Justice Department ends police oversight, probes in eight US cities

WASHINGTON: The Trump administration is dropping efforts to secure agreements for federal oversight of police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, despite a prior government finding they routinely violated the civil rights of Black people.

In a major rollback of federal civil rights investigations, the Justice Department said on Wednesday it was also ending investigations and rescinding findings of misconduct into six other police departments, deeming the probes - many launched following a 2020 wave of worldwide protests over racial justice - as overreaching.

“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 Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division. Her office will seek to dismiss the pending litigation against the two cities and retract the department’s prior findings of constitutional violations, she added.

Sunday will be the five-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck as Floyd repeatedly pleaded that he couldn’t breathe.

Floyd’s killing, as well as the killing of Breonna Taylor who was shot to death by Louisville police executing a no-knock warrant, sparked worldwide protests about racially motivated policing practices during the final year of Republican President Donald Trump’s first term in office.

Dhillon also said the department will be closing out investigations and retracting prior findings of wrongdoing against the police departments in Phoenix, Arizona; Memphis, Tennessee; Trenton, New Jersey; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and the Louisiana State Police.

She added that the department is also undertaking a review of all federal consent decrees, many of which date back to the Obama era, to determine if they should continue.