US abandons police reform accords sought over deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-abandons-police-reform-accords-sought-over-deaths-george-floyd-breonna-taylor-2025-05-21/

WASHINGTON, May 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department is abandoning efforts to secure court-approved settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville, despite its prior finding that police in both cities routinely violated the civil rights of Black people, a senior official said on Wednesday.

Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the department's Civil Rights Division, said her office will seek to dismiss the pending litigation against the two cities and retract the department's prior findings of constitutional violations.

"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," Dhillon said in a statement.

She also announced that 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.

[Irish_Dem]

1. All American progress wiped out.

In every aspect of US history, society, economy, government, civil rights.

[Docreed2003]

2. How can a country survive this whiplash in policy?

Trump, in his first term, made radical moves to undo progressive policy both at home and abroad. Now, in his second term, his minions are doing much the same except on steroids. How many generations will it take to rebuild what is being taken from us presently? It's infuriating and disheartening

[kelly1mm]

3. If you think it is bad now, imagine if the filibuster in the senate had been abolished. That position was

all the rege here on DU the past few years. Now? Not so much .....

[B.See]

9. Docreed is correct. During Trump's

first... occupation... his DOJ issued not one consent decree.

And since his second, he's issued or proposed EOs that'd essentially give cops complete immunity and carte blanche to do just about whatever they want...
excepting to people like Trump of course.

And in certain red states they're crafting ('perfecting) open carry and firearm permitting legislation,


allowing for the arming of those determined as being "law abiding citizens."

[Ocelot II]

4. Oh, great. MPD was improving a little bit, got a new chief.

I hope some of the worst racists have been weeded out since the Floyd murder. The police union guy, Trumpist asshole Bob Kroll, is gone, which helps. But a lot of cops have left or retired, so now the department is understaffed and they hardly show up at all unless there's been a multiple hatchet murder. Without the consent decree I don't know whether they'll relapse into their old, long-standing racist ways but they could.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

6. There's still the state consent decree. OTOH O'Hara is pretty contemptuous of both his own job and the community. The

problem is systemic, not personal.

[MineralMan]

8. I'm not sure that it's going to result in a complete collapse of the progress

that may have been made in the last 5 years. I'm not sure it's not, either. Things are not well with the police in Minneapolis. They have not been for quite some time. It's the same problem that most major cities seem to have. The trend that was attempted to move more people INTO the cities appears not to have taken hold. In fact, downtown districts are turning in to ghost towns in may places. Without people coming into the city to work at large business concerns that are headquartered there, it's not going to encourage any kind of activity downtown.

St. Paul has been like that for a long, long time. Everyone left downtown, and that left downtown to deteriorate in many ways.

I'm not hopeful that this will turn around. People don't have to work AT the corporate headquarters to work FOR the corporate headquarters. COVID 19 taught us that, and it's a lesson that is now well understood.

[mountain grammy]

5. Open season on Americans.

[Solly Mack]

7. Those damn anti-police (brutality) agendas! Damn.