Recent weeks have provided another powerful, tragic reminder that U.S. police departments are not about providing any kind of equal justice or keeping people safe—at least, not if they’re Black. But under Donald Trump and his attorneys general, the Justice Department has not been interested in doing the first thing to fix that.
The Department of Justice has the power to investigate entire police departments for patterns of unconstitutional policing practices. But while there were 12 such investigations during George W. Bush’s first term in the White House and 15 during Barack Obama’s first term, there has been just one during Trump’s.
“It's an abdication of their responsibility,” former Obama Justice Department official Emily Gunston told CNN. Then again, abdication of responsibility is a top activity for the Trump administration, and doubly or triply so when civil rights for anyone but evangelical business owners are involved.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) should “examine the Minneapolis Police Department from top to bottom, every detail, every practice, every policy, every record of abuse of its power to use force, every complaint that has ever been launched against it," another former DOJ prosecutor said. “But it isn't going to do that.”
What will happen instead of a broad investigation into the practices and patterns of the Minneapolis or Louisville police departments following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—or that of Glynn County, Georgia, after its failure to prosecute the killers of Ahmaud Arbery until public outrage forced the issue—is that Trump’s DOJ will investigate much more narrowly, looking to assign responsibility to individuals, if at all, rather than to the systems and structures that tell individual officers they can get away with racist violence.
Minneapolis police have used the same tactic that killed George Floyd 44 times in five years to the point where they rendered people unconscious—60% of them Black. That’s the kind of pattern a Justice Department that cared about justice might want to look into, at least after it resulted in a high-profile killing. But under Trump, not only have such investigations not happened—his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, put into place a policy that makes it more difficult for prosecutors to exercise oversight over police departments through the use of consent decrees, and current Attorney General William Barr has continued the policy. Sessions even called off a consent decree agreed to during the Obama administration by the DOJ and Chicago following the police killing of Laquan McDonald. (The Illinois attorney general did ultimately get a consent decree against Chicago despite Sessions’ objections.)
Donald Trump is not interested in any of that. This is a man who's repeatedly encouraged law enforcement to act with more brutality. His Justice Department is only replicating that contempt for Black lives.