’s predecessor at the civil rights division, Kristen Clarke, whom the Trump team said was an “avowed defund the police supporter.”

Ms. Clarke and Mr. Garland had cited the deaths of black residents George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville as reasons why those cities needed federal monitoring of their police practices. They said they found excessive use of force, unlawful search warrant practices, poor treatment of disabled residents and discrimination against Black people.

Ms. Dhillon said her division reviewed those findings and found they couldn’t stand up in court.

She said in some cases her predecessors cherry-picked statistics and in other cases ignored obvious explanations for racial difference in enforcement.

In Memphis, for example, she said the previous administration’s investigation suggested that police were racially discriminating in encounters with the homeless. But Ms. Dhillon said the city is majority-Black, the police department is majority-Black, and 75% of the city’s homeless population is Black.

She said it was a “real stretch” to conclude racism in the encounters.

Consent decrees are binding agreements that jurisdictions enter into, usually under threat of even more severe federal action.

In this case they would have installed monitors to scrutinize and report back on progress, and violations.

Ms. Dhillon said consent decrees have proved to be problematic, and often seem to lead to more crime, and can last for years — all costing the local taxpayers, who have to fund the changes required, as well as the monitoring.

“It is a very serious matter to put an American city under a consent decree that increases crime, increases cost, decreases safety and in some cases makes it virtually impossible to comply or get out from under it,” Ms. Dhillon said.