A judge has thrown out the federal consent decree for the Minneapolis Police Department, which followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by city police. The decision ends federal oversight, despite the Department of Justice having found the police department to engage in persistent illegal and racist practices. Any reforms to Minneapolis policing will now depend on the city or Minnesota governments. President Donald Trump has meanwhile suspended any further federal investigations into police departments nationwide.
On May 27, Judge Paul A. Magnuson—a Reagan-era appointee serving in the federal Minnesota District Court—dismissed the federal consent decree that was sought by the DOJ under the Biden administration. A consent decree is a legally binding agreement between two parties—in this case the federal government and the city and its police department—by which the city must reform its policing practices and procedures, under court supervision. The parties avoid going to trial.
Judge Magnuson dismissed the case “with prejudice,” meaning it cannot be refiled by a future administration. His decision immediately followed the five-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death on May 25, which was commemorated in Minneapolis and around the United States.
It also came just days after Trump’s DOJ announced it would be withdrawing from any further civil rights litigation against police departments, stating that consent decrees “would have imposed years of micromanagement by federal courts … and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs.”
On May 21, as Reuters reported, the DOJ said it was shutting down investigations and reversing misconduct findings in legal cases concerning Minneapolis; Louisville, Kentucky; Phoenix, Arizona; Memphis, Tennessee; Oklahoma City; the Louisiana State Police; Trenton, New Jersey; and Mount Vernon, New York.
“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,” stated Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”
“We are disappointed but not surprised … The current policies remove any accountability efforts that were put in place before.”
Surraya Johnson, director of the Criminal Justice Reform Program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, is among many advocates deeply concerned by the Trump administration’s actions.
“We are disappointed but not surprised that the DOJ discontinued their civil rights investigations and consent decrees that were entered into from the previous administration,” she told Filter.
In New Jersey, the Biden-administration DOJ found in 2024 that Trenton police were violating people’s rights, but that never led to a court-ordered consent decree.
“Unfortunately as it relates to Trenton specifically, [the investigation] is not a marker of a real change in policing that has occurred,” Johnson said. “There was not a consent decree entered into there … while the Trenton Police Department has undergone training, we don’t believe that [means] a real, substantial change in policing, or healing between the police and Black communities.”
Minneapolis policing became the focus of intense scrutiny as Floyd’s murder sparked a movement for racial justice and a reckoning on policing across the US and around the world.
While Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder and each of the other officers involved in the encounter was convicted on federal and state charges, the police department itself was put under investigation—accused of constitutional violations, excessive use of force, and racial profiling and discrimination, among other things.
“The bottom line is that we are doing it anyway. We will implement every reform in the 169-page [state] consent decree.”
Both the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, in June 2020, and the federal DOJ, in April 2021, opened civil rights investigations into the Minneapolis Police Department and the city.
The state moved faster, and in 2022 found “probable cause that the City and [ police] engage in a pattern or practice of race discrimination in violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act.” That led to a consent decree that the parties signed in March 2023. Among its provisions, it requires officers to de-escalate and not use force as retaliation; bans some pretexts for stops including those based on the smell of marijuana; bans consent searches during stops; restricts use of Tasers and pepper sprays; and bans training on “excited delirium.”
This state consent decree remains in force. And after Judge Magnuson’s May 27 decision, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) stated: “The bottom line is that we are doing it anyway. We will implement every reform in the 169-page consent decree.”
The DOJ, under President Joe Biden and then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, issued the findings of its own investigation in June 2023. The city agreed “in principle” to enter a consent decree to avoid going to trial. But the DOJ didn’t reach terms of an agreement with the city until January, just before Biden left office. The federal decree, which will now not apply, would have mandated training cops to de-escalate and avoid use of force, increased efforts to end racial discrimination, and reformed responses to incidents involving people with behavioral health disorders, among other provisions.
Trump’s opposition to pursuing such reforms through these legal processes has been crystal clear.
“The current policies remove any accountability efforts that were put in place before,” Johnson said. “We have a lack of accountability over these police departments where civil rights violations have been found.”
“We can impact this change in spite of any terrible policies coming down.”
Hopes for reform now rest with cities and states. “Here in New Jersey, there is legislation that has been introduced to put in place police accountability including [Civilian Complaint Review Boards] with subpoena power, [and] banning chokeholds and the use of excessive force,” Johnson said.
Reform advocates will have less recourse if local governments fail to follow through, without the possibliity of the federal government forcing them to act. Yet Louisville and Minneapolis are among cities whose mayors have expressed the intent to continue implementing reforms and police accountabilty measures, and Johnson thinks much can still be accomplished.
“We believe change comes from the ground up,” she said. “We believe actions from the state and local level can be effective to hold police departments accountable and get some of these reforms, and counteract some of the negative policies of the DOJ … We can impact this change in spite of any terrible policies coming down.”
Photograph of Minneapolis police, two days after the murder of George Floyd, by Chad Davis via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0
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