President Joe Biden made it a priority for his Justice Department to investigate local police agencies with troubled records, including patterns of excessive use of force, racial discrimination, and inadequate responses to victims of sexual assault.
In ten places across the country, the DOJ civil rights division either has an open investigation into police conduct, or has reported civil rights violations but not yet entered into a consent decree. In two more, the DOJ entered into consent decrees in the final weeks of the Biden administration, but those agreements have yet to be signed off on by a judge.
Now, under President Donald Trump, those open investigations are likely to close, and the reform agreements will likely never come to fruition, the Marshall Project reports. Already, new leadership at the Justice Department has ordered a halt to all open civil rights investigations as they reevaluate how many, if any, they still want to pursue.
Without federal involvement, advocates worry that police reform efforts will stall in those cities and states — even if investigations have already highlighted what work needs to be done.
“But what history tells us is that this information will not be used, which is why we [need to] have these consent decrees, and now we won’t have those,” said Christy Lopez, a Georgetown law professor who led the Justice Department’s civil rights investigations of police departments during most of the Obama administration.
The twelve departments the Biden administration either still had under investigation or found to have committed systemic civil rights violations are:
In Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by police, and Louisville, where Breonna Taylor was killed by police, the DOJ under Biden entered into consent decrees in the final weeks of his administration, and whether or not the agreements are approved are now in the hands of judges.
In both cities, the DOJ asked the judges in February for 30-day extensions in reviewing the agreements, given the new administration.
“That is disturbing — to get to this point after everything that our community has been through and to not know whether or not a consent decree at the federal level will ultimately occur,” said Nekima Levy Armstrong, a local civil rights attorney and activist in Minneapolis. “That, to me, is a failure of systems and those who were responsible for administering this particular process.”
Levy Armstrong said that she was hopeful that a state consent decree could still force the Minneapolis police to implement, but worried that agreement too could be subject to political changes.
“So that's part of why I think having the double layer of enforcement is so important,” Levy Armstrong said.
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