By SARAH N. LYNCH and ANDREW GOUDSWARD Reuters
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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is ending efforts to secure agreements for federal oversight of police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, despite a prior government finding they routinely violated the civil rights of Black people.

In a major rollback of federal civil rights investigations, the Justice Department said on Wednesday it was also ending investigations and rescinding findings of misconduct into six other police departments, deeming the probes — many launched following a 2020 wave of worldwide protests over racial justice — as overreaching.

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“Federal micro-management of local police should be a rare exception, and not the norm,” Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division, told reporters. She said control of police belongs with their communities rather than unelected bureaucrats.

She said her office will seek to dismiss the pending litigation against the two cities and retract the department’s prior findings of constitutional violations.

Sunday will be the five-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck as Floyd repeatedly pleaded that he couldn’t breathe.

Floyd’s killing, as well as the killing of Breonna Taylor who was shot to death by Louisville police executing a no-knock warrant, sparked worldwide protests about racially motivated policing practices during the final year of Republican President Donald Trump’s first term in office.

The mayors of Minneapolis and Louisville both said they would continue to implement reforms mandated in the federal agreements despite the Justice Department action. Minneapolis opposed the Trump administration’s move in court, saying it would impede the city’s progress on policing.

“Neither Trump nor anyone in Washington can stop us from doing this work that we are indeed committed to,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, told reporters during a press conference.

Dhillon also said the department will be closing out investigations and retracting prior findings of wrongdoing against the police departments in Phoenix, Arizona; Memphis, Tennessee; Trenton, New Jersey; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and the Louisiana State Police.

Minneapolis and Louisville were the two highest-profile cities investigated for systemic police abuse during Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration and were the only two cities that agreed to the terms of a court-approved settlement with the DOJ known as a consent decree.

Dhillon said DOJ was undertaking a review of all federal consent decrees, many of which date back to Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration, to determine if they should continue.

The moves announced on Wednesday would largely undo years of work on police oversight during Biden’s administration and represent a scaling back of the department’s historic role to investigate and monitor troubled departments.