Trump’s DOJ Shuts Down Police Reform Cases Sparked by Floyd, Taylor Deaths

Just days before the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, the Justice Department said they will dismiss police investigations launched during former President Joe Biden’s administration.

Harmeet Dhillon, the leader of the department’s Civil Rights Division, announced Wednesday plans to withdraw pending federal lawsuits against police departments in Louisville, Kentucky, following the death of Breonna Taylor, and in Minneapolis, where all the officers involved in Floyd’s death have been convicted in federal and state courts.

Dhillon also announced officials would retract findings of constitutional violations in six police departments, including in Memphis, Tennessee, where all the officers involved in Tyre Nichols’ death have been federally convicted.

“This decision is a slap in the face to the families,” Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney for the families of Floyd, Nichols, and Taylor, wrote in a statement on Wednesday, adding, “and to every community that has endured the trauma of police violence and the false promises of accountability.”

Civil rights and legal advocates said they feared that if President Donald Trump won a second term, Black and brown communities would face a weakened U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division — one likely to underuse its investigation tools in response to police misconduct over the next four years.

Following a pattern-or-practice investigation, a court-ordered agreement — known as a consent decree — can be created to help ensure that departments reform or create new policing practices.

“These consent decrees and investigations were not symbolic gestures, they were lifelines for communities crying out for change, rooted in years of organizing, suffering, and advocacy,” Crump wrote in his statement.

Now, with the Trump administration eliminating investigations into the pattern or practices of law enforcement agencies with allegations of misconduct, the courts will become the primary venue where the victims of police brutality can air their complaints.

After the DOJ announcement, the American Civil Liberties Union and local partners launched the Seven States Safety Campaign.

The campaign will file seven public records requests in seven states where previous DOJ pattern-or-practice investigations uncovered misconduct and found that law enforcement officials engaged in unconstitutional and racially discriminatory policing. Lawsuits are expected to be filed in Tennessee, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, Mississippi, Minnesota, and Kentucky aimed to combat the current administration from “turning its back on police abuse,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta of the ACLU in a press release.

“The DOJ under Biden found police were wantonly assaulting people and that it wasn’t a problem of ‘bad apples’ but of avoidable, department-wide failures,” said Borchetta, who is the organization’s deputy project director on policing. “By turning its back on police abuse, Trump’s DOJ is putting communities at risk, and the ACLU is stepping in because people are not safe when police can ignore their civil rights.”

But legal experts have said it is harder to achieve systemic reform through the courts.

George White, a scholar of race and public policy at the City University of New York at York College, said in a previous interview with Capital B that eliminating the Civil Rights Division’s investigations would be a significant step backward in the quest for greater equity.

“If you don’t have that kind of external pressure in place to make sure that these actors are actually doing the right thing — creating equity, and creating fairness — they’re not going to do it,” said White, the interim dean of the college’s School of Arts and Sciences.

He also said he believes there are going to be a lot of communities that are “left adrift for the next four years, or until we get a completely different administration in place.”

In Black communities, data shows that fatal police encounters continue to rise. An average of about 250 Black people have been killed in encounters with the police each year since 2021, according to an analysis by the Mapping Police Violence website.

During the Biden administration, the Civil Rights Division launched 11 pattern-or-practice investigations into local police departments. In seven of those probes, federal investigators relied on thousands of police records, thousands of hours of police videos, and interviews with police personnel throughout each department to develop their reports.

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

One of the four holdover pattern-or-practice investigations from the Biden administration was against Rankin County, Mississippi. In January 2023, six former law enforcement officers — who called themselves the “Goon Squad” — tortured, sexually assaulted, and beat Michael C. Jenkins and Eddie T. Parker for nearly two hours. The ordeal began after the officers allegedly searched a house for drugs, and the officers later accused the men of dating white women. At the end of the encounter, Jenkins was shot in the mouth, and it caused permanent brain damage. The six sheriff’s deputies were sentenced in federal and state courts.

The Mississippi case, along with other DOJ investigations, has been shut down, Malik Z. Shabazz, an attorney for Jenkins and Parker, told Capital B. Shabazz settled a federal civil lawsuit against Rankin County and the department for $2.5 million earlier this month.

“We strongly disagree with this decision because it hurts long fought efforts to stop police brutality and human rights abuses by America’s police departments,” Shabazz wrote in a statement to Capital B. He added that he and his legal team “will continue to press their case in courts for justice in Rankin County.”

Since Trump’s inauguration, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has opened one pattern-or-practice investigation against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The division will look into allegations of the police agency’s timeliness to approve concealed handgun license applications.

It has also launched a civil rights investigation into the Hennepin County, Minnesota, Attorney’s Office on May 5 — the prosecuting office that oversees state-level criminal cases in communities including Minneapolis. The office had issued policy guidance on negotiating plea offers that aimed to reduce racial disparities, which the Civil Rights Division alleged is “race-based prosecutorial decision making.”

In a letter addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi on May 20, 16 national civil rights and criminal justice reform organizations, including the ACLU, called out the Civil Rights Division’s investigation.

“The Department of Justice’s civil rights investigation into HCAO is not just about one prosecutor,” according to the letter addressed to Bondi. “It also risks chilling the work of prosecutors’ offices across the country that make critical decisions every day to either advance or hinder safety and justice in their communities.”