Trump’s DOJ Goes To Bat For Police: Will Dismiss Biden’s Lawsuits Against Them

On Wednesday, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division said lawsuits against the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, police departments would be dismissed.

The DOJ countered the lawsuits filed by the Biden administration in the waning moments of Biden’s presidency.

Those lawsuits accused the police departments of “unconstitutional policing practices by wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination and heavily relying on flawed methodologies and incomplete data,” the DOJ stated. “They also sought to subject the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments to sweeping consent decrees that went far beyond the Biden administration’s accusations of unconstitutional conduct.”

The Minneapolis and Louisville investigations followed the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020.

Memorial Day Sale – Get 40% Off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships

In April 2021, then-Attorney General Merrick B. Garland announced an investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department and whether it had used excessive force or treated minorities unfairly. In 2023, Biden’s DOJ released results of its investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD), saying it had acted with discriminatory behavior against black people. Both police departments reached consent decrees with the Biden administration.

The consent decree with Minneapolis enjoined the police department to:

• Require officers to de-escalate

• Prohibit officers from using force to punish or retaliate

• Prohibit the use of certain pretext stops

• Ban searches based on alleged smells of cannabis

• Prohibit so-called consent searches during pedestrian or vehicle stops

• Limit when officers can use force

• Limit when and how officers can use chemical irritants and tasers

• Ban “excited delirium” training

The consent decree’s demands of the Louisville police are listed here.

“The decrees would have governed many aspects of those police departments, including their management, supervision, training, performance evaluations, discipline, staffing, recruitment, and hiring,” the DOJ continued. “In short, these sweeping consent decrees would have imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.”

“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,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division declared. “Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”

In addition, the Civil Rights Division “will also be closing its investigations into, and retracting the Biden administration’s findings of constitutional violations” on the part of the police departments of Phoenix, Arizona; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and the Louisiana State Police.