Last year, when the Trump Justice Department ended oversight of troubled police departments in Louisville, Kentucky, Minneapolis and other cities, it argued that reform efforts were “factually unjust.”
But a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union says police officers in these locations continued to engage in the very conduct that led to federal scrutiny in the first place, including excessive and dangerous use of force against people facing mental health crises.
The ACLU reviewed hundreds of police use-of-force reports in four areas where the Justice Department found evidence of unconstitutional enforcement under the Biden administration. In their investigation, ACLU investigators found that government agencies continue to misuse Tasers and fail to properly review officers’ use of force.
In one incident, Minneapolis police repeatedly shocked a man with a Taser after he complied. In another incident, a Louisville police officer smashed a man’s car window during a mental health call, while another officer pointed a gun at him and the confrontation escalated, according to the report. Officers then pulled the man from the car and he brandished a knife. The officers hit him with their batons and shocked him seven times.
The records primarily span the period from late 2024, after President Donald Trump won a second term in the White House, to early 2025, when the new administration began to shift the Justice Department away from its traditional focus on civil rights enforcement.
The report also cited ProPublica reporting detailing police misconduct and reform efforts in Louisville, Tennessee, and Memphis. In the fall of 2025, President Trump said he was sending hundreds of National Guard troops, U.S. Marshals and immigration agents to Memphis “due to ongoing crimes.” ProPublica revealed that the operation ensnared innocent residents of the predominantly black city, who they say were targeted and harassed because of their race. The U.S. Marshals Service, which led the effort, disputed the racial profiling claims.
According to the authors, the goal of the ACLU’s efforts was to hold local police accountable in the absence of federal oversight and continue to advance reforms in areas where investigators had found or had concerns about excessive force or racial targeting. To that end, the nonprofit group has requested that Phoenix police or sheriff’s departments publicly record reports and other records detailing officers’ use of force. Louisville; Worcester, Massachusetts; Minneapolis; Mount Vernon, New York. And Memphis.
“We did this project out of concern that the Department of Justice was abandoning communities that needed support to ensure community reform, and our analysis of the records unfortunately proves that is what is happening,” said Jen Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director for the ACLU’s Policing Project.
The ACLU also sought records from ACLU member Rankin County, Mississippi in 2023.
The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, calling itself the “goon squad,” beat and tortured two black men. The officers were convicted in 2024 and sentenced to decades in prison. Biden’s Justice Department has launched an investigation into the Sheriff’s Office, and there are reports that the Trump administration is continuing to investigate. A sheriff’s department spokesperson told Mississippi Today that the department “continues to cooperate with the investigation to demonstrate that all aspects of the department’s enforcement efforts are within the constitutional scope.”
The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment. White House press secretary Abigail Jackson dismissed the ACLU’s findings as a “partisan talking point” from a group “suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” She also defended the administration’s approach. “President Trump has been a champion of our nation’s great law enforcement officers and, unlike the Biden administration, has encouraged them to apprehend criminals and enforce the law,” Jackson said.
The ACLU’s report specifically focuses on Louisville and Minneapolis because both cities signed reform agreements with the Biden Justice Department before the Trump administration dropped the underlying lawsuit in 2025 and dropped the case. These two cities were also more willing than other cities to respond to ACLU records requests.
In addition to using excessive force, including punching people in the face, head and body while handcuffed, Louisville Metro Police Department officers failed to properly review use-of-force incidents and misrepresented the facts during those reviews to make the use of force appear more reasonable, according to the report. A Louisville Police Department spokesperson told ProPublica that “use-of-force incidents are investigated through multiple levels of oversight and appropriate corrective action is taken when violations of policy are identified.”
Police also escalated encounters by pointing guns at people experiencing mental health crises, the ACLU said. This problem has become especially noticeable this year.
In March, Louisville police shot and killed Caitlin Hall, a 28-year-old woman who was in a mental health crisis, in her apartment. The incident is still under investigation, but police said Hall was carrying a piece of broken porcelain and posed a threat to officers.
Two months later, a Louisville police officer shot and killed 27-year-old Martin Nitzken Jr. as he lay naked on the street. According to local reports, the caller reported that Nitzken was becoming “mentally unstable.” The officer who shot and killed Nitzken was charged with manslaughter and reckless homicide. He pleaded not guilty. The officer’s attorney did not respond to requests to interview his client.
The ACLU report says Minneapolis police records show evidence of excessive force, improper use of Tasers and inadequate review of use of force. Police officials have not commented.
Both Louisville and Minneapolis have adopted local versions of reform agreements signed with the Biden administration, with local leaders pledging to implement reforms that will be monitored by independent watchdogs. A Louisville spokesperson noted that city leadership “voluntarily” took on the reform effort after the Department of Justice “abandoned” federal oversight.
But as ProPublica reported, progress has been slow in Louisville, with mixed results, especially in the area of mental health.
“The fact that the problems are still the same suggests to me that the police are not doing enough to improve their conduct,” Borchetta said.
After Hall and Nitzken’s killings, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg told local reporters that the city was “working as quickly as possible” to change the way police respond to mental health calls, including making behavioral health professionals available to assist officers during such incidents.
However, the ACLU’s findings were “not all bad,” the authors wrote. The nonprofit praised the city of Louisville’s transparency and examples of how its review process worked to “identify, remediate, and remediate potential abuses of force.”
The organization said it had intended to produce a broader report, but resistance and delays from other local police departments it was scrutinizing proved impossible. The Justice Department investigated those cities and released a report that found evidence of unconstitutional enforcement by the department. However, by the time Trump was elected, the case had made no further progress.
The ACLU said the cities of Memphis and Phoenix refused to provide use-of-force records, so the ACLU went to court. The nonprofit sued Memphis in February for the documents. “Only then did Memphis finally agree to comply. This production continues, as does the ACLU review,” the report states. A spokesperson for the Memphis Police Department blamed the delay on the ACLU’s initial request being rejected because it was “too broad” and lacking in specificity.
The nonprofit sued Phoenix for the records earlier this month. The lawsuit is ongoing. The country’s police did not respond to requests for comment.
In Worcester, Massachusetts, where the Justice Department previously discovered officers engaged in sex acts during an undercover investigation, the ACLU said officials initially withheld significant amounts of records, citing a law aimed at protecting the privacy of sexual abuse victims. Wooster eventually relented and provided more records, but still withheld reports on more than a dozen incidents, according to the ACLU. “Relying on laws that exempt police records from public scrutiny turns protections for survivors into swords against them,” the report states.
A spokesperson for the city of Worcester denied the ACLU’s claim that the report was withheld to protect police. “Concluding that the report was withheld to protect WPD, when the law does not grant discretion to decide whether to release such a report, is a gross misrepresentation of the law and the City of Worcester’s appropriate response in accordance with the law,” a spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement.
Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, criticized the use of federal reform agreements known as consent decrees, saying they are costly micromanagement that “stripped local control of police departments from the communities they serve.”
Notably, the ACLU noted in its report that many law enforcement agencies’ records of use of force are not detailed and thorough, making it difficult for the public and law enforcement themselves to identify problems and prevent excessive use of force problems.
Borchetta said the ACLU’s review is ongoing and the organization will take all steps necessary to reveal more public information.
“Real change can happen when people in the community want change and are pushing for it,” she said. “So we continue to work with communities and support them with this information and hope and expect that they will be able to implement the reforms that the Department of Justice has tried to deny.”
