The Minneapolis City Council unanimously voted on Monday to overhaul its police department to address a pattern of systemic abuses, as part of an agreement with the Department of Justice.
Lawyers from the Department of Justice and the city, where George Floyd was killed in 2020 by a police officer, have raced in recent weeks to finalize terms of the deal, known as a consent decree, before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office. The previous Trump administration opposed the use of consent decrees, and the fate of nearly a dozen other federal investigations into American police departments is uncertain.
Under the deal approved on Monday, the Minneapolis department promised to closely track and investigate allegations of police misconduct, rein in the use of force, and improve officer training.
“This agreement reflects what our community has asked for and what we know is necessary: real accountability and meaningful change,” Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said in a statement.
Federal oversight, the strongest tool available to overhaul police departments with histories of abuse, begins with an exhaustive civil rights investigation and a report of findings. Cities then usually agree to negotiate a consent decree, a court-enforced oversight agreement, in order to avoid a federal lawsuit.
The Minneapolis decree was set in motion in the summer of 2023 after the Department of Justice issued a report accusing the city’s police department of routinely discriminating against Black and Native American residents, of needlessly using deadly force and of violating the First Amendment rights of protesters and journalists.
City officials and lawyers from the Justice Department said they intended to present the deal to a federal judge, who will be responsible for overseeing its implementation.
During Mr. Trump’s first term in the White House, the Justice Department rejected such decrees, coming out in opposition to deals in Chicago and Baltimore and refraining from entering new ones. More recently, during a campaign rally last year, Mr. Trump said that in order to crack down on crime, the police should be allowed to be “extraordinarily rough,” and he spoke about the possibility of letting officers loose from constraints during “one really violent day.”
Officials in Minneapolis said they would remain committed to lasting change in the city’s police department, even if the Trump administration were to walk away from federal consent decrees. Several months before the Department of Justice report was issued, the city agreed to a policing overhaul as part of an agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.
Consent decrees were pursued aggressively under President Barack Obama, whose administration entered into 15 of the decrees in a time of a growing public outcry over police abuses.
After Mr. Trump’s administration steered away from such decrees, the Justice Department under the Biden administration sought to bring them back, launching a dozen civil rights investigations into police departments.
But the Biden administration has been slow to bring those efforts to a resolution, in some cases letting years elapse. The Justice Department’s civil rights division has released a flurry of investigative findings in recent weeks, covering cities like Memphis, where the department found excessive force and racial discrimination; Mount Vernon, N.Y., where it found illegal arrests and strip searches; and Oklahoma City, where it found chronic mistreatment of people with behavioral disabilities by the police.
Some cities, like Memphis and Phoenix, which was the subject of an investigation after an extraordinarily high number of shootings by the police, have balked at entering into oversight agreements. The agreements usually call for changes in a number of aspects of a police department’s operations, training, policies and discipline, and can take a decade to complete.
The Biden administration is currently enforcing 15 consent decrees reached under previous administrations, but has completed only one other new one besides Minneapolis, in Louisville, Ky.
Those agreements and the department’s remaining investigations will be handed over to the Trump administration.
Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.
