Trump is done pretending to care about people killed by police in the United States

Five years ago, a Minneapolis cop named Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds on a street corner while the world watched in horror.

The footage was a gut punch to the American conscience—or what was left of it. Protests erupted from coast to coast, cities burned, and for one fleeting moment, it seemed like the country might actually reckon with its addiction to police violence.

Among the causes of death listed in a lawsuit concerning at least one of 10,429 people shot and killed by police in the United States from 2015 to 2024, was a county’s encouragement of “employee attendance at ‘Warrior Mindset’ and/or ‘Killology’ trainings.”

A report by the Office of the State Comptroller (OSC) found that 377 New Jersey police departments and law enforcement agencies together paid more than $1 million for private police training hosted by Street Cop Training, a now-discredited company that taught illegal, discriminatory and likely unconstitutional tactics.

Such sessions create a culture of excessive force and disregard for de-escalation.

Despite the largest racial justice protests since the civil rights era of the 1960s and a wave of measures to improve training and hold officers more accountable, the number of people killed by the police continues to rise each year, and black Americans still die in disproportionate numbers.

But now, in the year 2025, under the dark specter of Trump’s second term, the Department of Justice has officially thrown in the towel.

The message from Trump’s DOJ is clear: We’re done pretending to care.

The Great Unraveling

The Biden administration, for all its flaws, at least went through the motions of accountability. They launched investigations, compiled damning reports, and even negotiated consent decrees with Minneapolis and Louisville. The findings were grotesque: cops in Louisville sicced dogs on children. Minneapolis officers treated Black and Native residents like enemy combatants. Memphis police beat handcuffed suspects like they were working out pent-up rage.

But none of that matters now.

Enter Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s newly installed attack dog at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. A week before the anniversary of Floyd’s death—because timing is everything in the theater of cruelty—she declared the consent decrees “overbroad,” “factually unjustified,” and the product of an “anti-police agenda.”

Translation: We don’t give a damn.

The Blueprint for Impunity

Dhillon’s reasoning is a masterclass in bureaucratic gaslighting. She claims the decrees would have cost too much (“tens of millions!”), taken too long (“years of micromanagement!”), and—most laughably—“stripped local control from communities.”

As if police departments drowning in misconduct scandals were ever under “local control” to begin with.

The reality? These decrees were the only leverage left to force change. Without them, cities like Minneapolis and Louisville are free to backslide into the same patterns of brutality that got us here. Already, cops in these departments are whispering behind closed doors: “We won.”

And they’re right.

The Ghost of Breonna Taylor

In Louisville, where cops shot Breonna Taylor to death in her own home during a botched no-knock raid, the DOJ had finally reached a settlement. Body cams, better training, an independent monitor—none of it revolutionary, but at least it was something.

Now? Gone.

Mayor Craig Greenberg insists the city will “voluntarily” keep reforms in place. Sure. Just like they “voluntarily” stopped no-knock warrants after Taylor’s death—except when they didn’t.

Minneapolis: Ground Zero for Empty Promises

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, ever the political contortionist, swears his city will still follow the state-level consent decree they signed. But let’s be real—without federal oversight, how long before the old habits creep back? How long before the next George Floyd?

The Minneapolis Police Department was already a tinderbox of racism and violence before Chauvin murdered Floyd. Now, with the feds walking away, the only thing standing between cops and another atrocity is “good faith.”

And in American policing, “good faith” is a myth.

The New Jim Crow 2.0

This isn’t just about Minneapolis or Louisville. The DOJ is also killing investigations into departments in Phoenix, Memphis, Trenton, and Oklahoma City—places where cops have been accused of everything from sexual assault to running modern-day “debtor’s prisons.”

Five years after George Floyd’s murder, the lesson is clear: America had its chance to change. It chose not to.

The pattern is unmistakable: The Trump administration isn’t just abandoning reform—it’s actively dismantling it.

And who pays the price? The same people who always do: Black and brown communities, the poor, the vulnerable. The people who dared to believe, even for a second, that justice was possible.

The Road Ahead

So where does that leave us?

The ACLU and grassroots groups are scrambling to fill the void, filing public records requests and preparing lawsuits. But let’s not kid ourselves—without the weight of the federal government, this is a losing battle.

Meanwhile, Trump’s DOJ is busy hunting down “antisemitism on college campuses” (read: pro-Palestine protesters) while giving violent cops a free pass. The irony is so thick you could choke on it.

And the bloodstains on the pavement? They’re just waiting for the next name.