Under President Trump, is Minneapolis’ pending consent decree with the DOJ dead?

After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis was poised to become the first city in the nation with its police department overseen by both state and federal consent decrees prescribing sweeping, court-enforceable reforms. But as former President Donald Trump prepares his return to the White House, it’s possible the federal consent decree will never come to pass.

The Trump administration has opposed consent decrees in the past, denouncing reform efforts as a “war on police” and federal overreach into the business of local law enforcement agencies.

“There is every indication that Trump will be as hostile to investigations of law enforcement agencies this time as he was last time — if not more hostile,” said Christy Lopez, a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division who negotiated consent decrees with several American cities, including Ferguson, Mo.

A consent decree is one of the federal government’s most aggressive tools for reining in police departments it finds to be systemically violating the U.S. Constitution. They are typically launched in the aftermath of a high-profile incident.

With authority passed by Congress in response to the 1991 Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King, settlement agreements are enforceable by the courts and overseen by a monitor. They list onerous and wide-ranging reforms that can last longer than a decade and cost tens of millions to enforce, experts say, but have proved to reduce police brutality in some cities.

President Joe Biden’s DOJ launched 12 federal probes into troubled police departments that remain pending. Minneapolis is one of four cities — along with Louisville, Phoenix and Lexington, Miss. — where the Justice Department found systemic misconduct but has yet to finalize a plan for solutions. If the city fails to achieve a legally binding settlement with the DOJ before Trump takes office on Jan. 20, the president-elect is expected to quash the process.

In Minneapolis, leaders say they are determined to push forward.

“We haven’t taken our foot off the gas since we started, and I have no intention of taking the foot off the gas,” City Attorney Kristyn Anderson said in an interview Tuesday. “I’m still hopeful we’re gonna be able to land the plane on this one.”

Two months after Trump assumed his first term in office, then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a review of all DOJ activities — including “contemplated consent decrees” — to ensure they promoted the new administration’s principles of supporting law enforcement.

Sessions’ March 2017 memo took immediate effect in the city of Chicago, which had been in the middle of talks with President Barack Obama’s DOJ following the 2014 murder of teenager Laquan McDonald by Chicago police. Having found a police culture of excessive violence against minorities, the Justice Department entered an “agreement in principle” with the city of Chicago to reach a consent decree.

But it wasn’t complete by the time Trump became president, and his administration ended negotiations with the city of Chicago. Then-Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan stepped into the void left by the Justice Department, and as a result Chicago is now operating under a mandated reform process to which the state of Illinois, rather than the federal government, is the opposing party.

“It was not as simple and straightforward as it might have been with a Department of Justice decree, but the only way to create a pathway to change and a pathway to reform of [the Chicago Police Department] was to have the state step in, given the unwillingness of the feds to do anything,” said Ed Yohnka, spokesman of the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union.

Given Chicago’s example, Yohnka said Minneapolis should be prepared for the possibility that it will not have a federal consent decree either.

Learning from Madigan in Chicago, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigated the Minneapolis Police Department’s patterns and practices following Floyd’s murder in a process separate from that of the Justice Department. Finding that the Minneapolis police engaged in race discrimination in violation of the state’s Human Rights Act, MDHR negotiated its own settlement agreement with the city of Minneapolis. It was enacted in July 2023 by Hennepin County Judge Karen Janisch.

The state consent decree cannot be undone by the Trump administration.

“What’s important is that we have the mechanism in place with this consent decree to do the work, no matter who the president is,” said MDHR Commissioner Rebecca Lucero, heralding Minnesota’s strong civil rights protections. “With or without the Department of Justice, that work goes on.”

The MDHR legal agreement is expected to last at least four years. The process is being overseen by Effective Law Enforcement for All (ELEFA), a nonprofit organization selected in February to serve as independent evaluator for both consent decrees, should the federal one ever materialize.

MDHR is not involved in pending negotiations between Minneapolis and the DOJ.

The Justice Department’s June 2023 report on the Minneapolis Police Department concluded that MPD used unjustified deadly force, unlawfully discriminated against Black and Native American people in particular, violated citizens’ free speech rights and at times caused trauma or death when responding to behavioral health crises in violation of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

The city and Justice Department were expected to next negotiate reforms, but there have been no public updates on their progress in the past year and a half.

Formal talks did not begin until late June, Anderson explained, when the DOJ submitted a “lengthy” draft consent decree to the city for feedback — nearly a year after their findings report was issued. No rationale was provided for the delay, she said.

According to Anderson, the parties have been working in earnest since this summer, meeting once every three to four weeks and remaining in constant contact.

Frey allocated $16 million in 2024 and $11 million in 2025 to manage reforms expected to result from both state and federal consent decrees, requiring dozens of new employees. Last year, MPD launched an Implementation Unit, dedicated to improving data collection and achieving compliance.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined comment for this story.

Skepticism remains among members of the public who have been awaiting progress on the federal consent decree.

Last month, activists interrupted a Minneapolis City Council meeting to demand Police Chief Brian O’Hara’s firing after the department failed to act on multiple arrest warrants for a south Minneapolis man who was known for terrorizing his Black neighbors, and allegedly shooting one in the neck. O’Hara is under scrutiny for failing to protect the victim, Davis Moturi. O’Hara, a former high-ranking official from New Jersey, had been hired in part because of his prior experience with a consent decree in Newark.

Lawyer Stacey Gurian-Sherman of the group Minneapolis for a Better Police Contract forecast that if Trump won the presidential election, city officials would celebrate the termination of federal consent decree negotiations.

“If [Frey] was sincere, he would be sending out ... something that reassures the public that he is acting in good faith,” Gurian-Sherman said in an interview. “This has led to justified speculation that Mayor Frey has purposely stalemated the negotiations in the hopes that Trump would come in and eviscerate the potential lawsuit against the city.”

She recounted the city’s hiring of private law firm Jones Day, which pushed back against the state’s findings of race discrimination by the police department, resulting in weeks of deadlock in negotiations over the eventual MDHR settlement.

In a joint interview with Anderson and Community Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette, Frey vehemently denied attempting to slow-walk the process and insisted his commitment to achieving federal oversight was unwavering.

“It’s not just lip service of investments we’re going to make,” he said. “We’ve made those investments. They’re in the budget. We’ve hired out personnel to do the work.”

When pressed on why he welcomes two consent decrees, Barnette asked: “Why wouldn’t we want to be better?”

“We’ve lost the trust of the community. We gotta get it back,” he said in the interview. “We can’t be afraid of a consent decree.”

Cities unable to formalize federal agreements prior to Trump taking office may follow the Illinois and Minnesota examples, seeking out state oversight as a workaround, said Lopez, the former federal litigator. Others may see his administration as a welcome out to avoid the laborious legal process altogether.

Lopez said if the city of Minneapolis wanted it: “I am certain they’ll be able to reach an agreement with the Department of Justice.”