Biden DOJ Makes a Radical End-Run on Policing

 Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is making a last-minute effort to cement radical policing restrictions in Louisville, Kentucky, preempting any attempts at reform by the incoming Trump administration through dubious legal means. Mike Howell’s team is jumping in to stop it. Here, the veteran attorney explains why his organization was compelled to get involved, and exposes the radical motivations — and destructive consequences — of the DOJ’s eleventh-hour move.

There have been 132 murders in Louisville this year. If a federal judge agrees to enter a consent decree between the outgoing Biden Department of Justice and the Louisville Metro Government, acting through the city’s radical mayor, then the lasting response will be to put the handcuffs on the police by mandating a wish-list of Black Lives Matter police reforms. Louisville will be a sanctuary city for gangbangers.

We’re trying to stop it.

Today the Oversight Project filed an objection in the Western District of Kentucky seeking to get the whole thing thrown out. Many legal commentators may say they’ve never heard of an amicus brief for a consent decree, but form and process are no excuse for inaction. The Biden administration isn’t trying to hide it; they want to tie the hands of the incoming administration. It is our hope that others will join in the fight and directly intervene in this case to make their voices heard as well. 

If this consent decree is entered, it will be a federal government stamp of approval on a new standard for policing that will be applied again and again. Louisville will likely be bound to this for at least five years, and there is very little the Trump administration can do if it’s on the books before January 20, 2025.

To explain where we are now, we must first understand how we got here. During the collective national psychosis of the Black Lives Matter movement and calls for defunding the police, an incident in Louisville added more fuel to the flames: the death of Breonna Taylor. In March 2020, Taylor was shot by police in the hallway of her apartment after police knocked on her door, announced their presence, forced entry with a battering ram, and her boyfriend responded by shooting at the police, hitting one in the leg. The officers returned fire, tragically resulting in Taylor’s death. The police were serving a warrant relating to her ex-boyfriend leaving packages of drugs at Taylor’s apartment. 

Those are the facts. Now it is time for the fiction. Capitalizing on the momentum of the George Floyd riots, the media, politicians, and activists turned Taylor’s unfortunate death to their political advantage. Many pushed the falsehoods that Taylor was shot in her bed, that the police did not knock at her door or announce themselves, and that the officers were racially motivated.

After a grand jury decided not to charge the officers involved, riots exploded. Louisville in particular saw immense property damage, over a hundred arrests, and two officers shot. Protests in other cities such as Portland, New York, and Los Angeles erupted. 

The politicians were happy to fan the flames. Senator Elizabeth Warren said, “The justice system is beyond broken — for Black people it never worked in the first place.” Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Just think if it were your daughter, your sister, your cousin, your relative, your friend who was murdered by the police.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez added, “we know that her death is not just the result of one person, but the system, structure and department that failed their entire community.”.”

Now fast forward to December 12, 2024, when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced an agreement with the Louisville Metro Government to reform their “unconstitutional and unlawful practices.” In his speech announcing the deal secured in the twilight of the Biden administration, Garland claimed, “This agreement addresses the serious violations of federal law that we uncovered during our pattern or practice investigation and puts the city of Louisville and its police department on a path to lasting reform. We are committed to honoring Breonna Taylor through our work to implement the agreement and to make Louisville a better and safer place for all of its residents.”

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke added, “In the wake of Breonna Taylor’s tragic killing, the people of Louisville fiercely advocated for racial justice, policing reform and accountability. City residents demanded that they receive the constitutional policing that they rightly deserve.”

So, what is in this “deal”? The consent decree is 259 pages of specific standards to limit the Louisville Police Department’s use of force, ability to obtain and execute search warrants. In practice, it will trap officers in a matrix of de-escalation techniques during life-or-death situations. It places restrictions around street enforcement activities like stop-and-frisk. It makes references to reducing racial disparities, so that police officers must consider the race of a criminal or suspect before engaging. And, of course, it mandates efforts to create diversity in the police applicant pool.

The consent decree also prohibits officers from firing at an individual whose actions can be determined to only have been a threat to themselves — e.g., someone who has a gun to their head and is threatening suicide. This is one of those split-second decisions that police officers have to make every day. In that split second it is impossible for an officer to know if a suspect is going to shoot themselves or turn the gun on the officers. This is a classic example of “action vs. reaction” training. Officers don’t have the time to react once a gun is pointed back at them. This is only something that you see in the movies; in real life, the bullet is faster than the officer’s ability to react. The DOJ’s own subsidiary law enforcement agency, the FBI, trains its officers to do the exact opposite of what the DOJ is telling Louisville police officers to do here. How can two standards be issued and enforced by the same federal government?

The list goes on and on, and it is remarkable for the precision and detail devoted to exactly how this wish list of Black Lives Matter policing reforms should be carried out. And it is all to be overseen by a monitor which could leave taxpayers on the hook for nearly three million dollars in the first two years alone.

Who in their right mind would want to be a police officer in Louisville, Kentucky, after this, making split-second, life-or-death decisions while weighing a 259-restriction manual?

As outrageous as the substance of the consent decree is, the extra-legal and anti-democratic way it came about is worse. This consent decree was rushed, as evidenced by its clearly drawing text from other documents — like a copy-and-pasted term paper — and its laughable factual findings section, which even points to instances of total accountability for officer misconduct as proof of the need for reform. 

One of its findings is even the conclusory article of faith that the Louisville Police Department “unlawfully discriminates against Black people in its enforcement activities.” This is nothing more than an 11th hour attempt to hamstring the Trump administration and reward left-wing political allies.

You don’t have to take my word for it. On Tuesday night we attended, and recorded, a virtual Zoom meeting hosted by the DOJ Office of Civil Rights team (all with pronouns beneath their names) involved in this deal. Fielding a question about what would happen to the consent decree if it is entered before Trump takes office, one of their attorneys said, “We’re all what they call career people.… Our role is to be the career staff who are consistently there, doing this work. And, you know, the interesting thing about consent decrees is that when we submit them to the court and the court enters them as an order, it really becomes the court’s order.”

While that statement was true, it was really an admission of strategy. This is about binding the Trump administration to the far-left agenda of the Biden administration using the mechanics of a consent decree.

For a political movement that built a failed 2024 national campaign around “defending our democracy” this is a complete affront to the democratic process and democratic values. No one voted for this.

The American people, in fact, voted for the exact opposite of this: they voted for law and order. Even in Louisville, Republicans swept every contested seat for the Metro Council in 2024.

This is a complete end-run around the democratic system. It will have real and severe consequences. People will be killed, and Louisville will continue to deteriorate. We aren’t going to sit back idly and watch that happen.

The decision now goes to a federal judge in the Western District of Kentucky. He will choose between the rule of law and the destructive politics of the Biden DOJ. And we will be there to help convince him to make the right choice, and throw this consent decree out.

Mike Howell is an attorney fighting for a government accountable to the American people’s interest.

https://tomklingenstein.com/biden-doj-makes-a-radical-end-run-on-policing/