During President Biden's term, the Justice Department launched a dozen investigations into state and local law enforcement agencies. Nearly four years later, his administration has yet to lock in reform agreements with any of them. President-elect Trump has signaled his intent to abandon Biden’s use of federal power to compel sweeping changes aimed at curbing excessive police force and racial discrimination. That leaves two months to secure legally binding consent decrees that could place jurisdictions under federal court supervision or to reach settlements or release extensive reports that could sum up investigators’ work and provide state and local officials with road maps toward reform, the Washington Post reports. Trump vows to empower local law enforcement to use more aggressive tactics to fight violent crime and possibly dispatch the National Guard, or even the military to help patrol cities. He said police needed to be “extraordinarily rough” to stamp out urban mayhem.
Since 2021, the Justice Department has opened civil “pattern or practice” investigations into 12 state and local law enforcement agencies. The agency has completed four of them, issuing reports of systemic police misconduct in Minneapolis, Louisville, Phoenix, and Lexington, Miss. In none of those cases has DOJ submitted a negotiated consent decree to a federal judge for approval. Federal and local authorities said the cities closest to locking in federal consent agreements are Minneapolis and Louisville, where the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, respectively, helped spark protests in 2020. Local officials in both jurisdictions expressed uncertainty over whether negotiations will be completed by the time Trump is inaugurated. Federal authorities appear further from reaching settlements in Phoenix, home of one of the nation’s largest police forces, and in Lexington, whose police department has fewer than 10 officers. The Justice Department is still investigating law enforcement agencies in eight other places: Memphis; Trenton, N.J.; Mount Vernon, N.Y., Oklahoma City; Worcester, Mass.; and the state of Louisiana; the sheriff’s office in Rankin County, Miss., and the New York Police Department’s Special Victims Unit. “We have definitely already urged (DOJ) to get these locked in,” said Damon Hewitt of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The challenge with consent agreements is that if you’re a jurisdiction, even one with progressive leadership, you’re going wait them out for the next few months. I think DOJ should push and move quickly.”