Justice Department Dismissing Biden Era Consent Decrees

“Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees,” announced Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. Since the beginning of the Obama administration and continuing over to the Biden administration, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has filed dozens of lawsuits against mostly big city police departments alleging unconstitutional policing practices and racial bias. Breanne Deppisch and David Spunt of Fox News report that that the DOJ is now dismissing lawsuits against the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments launched after the George Floyd riots of 2020. In both cases the government claimed that the departments were racially biased.

The Civil Rights Division is also reviewing consent decrees resulting from previous government lawsuits which have placed police departments under the supervision of federal judges or bureaucrats, many for over a decade. Among the cities where police departments are under federal supervision are Phoenix, Arizona; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Los Angeles, California.

Suing police departments and forcing them to operate under consent decrees has been part of the criminal justice reform strategy pushed by progressives to break down the rule of law in America. Both President’s Biden and Obama, appointees to leadership positions at the justice department, federal agencies and the courts have advanced the narrative that the U.S. criminal justice system is “systemically racist.”

Unsurprisingly, race hustlers including the Reverend Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson along with the national media have uncritically promoted that narrative in spite of decades of studies and data indicating that black men commit crimes at much higher rates than other races, which explains why their arrest and conviction rates are disproportionate.

Police departments and prosecutors cannot succeed in reducing crime if they are prohibited from arresting the offenders that are committing most of it. Removing the shackles of politically motivated lawsuits and consent decrees is a major step on the road to making local law enforcement more effective at protecting the public from criminals.