The Arrogance of the Garland Justice Department Apparently Had No Bounds

Another federal district court judge has questioned the propriety of a settlement hastily proposed by the Biden administration’s Justice Department in a case it had filed against the Louisville Police Department. The government had accused the department of a pattern of using excessive force, targeting black people, and stopping people without cause, yet it refuses to show the judge the evidence needed to back up its claims.

The Kentucky judge, Benjamin Beaton, was obviously extremely annoyed by the DOJ’s refusal to answer basic questions about the Dec. 12, 2024, consent decree or to offer evidence that would allow the judge to determine, as required by precedent, whether the proposed consent decree is “fair, adequate, and reasonable” and “consistent with the public interest.”

In fact, Beaton compared the DOJ’s refusal with Bartleby the Scrivener, the character in a Herman Melville short story who answers every question with the phrase, “I would prefer not to.”

I wrote previously about another federal judge who rejected a proposed consent decree in Georgia that the Garland Justice Department also tried to sneak through just before the Trump administration took over. That consent decree would have forced Cobby County, Georgia, to discriminate on the basis of race and set up a racial spoils system in the hiring and promotion of firefighters. 

The Georgia judge refused to approve a settlement that he concluded would violate the “foundational principle” of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits racial discrimination in employment. The Cobb County lawsuit has since been appropriately dismissed by the new Trump Justice Department.

In the Kentucky case, according to Beaton, the Justice Department claimed that the Louisville police department was engaging in an “ongoing pattern of incredibly serious legal violations.” That included “using excessive force—guns, tasers, and police dogs, for example—against the citizens of Louisville; stopping them on the street without a lawful reason; policing black people more harshly than others on the basis of their skin color; infringing protesters’ First Amendment rights; and denying equal emergency services to persons with behavioral disabilities.” [All italicized words in quotes throughout this piece are italicized in the original.]

Louisville admitted that some of its officers have “violated the rights of its citizens from time to time.” But it denied that the city has “engaged in a pattern of such violations.” That is a crucial point. 

The occasional individual officer who engages in such reprehensible behavior in violation of a police department’s policy and training can be personally prosecuted for such actions. But for the city to be held liable under the applicable statute, 34 U.S.C. §12601, the Justice Department has to prove that the police department has a “pattern or practice” of such conduct by its law enforcement officers that is fostered, condoned, or left unchecked by the police department.

In order to determine whether the Louisville Police Department met the “pattern or practice” requirement, Beaton wanted the Justice Department to answer a series of questions. These included:

• How many times over the past decade did the DOJ claim officers had shot civilians without justification?
• How often had officers unlawfully tased, punched, or kicked suspects?
• When was the last time the police department violated protesters’ First Amendment rights?
• How did the DOJ determine that the city’s policing disproportionately affected black people?
• How could 911 dispatchers determine whether to send unarmed behavioral health workers instead of armed police in response to a behavioral health incident?

The judge held a hearing to get these questions answered. As he says in his Jan. 18 order, “Remarkably, the United States refused to offer any answer and information whatsoever during the hearing.” The DOJ showed up at the hearing “with no witnesses and no evidence.”

At the end of the hearing, the judge asked the parties to “confer and report whether they’d be submitting any additional information in support of the proposed decree’s fairness, reasonableness, adequacy, and public-interestedness.” Beaton was astounded when the DOJ lawyer emailed the judge’s chambers the next day saying that the Justice Department “wouldn’t provide any further information.”

In that order, the judge discusses the intransigence of the Justice Department at length and expresses his dismay at its refusal to provide basic information and evidence necessary to justify the consent decree: to “share the full extent of its findings with the Court or the public.” The DOJ and the City of Louisville, said Judge Beaton, “owe it to this Court and the people to explain the facts that led them here.”

Instead, displaying its arrogance, the Garland Justice Department, according to Beaton, “implicitly and at times explicitly asked the Court to simply defer to its expertise and judgment.”

“Blind deference—without any insight into the facts and law on which the parties rely” is not in accord with the “independent evaluation” that must be conducted by a court, said Beaton. Precisely so!

The judge was not about to approve a 240-page consent decree requiring Louisville to make “hundreds of changes in its laws, policies, and personnel, followed by a robust process of review and assessment.”

The monitor the court would assign to make sure the consent decree was complied with “alone could run more than $7 million, to say nothing of additional personnel, operation, and compliance costs.”

The judge gave the parties one more month to answer all of the questions he had asked. When the Trump administration came in, it asked for and was granted more time to review the case, the DOJ’s internal investigation, and the proposed consent decree.

But given the department’s bizarre behavior, it seems highly likely that what the Trump administration will find is that the evidence needed under the applicable statute to establish a pattern or practice of unlawful behavior simply doesn’t exist. 

Instead, as it has done before, the Civil Rights Division—which is filled with ideological leftists who hate law enforcement—was probably using this case to impose a woke diversity, equity, and inclusion law enforcement model on Louisville that would have made it impossible for police officers to effectively and safely do their job to protect the public.

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