The Department of Justice is closing out investigations into local police departments around the country that the Biden administration initiated.
The DOJ described the investigations as being "filed at the last minute by the Biden administration" following the reelection of President Donald Trump.
The local police departments in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, were accused by the Biden Department of Justice of widespread patterns of unconstitutional policing practices.
NBC News reported the lawsuits were apart from trials of police officers accused of crimes in the highly publicized deaths of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In its announcement of closing out the federal actions, the Justice Department on Wednesday said the Biden DOJ was "wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination and heavily relying on flawed methodologies and incomplete data" as a basis for the lawsuits.
The actions were intended, according to the release, to put the federal government in control of the local police departments' "management, supervision, training, performance evaluations, discipline, staffing, recruitment and hiring."
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ Civil Rights Division said the DOJ was ending "the Biden Civil Rights Division's failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees."
Dhillon said similar attempts at federal control of law enforcement departments in Arizona, New Jersey, Tennessee, New York, Oklahoma, and Louisiana are also being closed out.
KSTP in Minneapolis reported on Tuesday that an annual report on the oversight of the Minneapolis Police Department noted that "MPD has overhauled use-of-force policies and brought its backlog of use-of-force cases under review down from more than 1,100 to about 400 in the last six months."
KARE reported that a state of Minnesota consent decree with the Minneapolis Police, managed by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, will remain in effect.
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