Next time, when the Trump Justice Department dropped its oversight of troubled police departments in places such as Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, it argued that the reform efforts were “factually unwarranted”.
However, according to a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union, officers in those locations were still using excessive force against people who were experiencing mental health crises, which was the very things that attracted national attention in the first place.
The ACLU reviewed hundreds of officers use-of-force reviews in four areas where the Court had discovered illegal controlling evidence under the Biden administration. In their evaluation, ACLU researchers found agencies continuing to abuse Tasers and failing to properly evaluate their officers ‘ use of force.
In one instance, Minneapolis police constantly shot a man with a Taser after he followed their purchases. According to the report, a Louisville official broke a man’s auto screen during a mental health phone while a second officer pointed his gun, escalating the situation. That officer finally pulled the man from the vehicle, at which point the person brandished a weapon. The officers shocked him seven times after hitting him with a stick.
The most recent data date back to late 2024, when President Donald Trump was elected president, and to the beginning of 2025, when the Justice Department began to shift away from its traditional focus on civil rights protection.
The report also cites reporting by ProPublica, which has detailed officers misconduct and reform initiatives in Louisville and Memphis, Tennessee. Trump sent thousands of National Guard soldiers, U.S. Marshals, and immigration officers to Memphis in the fall of 2025 as a result of what he called” the violence that’s going on.” According to ProPublica, the activity allegedly targeted and assaulted black city residents who claimed they were the victims of racism. The U. S. Marshals Service, which led the work, disputed the claims of racial stereotyping.
According to the authors, the goal of the ACLU work was to keep local police guilty in areas where excessive force and cultural targeting have been found or had concerns. In order to accomplish that, the nonprofit requested public records requests for information requesting information about officials ‘ use of power and other information from the police or sheriff’s departments in Phoenix, Louisville, Worcester, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, Mount Vernon, New York, and Memphis.
” We did this project because we feared the Department of Justice was abandoning areas that needed help to ensure that reforms were made in their communities, and our study of the information sadly proves that to have happened”, said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the assistant project director on surveillance for the ACLU.
The ACLU even sought information from Rankin County, Mississippi, where the organization’s people were in the state in 2023.
The” Goon Squad,” the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, tortured and beat two Black men. The officials were convicted and sentenced to years in jail in 2024. The sheriff’s office is being investigated by Biden’s DOJ, and reports suggest that the Trump presidency is keeping the research going. The coroner’s district’s spokesperson told Mississippi Now that the organization would continue to cooperate with the investigation to demonstrate that all departmental policing requirements are in accordance with the law.
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. Abigail Jackson, a spokesman for the White House, said the ACLU’s results from a group that she said” experiences from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome” as “partisan talking details.” She even defended the strategy employed by the administration. ” President Trump is a champion for our excellent law enforcement officers and has encouraged them to arrest criminals and enforce the law — unlike the Biden Administration”, Jackson said.
The ACLU report highlights Louisville and Minneapolis in specific because they had signed transformation treaties with the Biden Justice Department prior to the Trump administration’s decision to drop the main complaints and declare the cases invalid in 2025. In response to the ACLU’s data requests, the two cities responded to the requests for information more graciously than the others.
According to the report, officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department used excessive force, including dramatic people in their mouth, head or body while they were handcuffed, and failed to adequately evaluate incidents of force, mischaracterizing facts during those reviews to make force seem more affordable. The Louisville police department “reviews use-of-force incidents through multiple layers of supervision,” according to a Louisville police department spokesperson, and appropriate corrective action is taken when policy violations are identified.
According to the ACLU, police reportedly aimed their guns at people who were having mental health crises in addition to escalated their encounters with them. The issue has been particularly pronounced this year.
In her apartment in Louisville in March, police fatally shot and killed a 28-year-old woman named Katelyn Hall while she was suffering from a mental health crisis. Although the incident is still being looked into, police have said Hall posed a threat to officers because, according to them, she was holding a piece of broken porcelain.
Two months later, a Louisville police officer shot and killed 27-year-old Martin Nitzken Jr., who was unarmed and naked in the street. Local reports claimed Nitzken was taking a “mental break” after a caller reported it. The officer who shot Nitzken was charged with manslaughter and reckless homicide. He has pleaded not guilty. The officer’s attorney declined to give a request to speak with his client.
According to the ACLU report, the Minneapolis Police Department’s records showed evidence of excessive force, improper use of Tasers, and subpar reviews of use of force. The police department didn’t provide comment.
Local leaders have pledged to implement changes that are being overseen by independent monitors, and both Louisville and Minneapolis have adopted local versions of the reform agreements they signed with the Biden administration. After the DOJ “abandoned” federal control, the city of Louisville’s leadership “voluntarily” took on the reform effort.
But, as ProPublica has reported, progress has been slow in Louisville, and the results have been mixed there, particularly in the area of mental health.
Borchetta remarked,” The fact that the issues are still persisting in the same way suggests to me that the police departments are not doing enough to improve that conduct.”
After the Hall and Nitzken murders, Louisville’s mayor, Craig Greenberg, stated in the press that the city was “moving as quickly” as it could to alter how police handled mental health calls by allowing behavioral health experts to assist officers in such situations.
The ACLU’s findings were” not all bad”, though, the authors wrote. The nonprofit praised Louisville for its honesty and instances where the review process was used to “identify, correct, and improve possible misuses of force.”
The organization claimed that the release of a more in-depth report was a failure due to the opposition and delays by the other neighborhood police departments it was looking into. The Justice Department had investigated those cities and issued reports finding evidence their departments had engaged in unconstitutional policing. However, after Trump’s election, the cases had not advanced beyond that.
The ACLU claimed that because Memphis and Phoenix refused to turn over the use-of-force records, the organization turned to the courts. The nonprofit sued Memphis in February for the documents. Memphis “only then did finally consent to respond.” This production is continuing, as is the ACLU’s evaluation,” according to the report. A spokesperson for the Memphis Police Department blamed the delay on the ACLU’s initial request, which they said was “overly broad” and lacked specificity and was thus denied.
The nonprofit filed a lawsuit against Phoenix earlier this month for its records. The litigation is raging. The police department there did not respond to a request for comment.
The ACLU claimed that in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the DOJ had previously discovered officers engaging in sex acts during covert investigations, officials initially withheld a significant amount of information, citing a law intended to safeguard the privacy of victims of sexual abuse. The ACLU claimed that Worcester eventually gave in and kept more records, but it continued to hold back reports for more than a dozen incidents. ” Reliance on the statute to exempt records of police activity from public scrutiny thus turns a protection for survivors into a sword against them”, the report states.
The ACLU’s claim that the reports were withheld to protect the police department was refuted by a city spokesperson for Worcester. The spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement that” to conclude that the reports were withheld to protect the WPD when the law allows no discretion in determining whether such reports are public or not is an egregious misrepresentation of the law and of the city of Worcester’s appropriate response in accordance with the law”
Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, has criticized the use of federal reform agreements, known as consent decrees, saying they represent an expensive form of micromanagement and “divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs”.
Notably, the ACLU found that some of the law enforcement agencies ‘ use-of-force records were not thorough and thorough, which made it difficult for the public or the agencies themselves to spot problems or avoid excessive force issues in their reports.
Borchetta stated that the ACLU’s review is ongoing and that it will take whatever steps are necessary to release more information to the general public.
” You can make real change when people in the community want change and are pushing for it”, she said. So we anticipate and hope to work with communities and assist them with this information so that they can receive the reform the DOJ attempted to deny them.
The DOJ’s assertion that Trump’s police reform was” Factually Unjustified” was true. A New Report Shows Otherwise. first appeared on ProPublica.
