Minneapolis officials' pledge to keep terms of federal consent decree comes with accountability worry

Elected officials in Minneapolis say they won’t let President Donald Trump explode five years of police reform efforts.

After the Justice Department asked a judge to dissolve the Police Department’s consent decree this week, Mayor Jacob Frey gathered with police and City Council leadership in a unified pledge to continue to enact the changes, point by point, laid out in the agreement.

“We‘re doing it anyway,” Frey said Wednesday.

But in losing the federal decree, the city would also lose a critical layer of accountability.

There will be no court-enforceable agreement from the federal government mandating the changes, no federally appointed watchdog and no independent progress reports to the public. Also lost is the authority of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, which has built expertise over the past 30 years in implementing consent decrees in cities across America.

“I’m deeply concerned,” said Yohuru Williams, founding director of the University of St. Thomas’ Racial Justice Initiative. Williams lauded the city’s reform efforts over the past few years, but he said the decree is critical to making sure the new policies stick, and new leaders in City Hall could later threaten to undo that progress if priorities shift.

“I worry about the accountability piece,” Williams said. “Community was already concerned about long-term accountability and that’s what those consent decrees promised. We‘ve just lost a huge piece of that.”

For a lesson in how much an election can change culture, look no further than the arc of the federal decree.

Two years ago, under the Biden administration, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland traveled to Minneapolis to announce the blistering results of a federal investigation into the Police Department, prompted by the 2020 murder of George Floyd. In committing to negotiations with city officials, Garland said the robust civil rights probe had found that what happened to Floyd was part of a pattern of unconstitutional policing that went far deeper than the officers directly involved.

Now, under Trump’s leadership, Justice Department officials say federal oversight is not necessary, describing consent decrees in Minneapolis and other cities as “anti-police.”

“Up is down,” remarked Minneapolis City Attorney Kristyn Anderson this week.

Williams said the Trump administration’s decision to wait until just before the anniversary of Floyd’s killing to make the announcement is “salt in the wound.”

“If Minneapolitans were hoping for a tragedy with a happy ending, the way this is shaping up right now is there is no happy ending. It’s just the work,” he said. “The question is: Who is going to stay in the work?”

Kristen Clarke, a former assistant attorney general who stood next to Garland two years ago as he announced the department’s civil rights findings, said people across Minneapolis shared harrowing stories of violent police encounters during the investigation, and officers told of performing their duties under tremendous strain.

“The consent decree negotiated would put the city on the path to reform and help institute a 21st-century policing approach that benefits everyone — law enforcement and community members alike," Clarke told the Minnesota Star Tribune in an interview this week.

As the city moves forward, leadership emphasized the reforms will still be guided by another agreement, similar to a consent decree, with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.

Earlier this week, Effective Law Enforcement for All (ELEFA), the monitor for that agreement released a report showing police made significant progress toward implementing reforms, including reducing a backlog of complaints, though the department did not meet all its goals and some changes are moving slower than expected. Mayor Jacob Frey said this week that ELEFA will be asked to oversee implementation of the terms of the federal decree, “just as we have planned.”

But city leaders acknowledge the state agreement doesn’t cover everything in the federal decree, and the loss of the Justice Department’s guidance is significant.

“There is benefit to a federal court having oversight, and that’s why the Department of Justice has these provisions in federal court,” Anderson said at a news conference in February on police reforms. “So there is great value to it.”

Clarke said she was encouraged to hear Frey’s pledge to continue the work without the formal decree.

Since Floyd’s murder five years ago, the city has begun to implement a series of changes to its system of public safety. These include policy updates, such as new procedure manual language on an officer’s duty to intervene in and report a co-worker’s unreasonable force, bans on chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles, new body camera requirements and changes to the field training program.

The city also voted to restructure into a system that gives the mayor more authority over the Police Department, and Frey created a new Office of Community Safety to oversee emergency departments. In 2021, the city announced a prohibition on pretextual stops — the use of minor traffic or equipment violations as a legal way for police to pull over drivers they wish to investigate. Earlier this week, the city said it would appoint two civilians to high-ranking positions in the Police Department focused on officer conduct and rebuilding community trust.

The city also is relying more on nonpolice resources, increasing funding to the Neighborhood Safety Office, which takes a public health approach to addressing safety, from $2.7 million in 2020 to $23 million last year. The city has diverted thousands of emergency calls to behavioral health professionals and other nonpolice emergency responders.

“It’s always good to have judicial supervision,” said Barry Friedman, founding director of the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project, which is helping the city implement the call diversion program. “But the truth is in this case the city is taking this extremely seriously and the state is as well, so I have some degree of confidence that these necessary improvements are going to happen even in the absence of the federal government.”

But the city is still early in its long-haul plan for remaking the Police Department.

It will be years before there is enough evidence to judge the effects of the new policies and whether they led to meaningful culture change, said Michelle Phelps, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and author of “The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America.”

“I’m not super optimistic that we're going to see massive transformation in department policy and practices overnight,” she said. “This is a long, slow process.”

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