While turning a corner onto Central Avenue in Louisville, Kentucky. I saw the police lights flashing behind me and felt my heart drop. There, in the shadow of world-famous Churchill Downs racecourse, I waited in fear as the two officers approached my car. What happened next that day in 2011 was completely uncalled for, and terrifying.
The officers’ guns were drawn and pointed in my direction as I tried to breathe and regulate my emotions.
Luckily, or unluckily, I’d been here before. Five years prior, when I was pulled over by Kentucky State Police, there were six officers with guns pointed at me. Having only two in this instance was no less frightening.
My license and registration wasn’t their first demand. Instead, the officers asked where I was coming from and what brought me to the area. As it happened, I had just washed and detailed my eighteen-year-old Lexus which had 300,000 miles on it. It looked good, maybe too good. Maybe good enough to make the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) feel the need to check in on the young Black man in the Lexus.
When I finally had a chance to speak, aside from the obligatory “yes sir, no sir,” I asked the officers why they had pulled me over. One of the officers said there had been an issue at a bank a few miles away and, of course, I fit the description. The officer slightly shifted his tone after I told him I was a second-year law student, and while he didn’t stop pointing his gun toward my face, he did move his finger a little further away from the trigger.
After a few more barked orders, the officers’ radio informed them that I was not their guy, and they left without offering any semblance of an apology. But I was lucky. I was able to leave. Others in this city, like Breonna Taylor, were not so fortunate.
On March 13, 2020, Louisville police shot and killed Taylor in her apartment. The incident received national attention a few weeks later, after the world watched George Floyd take his final breath under the knee of a Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer—an event that recently had its five-year anniversary.
These killings were not isolated tragedies: They were seismic events that led to an outpouring of protest, grief, and a rare moment of bipartisan recognition that the enduring reality of police violence and structural racism in the United States had to change. And for a brief time, it seemed as though that might happen. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) launched long-overdue civil rights investigations into the police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, eventually producing harsh reports that documented unconstitutional abuses and deeply entrenched racial bias.
These findings led to federal consent decrees—court-enforced reform agreements aimed at curbing police brutality, ensuring accountability, and rebuilding public trust. They were not perfect solutions, but they were a good start. Now, the Trump Administration is ending even that modest progress.
In an alarming but not surprising move, the current administration announced just days before the anniversary of Floyd’s murder that it was seeking to dismiss pending police reform agreements in Louisville and Minneapolis, as well as shutting down active federal police reform efforts in Phoenix, Arizona; Trenton, New Jersey; and Memphis, Tennessee. This amounts to a sweeping declaration that federal oversight of racist, abusive policing is no longer a priority, or even a concern.
These decisions are not simply bureaucratic shifts by a new administration, as commonly occur when there is a change in the presidency. Rather, it is a profound move towards erasure, one that ignores the evidence, disrespects the dead, and undermines the hard-fought demands of millions of people in the United States and throughout the world who took to the streets for racial justice in 2020.
The DOJ’s investigative report on LMPD, released in March 2023, painted a damning picture. Officers routinely used excessive force, conducted illegal searches, and discriminated against Black residents. Later that same year it came to light that LMPD officers had engaged in behavior dubbed “Slushygate,” in which officers laughed as they threw drinks at pedestrians in predominantly Black neighborhoods, recording and sharing the videos for their amusement. These officers were not simply proverbial “bad apples”; they were symptomatic of a system corrupted by dehumanizing racialized contempt and the absence of accountability.
The Minneapolis report, released in June 2023, was no less disturbing. It evidenced years of racially biased policing, reckless force, and leadership failures that allowed abuses to endure. These reports confirmed what communities have long been saying: that modern policing, especially in Black and brown neighborhoods, too often operates as a mechanism of control rather than protection.
While the Trump Administration is seeking to dismiss federal consent decrees across the country, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights has maintained that the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department will remain under an existing state-level consent decree, which limits officers’ use of force, requires offices to de-escalate, prohibits certain pretextual stops, and requires independent oversight. The state court is the only entity that can terminate this agreement.
By walking away from these federal decrees, as well as the issuing of a recent Executive Order that professes to “unleash law enforcement,” the Trump Administration is saying to police departments everywhere: “We’ve got your back. Go ahead and abuse Black people. We don’t mind.”
This is not just a policy shift. It is a manifestation of a white supremacist logic—that state violence against Black people is acceptable, even necessary, to maintain “order.” It reflects an authoritarian impulse to consolidate state power, silence dissent, and shield law enforcement from scrutiny.
It is not coincidental that this comes amid broader attacks on racial justice—from efforts to ban the teaching of Black history to the criminalizing protest and the leadership of movements. The government’s pulling back from police reform is part of a much larger project to reassert dominance through fear and force.
Historically, the United States has been quick to condemn authoritarianism or strong-armed state violence and tactics abroad. But now we are seeing the outright dismantling of mechanisms that are designed to uphold constitutional rights and dignity.
When the federal government abandons its responsibility to investigate systemic abuses—particularly when those abuses disproportionately harm marginalized communities. It signals the normalization of a police state where law enforcement can act with impunity, and those harmed are left with no path to justice.
This is not democracy. This is the weaponization of state power against the very people it is meant to serve.
We should instead seek to honor the lives of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others by continuing to demand real accountability—not with symbolic gestures or rhetorical commitments, but meaningful structural change.
Congress must act to reinstate and strengthen the authority of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to investigate and enforce reforms. State and local governments must fill the void by enacting their own accountability mechanisms, including independent oversight, bans on qualified immunity, and divestment from militarized policing.
A larger conversation must be had about the root problem of white supremacy and the lasting legacy of this racist ideology across the board. All efforts must be made to address a system that is designed to uphold racial hierarchies through violence and surveillance.
As we think of the thousands of people like me who are regularly unjustly targeted by police, or the ones who succumb to the violence, we must be vigilant in seeking protections and accountability. The retreat from consent decrees is not only a policy failure—it is a moral collapse. We must respond not with resignation, but with renewed resistance.