Trump Justice Department Cancels Police Reform Deals And Empties Civil Rights Division, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Division Was Enforcing Civil Rights

WASHINGTON. The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it would move to dismiss the police reform agreements reached with Minneapolis and Louisville and retract findings of unconstitutional conduct against six additional law enforcement agencies, resolving a long-standing concern within the administration that the Civil Rights Division had been devoting federal resources to the enforcement of civil rights.

The Minneapolis agreement had followed a federal investigation opened after the murder of George Floyd, and the Louisville agreement had followed the death of Breonna Taylor. Officials scheduled the announcement to land four days before the fifth anniversary of Floyd's killing, a decision the Justice Department described as the natural conclusion of a careful review and that departing career attorneys described as the entire point. The retracted findings covered police departments in Phoenix, Memphis, Trenton, Oklahoma City, and Mount Vernon, along with the Louisiana State Police, each of which had been investigated under what the department now called a flawed methodology and would going forward be investigated under no methodology at all.

The dismissals capped a four-month effort to return the Civil Rights Division, a unit Congress established in 1957 for the specific purpose of enforcing the nation's civil rights laws, to a condition in which it would no longer be in a position to do so. After the Senate confirmed a new Assistant Attorney General in April, the division's sections received revised mission statements, and roughly 70 percent of its career attorneys resigned, transferred, or accepted the administration's standing offer to be paid to stop reporting for work. Officials cited the resulting vacancies as evidence that the division had been overstaffed relative to the mission it had left.

"For years this division operated on the assumption that its job was to locate civil rights violations and then correct them," said one official familiar with the restructuring, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the division's new direction. "We have realigned it toward the violations the President actually cares about." The official said the division would concentrate its remaining capacity on diversity programs, what the administration terms anti-Christian bias, and the gender policies of local school boards, three areas in which, the official said, the need for federal attention had gone unaddressed for too long.

Scholars of the department noted that the consent decree exists as a legal instrument precisely because a police department found to have engaged in unconstitutional conduct cannot reliably be expected to reform itself without external supervision. The administration expressed full confidence that the eight agencies now released from external supervision would reform themselves without it.

At press time, the Civil Rights Division had cleared every remaining civil rights matter from its docket by declining to recognize any of them as one.