Trump administration drops police oversight spurred by Floyd, Taylor killings

By Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward

WASHINGTON, May 21 (Reuters) - The Trump administration is ending 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.

"Federal micro-management of local police should be a rare exception, and not the norm," Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the department's Civil Rights Division, told reporters. She said control of police belongs with their communities rather than unelected bureaucrats.

She said her office will seek to dismiss the pending litigation against the two cities and retract the department's prior findings of constitutional violations.

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.

The mayors of Minneapolis and Louisville both said they would continue to implement reforms mandated in the federal agreements despite the Justice Department action. Minneapolis opposed the Trump administration's move in court, saying it would impede the city's progress on policing.

"Neither Trump nor anyone in Washington can stop us from doing this work that we are indeed committed to," Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, told reporters during a press conference.

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.

Minneapolis and Louisville were the two highest-profile cities investigated for systemic police abuse during Democratic President Joe Biden's administration and were the only two cities that agreed to the terms of a court-approved settlement with the DOJ known as a consent decree.

Dhillon said DOJ was undertaking a review of all federal consent decrees, many of which date back to Democratic President Barack Obama's administration, to determine if they should continue.

The moves announced on Wednesday would largely undo years of work on police oversight during Biden's administration and represent a scaling back of the department's historic role to investigate and monitor troubled departments.

Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who represented both the Floyd and Taylor families, said "the DOJ is not just rolling back reform, it is attempting to erase truth and contradicting the very principles for which justice stands."

"These consent decrees and investigations were not symbolic gestures, they were lifelines for communities crying out for change, rooted in years of organizing, suffering, and advocacy," Crump said in a statement.

'A DIFFERENT PROCESS'

Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said the city would hire its own independent monitor to assess the police department's progress, setting aside $750,000 in the city's budget.

"The goals for reform and the objectives for improvement are exactly the same as they were," Greenberg said during a press conference. "It will just be a different process."

Minneapolis also separately entered a similar type of settlement with the state of Minnesota to reform its police practices. That agreement, which includes many but not all of the reforms mandated in the federal agreement, will remain in effect.

Frey said the same monitor overseeing Minneapolis' compliance with the state agreement would also ensure the city followed through on reforms the Justice Department had sought.

Both reform agreements mandated large-scale changes to police training, use-of-force policies, and internal discipline.

Congress authorized the Justice Department to conduct civil investigations into constitutional abuses by police, such as excessive use of force or racially-motivated policing, in 1994, as a response to the beating of Rodney King, a Black man, by white Los Angeles police officers.

During Biden's presidency, the Civil Rights Division launched 12 such "pattern or practice" investigations into police departments.

But during those four years it failed to enter into any court-binding consent decrees, an issue that legal experts warned could put the department's police accountability work at risk of being undone.

The Trump administration has steered the Civil Rights Division away from pursuing cases to protect the country's vulnerable and historically disenfranchised populations and toward conservative causes such as gun rights and antisemitism at U.S. colleges.

Since Trump returned to power in January, the division has lost more than 200 attorneys, Dhillon told reporters on Wednesday.