One of the Justice Department’s goals under President Joe Biden was to investigate some of the nation’s most troubled police agencies, including the ones responsible for the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tyre Nichols.
Two months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the prospect of federal oversight appears likely to disappear in most of those 12 agencies.
For places where civil rights investigations were still open — the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office near Jackson, Mississippi, and the New York Police Department’s Special Victims’ Unit — the federal government will likely choose to take no further action. New leadership at the Justice Department has already ordered a halt to all open civil rights investigations as they reevaluate how many, if any, they still want to pursue.
The prospects are almost as dim for the eight agencies where investigators found civil rights violations but had not entered into consent decrees — the court-monitored processes that mandate police reforms. Those include police departments in cities like Memphis, Phoenix, Trenton, New Jersey and Mount Vernon, New York, where it’s unclear whether the Justice Department would even informally work with leaders to push the changes their investigations urged.
In Louisville and Minneapolis, on the other hand, it’s now up to judges to decide how much the federal government will be involved in police reform. Justice Department attorneys during the Biden administration signed consent decrees with leaders in both cities after civil rights investigations sparked by the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. But federal judges have yet to sign off on the agreements.
It will be tough to overhaul police practices without federal involvement in each of these places, said Christy Lopez, a Georgetown law professor who led the Justice Department’s civil rights investigations of police departments during most of the Obama administration. With investigations finished in 10 of the 12 agencies examined since 2020, Lopez says leaders in those cities have a roadmap for reform, at least theoretically.
“But what history tells us is that this information will not be used, which is why we [need to] have these consent decrees, and now we won’t have those,” Lopez said.
Trump’s second term brings just the latest of several reversals in federal policy toward police work over the past two decades. During the Obama administration, the Justice Department entered into several consent decrees, including with cities like New Orleans, Cleveland, Miami and Baltimore, the last of which came just before Trump first took office in 2016.
Signaling a shift in policy, Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, tried unsuccessfully to back out of the Baltimore consent decree and only pursued one other investigation of a police agency during Trump’s first term. Biden’s 2020 election brought with it a renewed focus on civil rights investigations of policing, even though some of these probes produced no findings of significant wrongdoing.
Investigations in 10 agencies since 2020 revealed that police used excessive force against residents in all but one: the Oklahoma City Police Department. In six agencies, according to the reports, officers also violated people’s free speech rights. Several police departments were found to have inadequate responses to victims of sexual assault, and officers in Lexington, Mississippi, and Worchester, Massachusetts, were accused of inappropriate sexual behavior themselves.
Police in six of the agencies discriminated against Black and brown people or other marginalized groups, federal investigators found. The Justice Department probes followed high-profile police deaths in four places — Memphis, Louisville, Minneapolis and Louisiana. In these and five other agencies, investigators attributed problems with policing to improper supervision and lax or no punishment for officers who broke the rules.
Here’s the state of reform in the 12 police agencies that the Biden administration either still had under investigation or found to have committed systemic civil rights violations.
- Lexington Police Department, Mississippi
- Louisiana State Police
- Louisville Metro Police Department
- Memphis Police Department
- Minneapolis Police Department
- Mount Vernon Police Department, New York
- New York Police Department, Special Victims Division
- Oklahoma City Police Department and state of Oklahoma
- Phoenix Police Department
- Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, Mississippi
- Trenton Police Department, New Jersey
- Worcester Police Department, Massachusetts
Lexington Police Department, Mississippi
Lexington, Mississippi, is a majority-Black town of about 1,200 people an hour north of Jackson. In January 2024, the municipality’s 10-officer police force had open warrants for 652 people, equivalent to more than half of its population, according to the findings of a Justice Department investigation released in September.
The 47-page report was the culmination of a 10-month investigation that detailed a small, but powerful police force that preyed on the vulnerable: brutalizing Black residents, siphoning money from the poor and people with disabilities, sexually propositioning women, arresting people for made up crimes — such as profanity — and illegally holding them in jail for days at a time.
Holmes County, which includes Lexington, is among the poorest in the nation, and more than three-quarters of its population are Black. Investigators concluded that this demographic worked to the advantage of the city’s aggressive police force, which targeted people who lacked the resources to challenge their power. They did so with little to no oversight.
Many of these findings are listed in a five-page letter that Cardell Wright sent to the Justice Department in September 2023, a year before the report was released. Wright is the president of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and took notice of complaints about police brutality in Lexington while organizing there in 2020.
Wright hoped the investigation in Lexington could be an example for other small-town police forces that engage in unjust policing practices.
“Police officers in these smaller communities, they can sit and hide because they know that the state and national media are not focused on smaller areas unless there’s a natural disaster, so we don’t get the coverage that other areas do,” Wright said.
According to the report, nearly half of the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies, like Lexington, have fewer than 10 officers.
Wright last spoke with federal officials in January. Though he said communication has slowed due to the change in administration, he’s optimistic that the tide will continue to turn.
“I don’t feel like they’ll be able to contain civil rights issues for too long, because we’re at an inflection point, and we have to choose which way we want to go.”
Louisiana State Police
Some of the strongest opposition to the findings of a Biden-era Justice Department investigation came from state officials in Louisiana, who blasted the federal report released in January. The report concluded that state troopers routinely violated motorists’ constitutional rights.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry said the report diminished the work of the officers and noted that the investigation was conducted “under the previous administration.” Louisiana’s Attorney General Liz Murrill called the investigators political appointees “continuing to use the agency to advance a political agenda.”
Even police reform advocates questioned the timing of the report. It came two days after the Justice Department officially declined to seek criminal charges in the 2019 death of Ronald Greene, a 49-year-old Black motorist who died after a violent encounter with state police officers. Troopers attributed Greene’s death to a car accident, but body camera footage later showed they repeatedly punched him, dragged him by his ankle shackles, forced him to lay face down while handcuffed and ignored his pleas for help before he lost consciousness.
State Rep. C. Denise Marcelle, a Baton Rouge Democrat, thinks the lack of charges in Greene’s case is a slap in the face to his family. She’s also worried about what a halt in federal oversight will mean for the statewide agency of 1,300 employees.
“The question becomes: How does this influence the actions of the officers?” Marcelle said. “Because if the officers can say, ‘Hey look, we’re not going to be held accountable,’ then we’re going backward. They’ll think, ‘We can do what we want because there’s not going to be a DOJ around to hold us accountable.’”
In the Justice Department report, investigators acknowledged that state police officials began making some reforms in 2021, but found the measures failed to fix the unlawful conduct they uncovered, which included a lack of oversight of officers.
Louisville Metro Police Department
Hand-painted portraits of Breonna Taylor, a slight smile on her lips, black curls tucked behind one ear with a clip, still adorn memorial sites in Louisville nearly five years after police shot her to death during a botched raid at her apartment.
Taylor has been a face for American police reform since 2020, as well as the catalyst for the federal investigation that led to a consent decree between U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland and Louisville city leaders three months ago.
In January, lawyers for the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind the Project 2025 blueprint, blasted the consent decree as “lawless on multiple levels” in court records and demanded a federal judge reject it or wait until the Trump Justice Department could decide what to do.
Steven Schwartz, special counsel for the Center for Public Representation, is one of three attorneys who represent a group of former law enforcement leaders, mental health advocates and other human rights organizations pushing for police reform in Louisville. Schwartz said that in this case, it’s unclear whether the Trump-led Justice Department has room to change course.
“With a case that’s in the status of Louisville, where the parties have made a deal, but the court hasn’t approved it, it’s a little bit vague,” Schwartz said. “But generally, the principle or the rule is, once you have submitted a deal to the judge, you can ask them to change something, but it’s up to the judge to decide whether to do it.”
Justice Department officials in February asked U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton for a 30-day extension to answer questions before he decides whether to approve the legally binding agreement. Beaton has hesitated to sign off on the consent decree but has said he would be more willing to sign a less restrictive settlement.
Among the potential reforms, Louisville leaders and the Justice Department agreed that the city’s police force needs to: learn de-escalation tactics, establish a non-police outreach team to respond to mental health crises, and develop a recruitment program to attract a diverse set of officers.
Memphis Police Department
Two years ago, body camera footage of Memphis police officers beating motorist Tyre Nichols to death sparked national outrage and a federal investigation into claims of over-policing, racial discrimination and brutality throughout the ranks of the department of 1,900 officers.
Justice Department attorneys released the findings of their investigation in a scathing report about a month after the 2024 presidential election. Among other violations, they concluded that officers had targeted Black motorists, habitually used excessive force on handcuffed and restrained people they arrested, that supervisors almost never held officers accountable or punished them for breaking rules.
Like leaders in several other cities that experienced Justice Department intervention, Memphis Mayor Paul Young brushed off calls for a consent decree last year, saying they could work on reforms themselves. Police Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis immediately disbanded the Scorpion street crime unit whose members were involved in Nichols’ death. And after Nichols’ death, city officials passed an ordinance banning officers from citing minor traffic infractions to pull over motorists. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee later signed a bill blocking that move and attempts at local police reform statewide.
Memphis community organizer Keedran Franklin said he and other activists had anticipated the withdrawal of federal oversight if Trump won the election. That’s why he says activists began talking with city leaders last year about other initiatives, like a recently announced community-led police task force to implement the reforms the Justice Department had recommended.
Retired federal Judge Bernice Donald will lead the group, which includes Memphis pastors, community organizers, law professors, a mental health expert and a former top police official.
“In Memphis, you have to hold a good poker face, because there’s a lot of influence down here in different directions,” Franklin said of himself and other reform advocates. “We’re determined, DOJ or not, we’re good down here.”
Minneapolis Police Department
In early January, the Minneapolis Police Department entered into a federal consent decree with the Justice Department. The legally binding agreement would map out reforms within a police department that just five years earlier sparked worldwide protests for the murder of George Floyd. A federal judge just needed to sign off on the agreement.
“This agreement reflects what our community has asked for and what we know is necessary: real accountability and meaningful change,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in an announcement.
But in late February, a federal judge agreed to delay his review of the consent decree for 30 days, at the Justice Department’s request acting under the Trump administration. The delay has cast the future of the agreement into doubt.
“That is disturbing — to get to this point after everything that our community has been through and to not know whether or not a consent decree at the federal level will ultimately occur,” said Nekima Levy Armstrong, a local civil rights attorney and activist. “That, to me, is a failure of systems and those who were responsible for administering this particular process.”
Levy Armstrong said she’s disappointed that the consent decree took so long to finalize under the Biden administration. Still, she remains hopeful that Minneapolis police can undergo reforms without help from the federal government.
In 2023, the city entered into a court-enforceable agreement with the state’s Department of Human Rights, which conducted its own investigation into the police department following Floyd’s murder. That consent decree focuses on improving training, oversight, and data collection.
Levy Armstrong says one of her concerns is that the state consent decree may, like its federal counterpart, be up to the whims of whichever political party is in power. Minnesota is currently led by Democratic governor and former vice presidential candidate Tim Waltz.
“So that's part of why I think having the double layer of enforcement is so important,” Levy Armstrong said. “But in the meantime, I do believe that the consent decree through the [state] Department of Human Rights is helpful for achieving some of the reforms that we’re hoping for.”
Mount Vernon Police Department, New York
In the summer of 2020, officers with the Mount Vernon department ordered two women to strip. One was 65 years old. The other was 75. They’d been arrested at a traffic stop, after police claimed the women had made a drug transaction out of their car. But the women maintained that they’d just passed cash to a loved one to buy a lottery ticket. Inside the police station, while naked, the elderly women were ordered to bend over and cough for the cops. No contraband was found. Later, an internal investigation revealed that there was actually no basis for the traffic stop or the cavity search, which left one of the women feeling “humiliated” and “scared for [her] life.”
A former county prosecutor who noticed the police’s frequent strip searches called for the Justice Department to investigate. The federal investigators’ report described the search of the elderly women as an example of how Mount Vernon police consistently violated people's rights. The 2024 report summarizing the three-year investigation said officers frequently made arrests without probable cause, conducted unlawful cavity searches, and used excessive force.
Attorney Jarrett Adams has represented several people with claims of police misconduct who were impatiently waiting for the release of the Justice Department’s report, hoping it would lead to a consent decree. While the report’s findings were affirming, he said they were discouraged by the lack of future federal oversight.
Adams said his clients asked him who was going to implement rules and protections so officers wouldn’t violate people’s civil rights. “I'm a man of many words, but I really didn't have an answer for them.”
After the release of the report, Mount Vernon Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard said in a statement that she’s been committed to reform, pointing to the review of dozens of unprocessed complaints leftover from the last mayoral administration and the firing of three officers for unconstitutional policing.
But Adams warned that because the situation is so dire, the people of Mount Vernon expect and need more than what the mayor has done.
“They want to trust the system,” he said. “But it is important to get it right and implement changes, because if you don’t, you will forever keep the fracture between the community and policing.”
New York Police Department, Special Victims Division
Ellen Blain is disappointed. For years, the seasoned lawyer was one of the lead federal investigators examining constitutional rights violations in the New York Police Department’s Special Victims Division. Now, the findings of that investigation may not be made public.
The division — which served as inspiration for the long-running Law & Order TV spinoff — has faced criticism for years for how it handles cases involving sexualized violence, including failing to collect evidence and treating victims dismissively. A scathing report in 2018 by the city’s inspector general found that NYPD leadership financially neglected the division, failed to address staffing shortages and encouraged officers to deprioritize certain cases. The report cited a 2011 memo, for instance, that directed the unit to, “simply not investigate all misdemeanor sexual assaults.”
Survivors and advocates wrote letters to the Justice Department urging the agency to investigate. In 2022, the agency announced it would examine whether the division engaged in a pattern of “gender-biased policing,” which would violate victims’ constitutional rights.
Blain spent more than a decade working for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, whose jurisdiction includes New York City, before she left for private practice last fall. She says that by failing to properly investigate some sex crimes, police departments may be violating the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.
“The NYPD investigation was the first investigation that the DOJ had ever opened focused exclusively on that. It was not about excessive force, it was not about search and seizure, it was not about racial profiling, it was about gender — and it would’ve been a cutting-edge, first-of-its-kind wake-up call to [police departments] and cities around the country,” she said.
Nearly three years later, it’s unclear if the Trump administration will make the results of the investigation public or engage in oversight of the unit.
The depth of local oversight rests with Mayor Eric Adams, whose recent federal corruption charges may now go away under the Trump administration. A spokesperson for the mayor said in November that his administration plans to continue “meaningful and dramatic” reforms to the division.
But Blain says without a judge ordering the police department to comply with a consent decree, “there is no mechanism in place” requiring the department to improve.
Oklahoma City Police Department and state of Oklahoma
In early January, the Justice Department concluded a wide-ranging investigation into the state’s mental health care system in Oklahoma City, and the role police there played in responding to mental health crises. Federal officials found the state was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, by unnecessarily institutionalizing many Oklahoma City residents with mental illness, instead of providing them with adequate care in the community.
Investigators also found police were discriminating against people with behavioral health disabilities, by sending armed officers instead of trained providers to mental health calls. Those officers sometimes escalated the situation, the report said — in one instance, an officer specially trained in crisis intervention ended up using a Taser on an unarmed teenager in need of a psychiatric evaluation.
Even before the report’s release, Oklahoma officials were working to increase access to mental health care in the state. Some bristled at the Justice Department’s involvement in the issue, with Gov. Kevin Stitt calling it “another Biden administration overreach on their way out the door.” He claimed local efforts would only be hindered by “heavy-handed, out of touch mandates from the federal government.”
Officials in Oklahoma City say there’s enough consensus on changing their community’s response to mental health calls, regardless of federal oversight. The city has piloted an alternative crisis response team that will expand this year, and plans to embed a trained mental health professional in the 911 dispatch center.
“By the time that report came out, thankfully, enough of the leadership in the city had come to understand that we had to do these alternative approaches,” said Oklahoma City Councilmember James Cooper, who has been calling for an alternative crisis response program and other policing reforms since 2020. “I’m learning in these early weeks of the Trump administration to keep in mind that serenity prayer: ‘What is in my control?’ The federal government is not.”
Phoenix Police Department
It was still dark on a February morning in 2021, when Phoenix Police officers roused a man sleeping outside under a blanket. Prompted by officers, bodycam footage showed, the man walked down a narrow, rocky gap between two fences and sat on a curb. “Is there no end to the harassment of the homeless?” the man asked. “Is there no end to the trespassing, or the obstructing? When’s that going to end?” an officer replied. “Whenever y’all give us shelter,” another person detained on the curb said. The man in the video was cited with trespassing. That summer, the Justice Department announced its investigation into the police department for, among other reasons, its treatment of unhoused people.
Nearly three years later, the Justice Department released its report, which included the 2021 incident. Along with identifying patterns of excessive force and racial discrimination, for the first time in these kinds of federal investigations, the report documented a pattern of police misconduct when encountering unhoused people. Phoenix Police, the report said, violated the law when detaining, citing or arresting unhoused people, and disposed of their belongings without due process.
Ever since the investigation was announced, the city has resisted entering into a consent decree. In a statement following the Justice Department report’s release, city councilmember Ann O’Brien said, “Phoenix can and will make necessary changes — independently!” Other city leaders have echoed this sentiment.
Elizabeth Venable, co-founder of Fund for Empowerment, an organization whose mostly unhoused members’ testimonies helped focus the Justice Department’s investigation, said the probe and her organization’s federal lawsuit pushed the city to create shelter space beyond just substance use treatment or programs for people with severe mental health issues. Though space can still be scarce, now police can offer unhoused people a place in a shelter. “These placements did not exist before,” Venable said.
If the Trump administration steps away from civil rights investigations, pressure for reforms will have to come from unhoused people writing letters, speaking and demonstrating in front of the city council — the same actions that fostered the Justice Department investigation in the first place, Venable said.
At a December council meeting, Interim Police Chief Michael Sullivan presented public safety measures that some say demonstrate the city doesn’t need further oversight. These included seating a civilian police oversight board; creating or revising policies on use-of-force, body-worn cameras, free-speech, unattended and seized property and interactions with young people; and training on cultural competency and crisis intervention.
Still, Phoenix residents who have been pushing for durable police reforms continue to call for evidence that the department’s practices have changed.
Roland Harris, the father of Jacob Harris, a 19-year-old fatally shot by Phoenix police officers in 2019, told the city council this February that a reprieve from Justice Department oversight is temporary — while the Trump administration lasts. “So implement the policies, procedures and changes now, so in four years when they come back you guys can say ‘Hey look we truly don’t need you guys to intervene, we don’t need to sign a consent decree because we’ve already made these changes without your oversight,’” Harris said.
Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, Mississippi
After receiving a complaint about Black men staying at a White woman’s house in Rankin County, just east of Jackson, Mississippi, six law enforcement officers — who called themselves the “Goon Squad” — broke into the home and tortured two men.
The officers beat Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, tased them repeatedly, hurled racial slurs, assaulted them with a sex toy and poured alcohol and cooking grease on the men before shooting Jenkins in the mouth and nearly severing his tongue. The officers invented a cover story and planted evidence, framing Jenkins with aggravated assault and drug possession charges, according to a federal indictment.
The former officers pleaded guilty to both state and federal charges in August 2023 and are serving a combined total of more than 132 years in prison.
Nearly two years after the raid, the Justice Department announced in September that it would open a pattern or practice investigation into Rankin County and the Sheriff’s Department.
Rankin County NAACP President Angela English, who worked closely with the Justice Department to bring forth citizens’ complaints, said the status of the investigation is now unclear. Todd Gee, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, resigned in January, ahead of the president’s inauguration. The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.
However, English said, the work must continue, federal investigation or not. She said she is still fielding complaints about incidents of brutality at the hands of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department.
“Our mission remains the same, and that is to seek justice for those for whom justice has been denied,” English said.
Allegations against the department revealed a harrowing and pervasive culture of abuse that spans decades. Christian Dedmon, the deputy serving the longest sentence, recently told Mississippi Today how he and other deputies routinely entered houses without warrants, falsified reports, and used violence and humiliation to force information from suspects. An investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times detailed nearly two decades and more than a dozen incidents of abuse by the sheriff’s department.
Local activists are calling for review of “all the cases that were ever touched by these rogue lawmen,” English said. “We are sure that there are people who are probably still serving time for some of these atrocities that the Goon Squad perpetrated and they are serving time and they are innocent.”
Trenton Police Department, New Jersey
Maati Sekmet Ra has always thought of Trenton, New Jersey’s seven square mile state capital, as “a small city with big city problems.”
Chief among the problems is a police department where officers operated with impunity, using excessive force and unlawfully stopping and arresting motorists and pedestrians alike, according to a Justice Department investigation released in November. Federal investigators also outlined a “stats” driven culture within the police department, which encouraged officers to make as many stops and arrests as possible.
Ra, co-founder of the Trenton Anti-Violence Coalition, thinks a lack of federal oversight would undo years of progress in police reform in the city. She also wonders what will happen to federally funded programs which encourage police accountability.
“Our position is that you can’t talk about the problem of violence in our communities, or violence in Black and brown communities, without addressing the problem of police violence,” Ra told The Marshall Project in late February, adding she was anticipating city leaders’ promise to unveil their own plan for police reform following the federal probe.
The next day, Mayor Reed Gusciora and Police Director Steven Wilson vowed to continue fixing the police department’s problems. Wilson said he had already started making changes to the police department before the Justice Department released the investigation findings.
Wilson said he dismantled two tactical units at the center of police brutality claims, telling ABC 6 Philadelphia and other outlets that he and city leaders will continue working on a slate of 20 reforms to police practices with or without federal oversight. Wilson also said the federal investigation failed to note that his office had punished officers who committed violations.
Worcester Police Department, Massachusetts
In December 2024, the Justice Department found police in the central Massachusetts city had frequently used excessive force, ranging from Tasers to police dogs, including on people in mental health crises. Most notably, investigators also found multiple officers “engaging in sexual contact while undercover” and several who were accused of sexually assaulting women and threatening them with arrest.
Officials denied many of the report’s findings. An attorney for the city said it was “riddled with factual inaccuracies” and criticized its use of anonymous sources. The city’s police chief also challenged the report, saying it wasn’t sufficiently corroborated.
More recently, the police department announced that it would pursue several of the recommended reforms outlined in the report, even without a binding consent decree. Those include revising their K-9 policy, increasing crisis intervention training, and changing their approach to prostitution and sexual assault investigations.
Attorneys who have sued Worcester police over misconduct are still skeptical that the department will make significant changes without federal pressure. “I haven’t seen any changes,” attorney Joseph Hennessey said in early March. “And with this new Trump administration order, I don’t anticipate any.”
Others say the Justice Department findings may help bring a cultural change in the city, and open the eyes of judges and juries.
“I think it has an impact because for the first time the genie is out of the bottle,” said attorney Hector Piñeiro, who has litigated police misconduct cases in Worcester since 1993. “It’s caused a tremendous amount of outrage with the public here. It’s important for the court system to understand that these are systemic issues and not just isolated events.”
