The Trump administration’s Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has filed a motion to dismiss its case against the city of Minneapolis and the city of Louisville, Kentucky which were responsible for the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020.
The cases would have likely resulted in federal consent agreements and mandated reform of the respective police departments. The administration provocatively made the decision coincide with the five-year anniversary of Floyd’s death, which takes place this Sunday. It has motioned for a dismissal with prejudice, meaning the cases cannot be raised again.
This has been accompanied by provocative calls among the far-right to pardon Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for almost nine-and-a-half minutes. A prominent far-right figure and founder of the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, has launched a petition calling for Trump to pardon Chauvin.
MPD chief Brian O’Hara said to a Minnesota Fox affiliate that police chiefs from around the country were asking him if this was indeed going to happen. While saying that there was “no credible information” he also said that “we’ve been in communication with our partners at the state, at the federal level to ensure that we and all of our partners are prepared” in the event that a pardon happens and “causes some type of civil disturbance.”
A presidential pardon would only apply to the federal civil rights charges he was convicted on, not the separate state murder charges, meaning Chauvin would be transferred from federal prison to a Minnesota prison to serve out the remainder of his 22.5 year sentence handed down in 2021.
The Biden administration originally filed the lawsuits at practically the last minute, in December and January respectively, more than four years after the killing of Floyd and Taylor.
Trump has long opposed consent agreements, calling them a “war on police.” All civil rights litigation was frozen and a memo issued at the start of the Trump administration indicating that it may “reconsider” court enforceable agreements to reform police agencies.
The DOJ also plans to close investigations and rescind findings of constitutional violations in a number of other police departments around the country including:
Phoenix, Arizona, which was found to have “violated people’s rights, discriminated against certain groups and has used excessive force, including unjustified deadly force.”
Trenton, New Jersey, where the DOJ stated in a November 21 report that it found that the city and Trenton Police Department used “excessive force, including using unreasonable forms of physical force and pepper spray” and “unlawfully stops, searches, and arrests people during pedestrian and traffic stops” violating people’s Fourth Amendment rights.
Memphis, Tennessee, which was found to use excessive force among other violations similar to the above. The DOJ cited the police killing of Tyre Nichols in a McDonald’s drive through in 2023 and Kayla Lucas in 2021.
Other police departments let off the hook include Mount Vernon, New York; the Louisiana State Police; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
The two-year federal investigation into MPD which found its culture cultivated “systemic problems” that made the killing of George Floyd possible will also be closed. Among these findings were that MPD routinely uses excessive force, “unlawfully discriminates against Black and Native American people,” violates the Americans with Disabilities Act in its response to mental health calls and violates the Constitutional rights of people who criticize them.
“Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments,” the DOJ said in a news release. That is, that any inhibition, no matter how limited, is to be lifted on the US police’s power to oppress and brutalize the population—overwhelmingly the working class and poor people.
Trump’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the DOJ absurdly claimed that the findings were based on “dubious legal theories” and that the investigations were designed to “inhibit local policing.”
Over the course of the Biden administration, police killings increased by almost 10 percent, from 1,148 in 2021 to 1,260 in 2024. This increase significantly outstripped population growth for that same period, which stood at 2.4 percent. Suffice to say, the administration was not concerned with addressing the issue of wanton killings by police and in fact served to make it more lethal funneling billions of pandemic relief funds to the cops and signing pro-cop executive orders. The investigations served to whitewash police violence in an attempt to give the “bodies of armed men” a face-lift while changing none of their fundamental characteristics as a tool of the ruling class to oppress workers and enforce social inequality.
Furthermore, the brutality of US police was known long before any investigation was launched, as the police killed over 1,000 people a year on average for the seven years preceding Floyd’s death.
The reasoning provided by Trump’s DOJ for ending these agreements was that it introduced unnecessary bureaucracy which got in the way of recruiting and retaining police.
The investigations and performative pledges to reform under Biden are now seen as an impediment to recruiting the most ruthless and backwards elements among the population. The ruling class sees deploying these layers, epitomized by Chauvin, as necessary in order to confront an increasingly restive working class, which has engaged in a series of strikes in a number of industries in recent years, as well as mass protests against attacks on democratic rights and the genocide in Gaza.