The clock is ticking for the Justice Department and federal prosecutors trying to resolve civil rights investigations and complaints against law enforcement agencies accused of mistreating Black and brown communities.
This form of accountability can produce a court-ordered agreement — a consent decree — to enforce departments to overhaul their policing practices that Black Americans have been protesting to end for decades.
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, the Justice Department’s focus could shift, as his allies have formulated and distributed a plan, called Project 2025, that advocates eliminating those investigations.
In the final days of President Joe Biden’s administration, federal prosecutors are racing to complete and release the findings of those investigations.
Since Trump’s victory, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has announced the conclusion of investigations into four police departments: Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Mount Vernon, New York. In each case, federal investigators found there was credible evidence of systemic misconduct within those departments and their jurisdictions.
The division also announced the conclusion of their federal oversight of two separate consent decrees with the Yonkers, New York, and Baltimore police departments. Each consent decree was enforced for eight years.
Four more investigations, including the Rankin County, Mississippi, “Goon Squad” case, are still in progress, but it’s not clear whether the probes will be completed before Trump takes office.
The Civil Rights Division is run by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, the first Black woman to lead it.
“Ensuring lawful, non-discriminatory, transparent and effective policing is a top priority for the Justice Department,” said Clarke in remarks following the release of the findings against the Memphis police department.
“We stand ready to continue working with the city,” she said. “The people of Memphis deserve fair, transparent, non-discriminatory constitutional policing — nothing less.”
If the Trump administration eliminates the investigations, the courts will become the primary venue where the victims of police misconduct can air their complaints. But legal experts said it is harder to achieve systemic reform through the courts.
George White, a scholar of race and public policy at the City University of New York at York College, said eliminating the Civil Rights Division’s investigations would be a significant step backward in the quest for greater equity.
“If you don’t have that kind of external pressure in place to make sure that these actors are actually doing the right thing — creating equity, and creating fairness — they’re not going to do it,” said White, the interim dean of the college’s School of Arts and Sciences. He added that he believes there are going to be a lot of communities that are “left adrift for the next four years, or until we get a completely different administration in place.”
Federal prosecutors can be “a bulwark against the hostility”
Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department launched a dozen pattern or practice investigations into law enforcement agencies across the country, including Phoenix, Minneapolis, and Louisville, Kentucky. Two of those investigations stemmed from police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Another one, in Memphis, came after the murder convictions of six Black former police officers for the January 2023 beating death of Tyre Nichols after a traffic stop.
In Black communities, fatal police encounters continue to rise. An average of about 250 Black people have been killed in encounters with the police in each year since 2021, according to an analysis by the Mapping Police Violence website.
Although federal prosecutors conduct their work independently of the White House, “it’s particularly difficult to do that when the administration is quite hostile to the work that you’re doing,” said Christy Lopez, a former deputy chief in the special litigation section of the Civil Rights Division who now teaches at Georgetown Law.
Lopez said the expected antipathy of the Trump administration to the Justice Department’s work might prompt some prosecutors to continue working in the department while he is in office.
Those prosecutors may hope to be “a bulwark against the hostility and the undermining of the work that they’ve invested in,” Lopez said, adding that, “What you often hear is, ‘I’m not going to leave and clear a seat for somebody who’s actually hostile to this work to come in.’”
One of the four investigations that may not be completed before Trump takes office is an investigation into Rankin County that only launched three months ago. Six white law enforcement officers from two separate departments were convicted of abuse and assault, after they tortured Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker, two Black men, who told Capital B about their nearly two-hour ordeal.
In addition to opening and closing investigations, federal officials have been actively monitoring 18 pattern or practice investigation settlements, according to information provided to Capital B by the Justice Department.
“A call to arms” to U.S. attorneys
During Trump’s first term, federal officials launched and released their findings in only one pattern or practice investigation that looked into alleged misconduct. This investigation focused on the Springfield, Massachusetts, Police Department in 2018. Before Trump’s first Attorney General Jeff Sessions left office, he urged limiting the use of consent decrees.
After the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Taylor, and Floyd in 2020, Trump did not direct Sessions’ replacement, William Barr, to investigate the police departments or local government agencies involved.
Trump has been vetting replacements for Garland, Clarke, and their teams. One candidate is Harmeet Dhillon, a conservative and Trump loyalist, that has raised concern from advocacy leaders.
White said that in the interests of fairness and equality, it’s essential that local federal prosecutors continue their efforts to investigate allegations of misconduct.
“We really do need to issue a call to arms to a number of U.S. attorneys around the country to continue to do pattern and practice investigations,” White said, adding, “Partly because I do think that leadership is going to completely de-emphasize that, so they’re going to have to work on their own.”
In response to the dearth of pattern or practice investigations during the first Trump administration, U.S. attorneys in local Justice Departments — Illinois, California, and Colorado — were involved in their own investigations of local police departments. It doesn’t matter whether the pattern or practice investigations are launched locally or in Washington, D.C.
If the Trump administration stops conducting the investigations all together in his second term, Lopez said that anyone can request injunctive relief — which, in a police-related case, is asking the court to stop law enforcement from engaging in certain patterns of discriminatory behavior.
“You can often get accountability that’s very meaningful to the individuals who are harmed by bringing a civil suit for money damages,” Lopez said.
Taylor’s family filed a civil lawsuit against the city of Louisville, Louisville Metro Police, and officers involved in her March 2020 shooting death while executing a no-knock warrant. Among the terms of the settlement was an agreement from the department to limit the use of no-knock warrants.
However, achieving reform through civil litigation as a private citizen can be challenging because of a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that raised the bar for who can request such reforms through a civil lawsuit. In that case, a police chokehold survivor sought to end the practice in Los Angeles, but was denied.
The bigger deterrent against police misconduct is when a department, city, or county gets hit with multiple multimillion-dollar police brutality settlements, Lopez said. But those dollars are usually paid out by insurance companies, police unions, city budgets, and ultimately taxpayers. And police officers are often shielded by qualified immunity, where they cannot be held personally liable for what occurs while they’re on the job.
Jenkins and Parker have filed a federal lawsuit demanding $400 million in damages in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.
The Justice Department has been conducting pattern or practice investigations into police misconduct since 1995.
It was an authority the Justice Department gained after public outrage over the March 1991 beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist in Los Angeles, by four white police officers. Riots ensued around the country, prompting federal prosecutors, led by Barr in 1992, to bring federal civil rights charges against the officers. Two of the officers were later convicted.
When the Justice Department conducts an investigation, the Civil Rights Division releases public reports of their findings. Then, if an agreement is reached, the parties negotiate the terms of a consent decree. And, depending on the terms, a federal judge or court-appointed monitor is assigned to investigate the agency.
The longer they’re not in compliance, the longer the monitor stays in place.
White said, “So much of the kind of neoconservative movement that we see really is about erasure and erasing people, erasing histories.”
He added: “And so, it remains very, very important, vitally important, to have really good data and information to demonstrate that racism is still alive and well in this country, sexism is still alive and well, and it has real world impacts.”