Civil Rights Division Moves to Dismiss Louisville and Minneapolis Police Lawsuits and Withdraw Proposed Consent Decrees
The U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division announced on May 21, 2025, that it was beginning the process of dismissing its lawsuits against the police departments in Louisville, Jefferson County, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Hennepin County, Minnesota, retracting the previous administration's findings of constitutional violations by the two departments and abandoning the proposed federal consent decrees for both cities.
In its statement, the Department said the two lawsuits had been filed at the last minute by the Biden administration after President Donald Trump's reelection, accusing Louisville and Minneapolis of widespread patterns of unconstitutional policing by wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination and heavily relying on flawed methodologies and incomplete data. The proposed decrees, the Department said, went far beyond the accusations themselves and would have governed the departments' management, supervision, training, performance evaluations, discipline, staffing, recruitment, and hiring, imposing years of micromanagement by federal courts and expensive independent monitors and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis.
"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," said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division. "Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division's failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees."
The Division said it would take all necessary steps to dismiss the Louisville and Minneapolis lawsuits with prejudice, close the underlying investigations, and retract the prior findings. The same action closed investigations and retracted findings for six additional agencies: the police departments of Phoenix, Arizona; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and the Louisiana State Police.
According to the Associated Press's reporting that day, the Louisville and Minneapolis consent decree agreements grew out of two killings that set off nationwide protests in 2020: the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the shooting of Breonna Taylor during a Louisville police raid; the cities reached agreements with the Justice Department in the final weeks of the previous administration, but the decrees had not yet been approved by a judge. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said that day that his city would carry out the reforms on its own under the terms it had signed. The Department closed its statement by saying it would continue to support police departments nationwide through grants and technical assistance, and stands ready to take all necessary action, including criminal prosecution, when individual bad actors in uniform violate the Constitution or civil-rights laws. (Source: U.S. Department of Justice)
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于华盛顿哥伦比亚特区的美国司法部总部 Robert F. Kennedy Building 一角（资料图），檐口刻有司法部铭文。Pelajanela 摄，CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: A corner of the Robert F. Kennedy Building, U.S. Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C. (file photo), with the Department's inscription on the frieze. Pelajanela, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
