Trump DOJ dismisses Biden-era lawsuits against Minneapolis, Louisville police departments

While speaking to the press on Wednesday, Justice Department Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said that the DOJ is set to dismiss the lawsuits against the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments "with prejudice," according to Fox News. Dillon said that the lawsuits were overly broad and did not address the issues the suits claimed to solve.

The lawsuits had accused both departments of "widespread patterns" of unconstitutional police practices, which the Trump administration said was a result of "wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination" as well as relying "heavily" on "flawed methodologies and incomplete data."

Dillon's announcement about the lawsuits comes just before the anniversary of George Floyd's death, which some doctors have linked to a drug overdose instead of asphyxiation, as was portrayed in the media.

The Trump administration said the consent decrees that the Biden administration wanted to impose on the police departments were "reliant on faulty legal theories." A consent decree allows for federal oversight in local police departments and has been used before as a way to probe local law enforcement. One consent decree was pending a decision from a judge in Louisville, and the department had previously been probed over the death of Breonna Taylor.

Taylor died when police knocked on the dwelling that she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were residing in. Walker shot at the police first, leading the officers to return fire, killing Taylor, who was also in the housing. A judge later ruled that Walker was responsible for Taylor's death.

The DOJ noted that consent decrees can last for years, and not achieve their intended results, and will often cost tens of millions of dollars in funding. "That's over $100 million in taxpayer expense, often without significant impact to the underlying issues that the DOJ identified," Dhillon said.

Other investigations into police departments that the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ will be dismissing include probes of law enforcement in Phoenix, Arizona; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City; and the 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. 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."