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The Department of Justice is withdrawing from federal settlement agreements with the cities of Minneapolis and Louisville that called for sweeping police reform in the wake of George Floyd's and Breonna Taylor's deaths, per Newsweek.
Under the Biden administration, settlements, known as consent decrees, were reached between the cities and the DOJ following federal investigations into policing spurred by the killings of Taylor and Floyd in 2020. The consent decrees were designed to overhaul the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments to address failures in training, use-of-force policies, and officer accountability.
The Biden administration finalized its agreement with Minneapolis in January 2025, but the Trump administration soon after secured a delay in its implementation.
On Wednesday (May 21), Trump's DOJ informed a Minnesota federal court that it would no longer be pursuing the consent decree, saying that the department doesn't believe the agreement serves the public interest. Andrew Darlington, acting chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division's special litigation section, wrote in a notice that the department "will no longer prosecute this matter."
A similar withdrawal from the Louisville decree is set to take place.
The DOJ's move comes just days before the fifth anniversary of the murder of Floyd, who was knelt on for over nine minutes by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020.
Minneapolis will still be bound by a separate consent decree with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, which was enacted in 2023 over racial discrimination in the police department.
"The city and MPD must make transformational changes to address race-based policing," Minnesota Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero said in a statement.
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