On the day a white police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man, in May 2020, sparking nationwide outrage and focusing attention on police misconduct, the practices of numerous law enforcement agencies in the United States had already been under scrutiny.

Since 1994, when President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in the aftermath of the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division has been empowered to investigate and sue police departments to root out unconstitutional practices such as excessive force and racial profiling. Many of those investigations ended up in consent decrees — court-enforced agreements between the federal government and local police departments — aimed at correcting and rooting out the problems.

Legal experts, civil rights attorneys, and former law enforcement officials disagree on the effectiveness of consent decrees, with some saying they have helped reduce excessive force and racial profiling, and others arguing they are costly and slow-moving.

This debate over consent decrees is at the heart of a dramatic policy change. As the Trump administration has made clear through a pair of January memos that it is abandoning consent decrees altogether, experts say a key tool for holding law enforcement accountable will now be missing, and some say the responsibility will shift to the states and civil rights plaintiffs.

"Trump's abandonment of police reform immediately puts people at risk of police abuse," said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, a civil rights lawyer who is deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Criminal Law Reform Project. "When you turn your back on evidence of rampant police misconduct, you encourage more misconduct."

Puneet Cheema, a former trial attorney in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division who now manages the Legal Defense Fund's Justice in Public Safety Project, said the Trump administration's shift in policy means there will be no remedies from the federal government when law enforcement agencies violate the constitutional rights of people they encounter.

"It's also dangerous, because it sends a signal to law enforcement that there's one less lever of accountability," she said.

While the federal government has the resources to investigate only a limited number of law enforcement agencies from among the about 17,500 existing across the country, Cheema said each case has a ripple effect of persuading others to proactively change their policies, for instance by improving police officer training or curtailing programs that infringe on people's rights.

With the federal government out of the picture, that form of "soft power," as she called it, is no longer there.

"Now, when you know there's a clear signal that there will be no federal oversight, it could also embolden bad actors that are able to fly off the radar, like sheriffs in small towns that they think they can evade media attention, or officers that know their sergeants will be less worried and more lax about strict compliance," Cheema said.

The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.

Consent Decrees: What Are They?

King, a Black man, became a symbol of police brutality in March 1991 when he was kicked, hit with batons, and shocked with a stun gun by four Los Angeles Police Department officers while a group of other officers watched. The attack was caught on video and broadcast all over the world. His case led to measures in the 1994 crime bill that gave the DOJ the power to investigate police departments and seek injunctive relief from courts in the form of consent decrees that have shaped police reform efforts ever since.

DOJ investigations focus on alleged patterns of misconduct in response to complaints from individual citizens, police reform advocates and elected leaders, sometimes after high-profile incidents make the news. If violations are found, a consent decree is negotiated. When a court approves a consent decree, it also appoints independent monitors tasked with ensuring that the law enforcement agency involved complies with terms of the agreement.

Experts note that consent decrees are subject to political cycles. Democratic administrations tend to support them, while Republican administrations tend to reject them, a pattern that scholars say largely reflects partisan feelings about police accountability.

Ayesha Bell Hardaway, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, said that early consent decrees like the one entered in Pittsburgh in 1997 were limited in scope. The George W. Bush administration, meanwhile, shifted from consent decrees to memoranda of understanding, agreements that are not enforced by courts and therefore have a more limited effect.

It wasn't until the Obama administration that consent decrees became a powerful tool of oversight, particularly after the police killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

Over two terms, the Obama DOJ opened 25 investigations of state or local police agencies​. Fourteen of those investigations ended with consent decrees, some with police departments in major cities, including Seattle, New Orleans, Cleveland, Newark, New Jersey, and Ferguson.

In contrast, the succeeding Trump administration sharply curtailed this effort, initiating only one investigation involving the narcotics unit of the police department in Springfield, Massachusetts, without entering any agreements.

Former President Joe Biden revived the DOJ Civil Rights Division's mission. During his administration, the DOJ opened 12 police misconduct investigations. In 11 of those, the DOJ issued reports detailing systemic police misconduct including abuse and racial targeting.

But the reports do not have legal consequences on their own unless followed by a consent decree or another form of legally binding action. Only two probes initiated during Biden's presidency have yielded consent decrees. They involve police departments in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, and Louisville, Kentucky, where Breonna Taylor, a Black woman, was killed by police during a raid inside a home in March 2020.

Ed Chung, a former federal prosecutor and official in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division who now serves as vice president of initiatives at the Vera Institute of Justice, said that since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump has made clear his intention not to interfere with the way police departments operate.

Chung contrasted the administration's recent actions with efforts by the first Trump DOJ to show some degree of interest in police oversight, particularly in 2020 following Floyd's killing. For example, Chung said the first Trump administration issued a report in which a commission made up of police chiefs and officials acknowledged the limitations of policing in providing public safety. At the time, Trump also issued an executive order supporting the creation of a database listing officers who committed misconduct.

"At the end of the first term, there was at least some acknowledgment that police accountability is necessary," Chung said. "In his second term, all of that is gone. He has taken away police accountability from any of the policy considerations that he has."

The Immediate Impact of DOJ's Withdrawal

Experts say that the Trump administration's decision to stop enforcing consent decrees will most directly impact agreements in Louisville and Minneapolis, which have been filed but not yet entered into force by a court.

Cheema said the administration could walk away from those agreements, and although officials in Louisville and Minneapolis claim they will continue reforms, without court enforcement there's no guarantee they will follow through. Courts could decide to approve the agreements anyway, but that's unlikely.

"If the courts let the DOJ withdraw, then it's likely that the DOJ would simply abandon those agreements," she said.

Hardaway, who served for nine years in the independent monitoring team overseeing a consent decree between the DOJ and the Cleveland Police Department, noted that the first Trump administration already attempted to renege Obama-era consent decrees in cities like Chicago and Baltimore. While the Trump DOJ succeeded in pulling out of the former, the Baltimore decree survived, but only after a court rejected the DOJ's request to halt it.

"This isn't the first time we've seen it," Hardaway said of the administration's approach.

Cheema said that agreements that are already being monitored by courts, including those in Baltimore and Cleveland, could ultimately be undermined from reduced DOJ resources, potentially delaying compliance and prolonging court oversight.

Christy E. Lopez, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., who led investigations into several law enforcement agencies as a special litigation chief in the Obama DOJ's Civil Rights Division, said the Trump administration's policy on consent decrees ignores findings of constitutional violations involving several police departments in America, including in large cities like Chicago and Memphis.

"Here are some pretty credible findings that police are systematically violating people's rights, and there's no plan to correct this," she said.

Columbia Law School professor Jeffrey A. Fagan, a leading expert on policing, said the Trump administration's pivot provides a "natural experiment" that will show if police departments that have been forced to reform under consent decrees will continue to comply with constitutional requirements.

"What happens when you stop these reforms right in the middle? Do the police departments revert back to their bad behaviors?" he said.

The experience of Subodh Chandra, a civil rights attorney who served as Cleveland's law director from 2002 to 2005 and negotiated the first consent decree with the DOJ involving the city's Division of Police, could provide an answer.

"Once it expired, the division went back to its terrible ways," he said. "They rescinded many of the better policies and procedures that we had put in place and prior consent decree which my department had been involved in developing."

After moving into private practice, Chandra went on to represent the family of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy killed by Cleveland police in 2014 over suspicion he was holding a firearm, while in reality he was playing with a toy gun in a park.

Around the same time Rice was shot dead, the DOJ had issued a report finding that, after improvements observed with the consent decree, which lasted three years, the Cleveland Division of Police had backslid into a pattern of excessive use of deadly force. Such findings provide the basis for a second consent decree, which began in 2015 and remains in effect today.

Successes and Failures of Consent Decrees

Over the three decades that the law has allowed for federal police oversight, there have been more than 80 investigations of police departments. Fewer than 20 of them have resulted in consent decrees, and fewer than 10 with memoranda of understanding, imposed on cities across the United States — achieving mixed results. Some departments have undergone significant reform, while others have stagnated through years of federal oversight.

Experts say the effectiveness of consent decrees depends not only on the federal government's commitment but also on local political will, police cooperation, and judicial enforcement.

Ronal Serpas, a member of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, an advocacy group made up of over 200 members from across the political spectrum, said that the history of a consent decree in New Orleans exemplifies the ups and downs of federal intervention.

In 2004, the DOJ under Bush spared the New Orleans Police Department from court oversight after an eight-year probe because of reforms the city had taken on its own initiative. One year later, Hurricane Katrina hit the city, and as a result, its police force reverted to earlier practices, in part due to a strain on its resources. By 2010, when the Obama DOJ entered a consent decree with the NOPD, the department was described as one of "the worst" in the country because of its corruption.

"Look at how short that can occur: in five years, things can go bad," said Serpas, who led the NOPD as its superintendent when the consent decree was entered and stayed in the position through the first three years of its implementation. "I thought [the consent decree] was absolutely needed. I'm glad we did it."

Serpas said the decree helped address the lack of funding for training, hiring and equipment that plagued the department. Public trust in the police nearly doubled in the first three years, reflecting the early impact of reform.

Scholars describe consent decrees in Newark, New Jersey, and Seattle as successes.

Following a DOJ investigation into excessive force by the Seattle Police Department, a 2012 consent decree mandating changes to policies and training on the use of force led to a 60% reduction in serious use-of-force incidents over a decade. In 2023, in light of such progress, a federal judge terminated most of the consent decree's provisions.

Newark's 2016 consent decree, meanwhile, highlights the power of data-driven reform. In 2014, a DOJ investigation found that 75% of pedestrian stops between 2009 and 2012 had no legal basis. A decade later, after the consent decree overhauled the police department's stop-and-search policies and training, 95% of stops were documented as lawful. Newark also made its policies more transparent, requiring public access to the stop data, use-of-force reports and officer discipline records.

Philadelphia, which since 2011 has been operating under an agreement that, unlike federal DOJ consent decrees, was negotiated between private citizens and the city, showed success in reducing unwarranted stops and searches of individuals, a practice known as stop-and-frisk.

The consent decree, monitored by plaintiffs who had sued under federal civil rights laws, revealed that over 50% of stops lacked reasonable suspicion and were racially disparate, with 90% of stops involving racial minorities. After years of implementation and monitoring, the number of stops in one year fell from 270,000 to below 100,000.

In a recent analysis, 85% of stops have been found to be constitutional, David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer and professor at University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School who has represented the Philadelphia plaintiffs, told Law360.

"We know it works. We know it doesn't work. Things will never be perfect. But if you've got a police department or mayor or a prosecutor who's willing to look at things differently, you can achieve some changes," he said. "The best consent decrees are going to mean nothing unless the police department buys into it."

Despite acknowledging fruitful consent decrees in some jurisdictions, which he described as modest and temporary successes, Fagan of Columbia Law said the failures were many more. Many cities under consent decrees, such as Baltimore and Cleveland, have struggled due to lack of political will, inadequate enforcement, and resistance from police unions, he said.

"If you kept a scorecard, I just don't think that you can point to either short-term or long-term successes," said Fagan, who has worked on police reform in New York City, which is currently operating under a 2014 federal court order that has helped reduce, though not eliminate, racial profiling during traffic stops.

He described the consent decree in Baltimore, which stemmed from the fallout over the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man in police custody, as "pretty much of a failure."

"They are continuing to shoot people and injure them, and they're kind of lawless," he said.

The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest law enforcement officer organization in the country, did not respond to a request for comment.

Fagan said municipalities and police departments are increasingly resisting consent decrees and federal oversight, a trend that began before Trump but escalated during his first administration. Fagan cited financial concerns and reluctance to surrender control over police departments as main reasons, and mentioned Memphis as an example of a jurisdiction unwilling to submit to government monitoring.

"Part of it is money, is fiscal autonomy. They don't want to have to pay the price for doing all the reforms that are demanded of them," he said.

Fagan criticized a lack of enforcement mechanisms that make many consent decrees ineffective as a major reason most of them do not work.

"If you issue an order and you don't really force compliance, then you're not going to see any success," he said. "If you tell your child they can't watch television unless they clean up their room, and they never clean up their room, but you let them watch television anyway, then your threats are empty."

Others questioned whether long implementation timelines were sustainable, noting that consent decrees in Cleveland, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Seattle have lasted over a decade. The agreement in Oakland, California, has been in place for nearly 25 years, without showing meaningful improvements.

Serpas said he believes police accountability is city-specific and that "national narratives about police don't really match the local experience." He said monitoring police departments has totaled tens of millions of dollars, expenses that burden cities that also have to contend with day-to-day functions like sanitation, fixing potholes, funding education and overall public safety.

"That's when cities start to wonder, you know, is the juice worth the squeeze?" he said. "Of course you want constitutional policing, because that's how you get forward. But at what cost?"

But Chandra, the former Cleveland law director, said consent decrees are no quick fixes. Even after new policies are set in place, it takes years for a police department to breed a new crop of officers willing to abide by them.

"To be effective, consent decrees have to last a long time — in my view, a generation — because you need full turnover within a police department to change its culture," he said.

State and Local Responses to DOJ's Exit

Legal experts agree that consent decrees are only one tool and that alone will not fix police misconduct. With the DOJ stepping back from consent decrees under the Trump administration, the responsibility for police accountability is shifting to state attorneys general, city governments, and community-led oversight efforts.

Moving forward, the experts say, state and local actors will bear the burden of ensuring constitutional policing — a task that will vary widely based on political will and available resources.

"When you see the federal government shirking its responsibility and pulling back from those critical accountability duties, states have the ability and the responsibility to step up," Chung of the Vera Institute said.

There are already examples. After the first Trump administration exited the federal consent decree in Chicago, the state attorney general took over police reform efforts. In Minneapolis, the state department of human rights entered a consent decree with the city's police department following a state investigation launched in the aftermath of Floyd's murder.

But Lopez of Georgetown University Law Center said states have largely been unable, or unwilling, to assume oversight roles when the federal government copped out of consent decrees. One of the reasons, she said, is that state courts don't have the experience and the resources necessary to enter agreements and ensure compliance

The handful of states that have tried to exercise police oversight authority, have achieved mixed results at best. For instance, in 2023, a California state court refused to enter a consent decree involving the police department in Vallejo, a city north of Oakland, and the state attorney general. The state then entered into a settlement agreement with the city in April 2024 which, unlike the consent decree it initially sought, will not be monitored by the court.

"It's always been the case that the best, arguably the best, place to address patterns of police misconduct is at the state level, Lopez said. "It's also always been the case that the state has failed to live up to that responsibility."

In states where local governments resist reform, community advocacy and civil rights litigation are becoming the primary mechanisms for change. Rudovsky, who reached the settlement with the police in Philadelphia, said it's going to be up to private organizations such as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and prisoner rights groups to litigate cases involving police wrongdoing in search of settlements and injunctive relief, much like what happened in Philadelphia.

Ultimately, experts agreed that federal withdrawal does not mean police reform is dead, but it does mean that progress will depend on local political leadership.

"The Civil Rights Division will never have the capacity to oversee all 18,000 agencies," Cheema of the Legal Defense Fund said. "To fill this vacuum, it's really going to be incumbent on state and local governments to step up and fill the gap."

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo. Graphics by Jason Mallory.

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