During the latter days of the Biden administration, the Department of Justice (DOJ) decided to go after several police departments.
Well, the Trump administration just made its move to end those suits, and liberals are not happy at all.
In September 2024, with a mere four months left in office, Biden decided to go to war with a couple of police departments, alleging they were depriving people of their rights.
A complaint was filed against the city and the police department of Lexington, Mississippi.
At the time, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland stated, “Today’s findings show that the Lexington Police Department abandoned its sacred position of trust in the community by routinely violating the constitutional rights of those it was sworn to protect.
“The Justice Department’s investigation uncovered that Lexington police officers have engaged in a pattern or practice of discriminating against the city’s Black residents, used excessive force, and retaliated against those who criticize them.”
Earlier this month, the Trump administration made it known that it was looking to pull these lawsuits, and that, of course, did not make anyone on the left very happy.
A former Connecticut Democrat stated, “Where these have been imposed, in almost every case the end result was better policing, less crime and fewer lawsuits against cities and towns. The bottom line is these actually help, and not hurt, police departments.”
Ben Crump, the noted civil rights attorney who is representing a family in a Memphis case against the police, responded, "This decision is a slap in the face to the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tyre Nichols, and to every community that has endured the trauma of police violence and the false promises of accountability.
"These consent decrees and investigations were not symbolic gestures. They were lifelines for communities crying out for change, rooted in years of organizing, suffering and advocacy."
As far as the Trump administration is concerned, these cases relied on “faulty theories” and were hurting morale, so it just made its move to have the cases dismissed with prejudice so they cannot be brought again.
Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon stated, "In short, these sweeping consent decrees would have imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.
"Overbroad police consent decrees divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti- police agenda. Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division’s failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees."
The suits by Biden really did appear to be a play to pander for votes, so I really don’t have a problem with the Trump administration making a move to dismiss them. I have always believed that Democrats have overplayed this card, especially when you consider there are hundreds of thousands of arrests in this country every day, and we see a “bad apple” case only a handful of times every year. I am far more worried about the police being attacked than the narrative that Democrats are pitching on this front.
