Biden’s DOJ Has Investigated Police, But Trump Could Stop It.

With less than two weeks to go until Election Day, civil rights attorneys and the families of victims of police violence are sounding the alarm about what they see as a likely consequence of a second Donald Trump presidency: dissolving any progress on police reform that has been made under President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice.
The Justice Department has launched investigations into allegations of misconduct and discriminatory policing at several police departments across the U.S. over the last four years, and experts and observers wonder what could change if Trump beats the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
When Trump was president, his administration took several steps to roll back civil rights protections and did not actively seek to investigate or curb police misconduct, even though the issue was increasingly in the national spotlight, especially after the high-profile 2020 police killings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, and George Floyd in Minneapolis.
And on the campaign trail, he has avoided talking about people who have been killed by police, instead signaling support for immunity from accountability for law enforcement personnel. The Trump campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
“I feel like [the current administration] did a lot of work in the community, but I am worried about the changing of the guard,” said Sherri Reeves, the mother of Peter Reeves, a 30-year-old Black man who sued the police in Lexington, Mississippi. His lawsuit was eventually dismissed, but the Justice Department recently found that the police department in the small town had engaged in discriminatory practices.
“I hope that [Harris] gets in because if she does, the work will continue,” Reeves said. “If Trump gets it, then we are going to be going back in time as far as what we went through before the DOJ stepped in.”
The Biden administration has opened 12 “pattern-or-practice” investigations of police and sheriff’s departments across the country through its civil rights division, according to a DOJ spokesperson. Such reviews look at a law enforcement agency’s history to establish if there has been a pattern or practice of police misconduct, a systematic use of illegal methods.
Some investigations are still open, but others, including in Phoenix, Louisville and Minneapolis, have concluded and found discriminatory policing practices. Yet these cities have hit hurdles when initiating police reform ordinances, including, in the case of Memphis, Republicans in the state legislature blocking reform efforts.
Kristen Clarke, the U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, has led the charge on these Justice Department efforts.
Clarke has been a “maverick,” especially when compared with the “toothless” policing policies under Trump, said civil rights attorney Lee Merritt, who has represented several families of victims of police violence, including those of Floyd and Taylor.
Under Clarke, the Justice Department also initiated contacts in some smaller towns that often go overlooked by the federal government. In Decatur, Alabama, for example, Merritt said people from the Justice Department met with community members who had concerns about local police, including the family of Stephen Perkins, a Black man who was fatally shot by police while his car was getting repossessed outside his home. Merritt represents Perkins’ family.
“You saw pushback from the federal government in a small city like Decatur, where they were sending in U.S. attorneys and taking reports from citizens about violations of the Constitution by the state,” Merritt said.
“Obviously I did not see that under the Trump administration. We saw the opposite. We saw him attempting to martialize National Guard troops and military against citizens themselves,” Merritt said, referring to Trump’s response to protests following Floyd’s death. “That is something scary Trump has talked about and he would do if he gets back in office.”
Lexington, as well as nearby Rankin County, Mississippi, are other examples of the DOJ stepping in to investigate small-town police forces.
Lexington, a majority-Black town with a population of just over 1,000 people, found itself in the national spotlight after a former police chief went on a racist tirade, including bragging about shooting a Black man more than 100 times. Clarke’s office found that the police department engaged in discriminatory policing practices. The Justice Department opened an investigation into police in Rankin County following the conviction of six white law enforcement officers for torturing two Black men. The Rankin County investigation is ongoing.
Sherri Reeves said Lexington residents had long had complaints about the police, but they hadn’t been investigated until Biden’s administration. She said that she thought there was hope for more federal intervention if Harris wins and that she does not believe Trump’s DOJ would have investigated her city.
“The DOJ is a big deal when they come into a small community like this. I think that is what makes it pivotal because they usually don’t take cases this small,” she said.
Cardell Wright, the leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and an activist in the Lexington area, told HuffPost that Clarke’s efforts have put police officers across the country on notice — including in towns like his, which he said have historically been overlooked.
“So often we have seen over the course of 10 to 20 years there have been so many shootings at the hands of the police, and they have walked away free with no criminal charges filed,” Wright said. “It is this issue of qualified immunity, and so that is what I will say is at risk with this election, is proper accountability for police officers who will go rogue and do what they want to do.”
One of the Justice Department’s most high-profile pattern-or-practice investigations is in Memphis, which started after Tyre Nichols, 29, was fatally beaten by police officers in January 2023. One officer, Desmond Mills, pleaded guilty to both civil rights and conspiracy charges. Another, Demetrius Haley, was convicted of violating Nichols’ civil rights resulting in bodily injury, as well as conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges. Former officers Tadarrius Bean and Justin Smith were convicted of obstruction of justice.
Rodney Wells, Nichols’ stepfather, said both Biden and Harris had contacted the family after Nichols’ death. He and RowVaughn Wells, Nichols’ mother, attended Biden’s State of the Union address a month after his death, and have since advocated for police reform legislation.
“We got invited to the White House, the Juneteenth celebration, we have gotten a letter from the Biden administration around Christmas — but we have not received anything from Donald Trump,” Rodney Wells told HuffPost this week.
“It is about the fact that he has not acknowledged us and the tragedy that happened to Tyre Nichols. The Biden-Harris administration has acknowledged us. [Harris] came to our funeral in a snowstorm, and that was very powerful to our family.”
When Trump took office in 2017, his administration began rolling back regulations from Barack Obama’s presidency.
On March 31, 2017, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions submitted a memo suggesting U.S. attorneys not pursue consent decrees. Prior administrations had used consent decrees, which are court agreements on reforms required of the police departments, to combat misconduct, including issues of excessive force, discriminatory stops and officers spying on civilians who may have spoken out about the police department. The settlement would set a standard for officers to meet to reform their policing practices.
For example, in October 2018, a federal judge ruled that Memphis police violated a 1978 consent decree due to surveillance of activists and reporters. Officers were tracking local activists by collecting their Facebook posts and monitoring the families of people killed by police.
Sessions additionally attempted to stop Baltimore police from adopting recommended reforms in a federal consent decree on discriminatory policing practices, but that was blocked by a federal court.
Sessions then rescinded an Obama-era ban on police use of military-style weapons, which had become an issue in particular during protests against police brutality.
Sessions and his successor, William Barr, “were actively pursuing policies that were anti-human rights and civil rights. They were voluntarily withdrawing from consent decrees about police misuse of force,” Merritt said.
The deaths of Floyd and Taylor sparked mass demonstrations demanding policing accountability.
“I was in Minnesota after George Floyd was murdered. I was there with protesters helping serve as a legal observer. Individuals were not only being targeted by police, but when the state seemed to be working to deescalate the situation in Minnesota and bring justice to the community, Donald Trump was throwing fuel on the flames.”
At a campaign rally in Wisconsin in May, Trump reiterated that he would “give police their power back” and would be “giving them immunity from prosecution.”
In July, a panel of interviewers at the National Association of Black Journalists convention asked Trump about his previous comments on qualified immunity, which protects law enforcement officers personally from criminal prosecution and civil suits unless it is found legally that they violated a person’s civil rights. In particular, they asked him about the death of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman who had been fatally shot in her Springfield, Illinois, home by a sheriff’s deputy earlier that month. Trump did not seem familiar with the details of the case, which had sparked national outrage, and wouldn’t say whether he thought the deputy who shot Massey would be granted immunity under his policy proposal.
“Well, he might not. It depends on what happens. I am talking about people much different than that. We need people to protect ourselves,” Trump said at the time. “In this particular case, that did not look good to me, I did not like it. I did not like it at all.”
Harris put out a statement condemning the shooting and called Massey’s family.
Van Turner, the former president of the Memphis NAACP, said a lot is on the line this election. He pointed to what Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump presidency written by conservatives, says about policing and the role of the Justice Department.
“The evidence shows that the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice has failed to protect law-abiding citizens and has ignored its most basic obligations. It has become at once utterly unserious and dangerously politicized. Prosecution and charging decisions are infused with racial and partisan political double standards,” the document says. (Trump has distanced himself from many of the proposals in Project 2025, even though its authors include former aides and other allies.)
“When you look at Project 2025 and other things President Trump has said, I think it is a real risk of him continuing what he was doing when he was in office,” Turner said.
“In relation to what is going on with the DOJ and their investigation of [the Memphis Police Department] as well as the aftermath of Floyd and Nichols, I just think we will remain at a standstill, and what needs to happen will not happen under his administration if he wins.”