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The Justice Department on Wednesday said it is dismissing Biden-era lawsuits against the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments and is in the process of unwinding investigations into several other police departments, describing the actions as sweeping and overly broad.
Speaking to reporters on a press call Wednesday, Justice Department Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said DOJ is taking all necessary steps to dismiss “with prejudice” the Louisville and Minneapolis lawsuits, and to close the investigations into the departments – describing them as expensive and overly broad.
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 police departments in Phoenix, Trenton, Memphis, Mount Vernon, Oklahoma City, and Louisiana state police.
“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,” Dhilon said.
Police officer Derek Chauvin kneels on the neck of a handcuffed George Floyd who repeatedly pleaded, “I can’t breathe,” in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. AP
The U.S. Justice Department charged four Louisville police officers involved in the deadly Breonna Taylor raid with civil rights violations. AP“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,” she added.
“Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”
English (US)