Goodbye, De-policing? Trump DOJ Takes Biden’s Knee Off Police Departments’ Necks
by Selwyn Duke May 22, 2025
Call it, maybe, an example of Making Policing Great Again. A troubling step toward the federalization of local law enforcement taken by the Biden administration has just been reversed by the Trump administration. The issue concerns “consent degrees,” court-enforced agreements that allow the Washington leviathan to monitor and control local police. Such control is contrary to the Constitution, of course. It’s quite necessary, though, if the feds are to have complete societal control.
Create Crises — and Never Let Them Go to Waste
Used as a pretext for these decrees are cases of alleged police misconduct. Examples are the 2020 deaths of criminal George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. As for Trump’s remedial action, the Department of Justice related in a Wednesday press release:
Today, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is beginning the process of dismissing lawsuits against the Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, Minnesota police departments.
These lawsuits, which were filed at the last minute by the Biden administration after President Donald Trump’s reelection, accused Louisville and Minneapolis of widespread patterns of unconstitutional policing practices by wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination and heavily relying on flawed methodologies and incomplete data. They also sought to subject the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments to sweeping consent decrees that went far beyond the Biden administration’s accusations of unconstitutional conduct; the decrees would have governed many aspects of those police departments, including their management, supervision, training, performance evaluations, discipline, staffing, recruitment, and hiring. In short, these sweeping consent decrees would have imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.
“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,” added Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’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.”
A relevant DOJ tweet follows.
https://thenewamerican.com/us/politics/goodbye-de-policing-trump-doj-takes-bidens-knee-off-police-departments-necks/
