Topher Sanders, ProPublica
Last year, when the Trump Justice Department dropped its oversight of troubled police departments in cities such as Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, it argued that the reform efforts were “factually unjustified.”
But according to a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union, officers in those places were continuing to engage in the very behaviors that attracted federal scrutiny in the first place, including using excessive — and dangerous — force against people experiencing mental health crises.
The ACLU reviewed hundreds of police use-of-force reports in four communities where, under the Biden administration, the DOJ had found evidence of unconstitutional policing. In their review, ACLU investigators found agencies continuing to misuse Tasers and failing to properly review their officers’ use of force.
In one case, Minneapolis police repeatedly shocked a man with a Taser after he complied with their orders. In another, a Louisville officer broke a man’s car window during a mental health call while a second officer pointed his gun, escalating the encounter, according to the report. That officer then pulled the man from the car, at which point the man brandished a knife. The officers hit him with a baton and shocked him seven times.
The records primarily span from late 2024, after President Donald Trump won a second term in the White House, to early 2025, as the new administration began to shift the Justice Department away from its traditional focus on civil rights enforcement.
The report also cites reporting by ProPublica, which has detailed police misconduct and reform efforts in Louisville and Memphis, Tennessee. In the fall of 2025, Trump deployed hundreds of National Guard troops, U.S. Marshals and immigration officials to Memphis because, he said, “of the crime that’s going on.” The operation, ProPublica found, ensnared innocent residents of the majority-Black city who said they were targeted and harassed because of their race. The U.S. Marshals Service, which led the effort, disputed the claims of racial profiling.
The aim of the ACLU effort, the authors said, was to hold local police accountable in the absence of federal oversight and to keep reforms moving in communities where investigators found or had concerns of excessive force and racial targeting. To do that, the nonprofit made public records requests for reports detailing officers’ use of force and other records from police or sheriff 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 communities that needed help to ensure that reforms were made in their communities, and our analysis of the records unfortunately proves that to have happened,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the deputy project director on policing for the ACLU.
The ACLU also sought records from Rankin County, Mississippi, where in 2023 members of the
Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, calling themselves the “Goon Squad,” beat and tortured two Black men. The officers were convicted and sentenced to decades in prison in 2024. Biden’s DOJ launched an investigation into the sheriff’s department, and reports indicate that the Trump administration is continuing the probe. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s department told Mississippi Today that the agency “will continue its cooperation with the investigation in order to show that all aspects of the department’s policing are within constitutional boundaries.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed the ACLU’s findings as “partisan talking points” from an organization that she said “suffers from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” She also defended the administration’s approach. “President Trump is a champion for our great law enforcement officers and has encouraged them to arrest criminals and enforce the law — unlike the Biden Administration,” Jackson said.
The ACLU report spotlights Louisville and Minneapolis in particular because they had signed reform agreements with the Biden Justice Department before the Trump administration dropped the underlying lawsuits and quashed the cases in 2025. The two cities were also more forthcoming than the others in response to the ACLU’s records requests.
According to the report, officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department used excessive force, including striking people in their face, head or body while they were handcuffed, and failed to adequately review incidents of force, mischaracterizing facts during those reviews to make force appear more reasonable. A spokesperson for the Louisville police department told ProPublica it “reviews use-of-force incidents through multiple layers of supervision, and when policy violations are identified, appropriate corrective action is taken.”
Police also escalated encounters with people experiencing mental health crises by pointing their guns at them, the ACLU found. The issue has been particularly pronounced this year.
In March, Louisville police officers fatally shot and killed a 28-year-old woman named Katelyn Hall in her apartment while she was experiencing a mental health crisis. The incident is still under investigation, but police have said Hall posed a threat to officers because, they said, 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. A caller reported Nitzken was having a “mental break,” according to local reports. The officer who shot Nitzken was indicted on charges of manslaughter and reckless homicide. He has pleaded not guilty. The officer’s lawyer did not respond to a request to speak to his client.
The Minneapolis Police Department’s records showed evidence of excessive force, improper use of Tasers and poor reviews of use of force, the ACLU report says. The police department didn’t provide comment.
Both Louisville and Minneapolis have adopted local versions of the reform agreements they had inked with the Biden administration, and local leaders have pledged to institute changes, which are being overseen by independent monitors. A spokesperson for the city of Louisville noted that its leadership “voluntarily” took on the reform effort after the DOJ “abandoned” federal oversight.
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.
“That the problems are still persisting in the same way is suggesting to me that the police departments are not doing enough to improve that conduct,” Borchetta said.
After the killings of Hall and Nitzken, Louisville’s mayor, Craig Greenberg, told local press the city was “moving as rapidly” as it can to change the way police respond to mental health calls by allowing behavioral health experts to help officers during such incidents.
The ACLU’s findings were “not all bad,” though, the authors wrote. The nonprofit credited Louisville for its transparency and for instances in which the review process worked “to identify, correct, and improve possible misuses of force.”
The organization had intended to produce a more expansive report but said that proved impossible due to the resistance and delays by the other local police departments it was scrutinizing. The Justice Department had investigated those cities and issued reports finding evidence their departments had engaged in unconstitutional policing. But the cases had not progressed beyond that when Trump was elected.
Memphis and Phoenix refused to turn over the use-of-force records, the ACLU said, so the organization turned to the courts. The nonprofit sued Memphis in February for the documents. “Only then did Memphis finally agree to respond. This production is continuing, as is the ACLU’s review,” the report states. 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 sued Phoenix earlier this month for its records. The litigation is ongoing. The police department there did not respond to a request for comment.
In Worcester, Massachusetts, where the DOJ had previously found officers engaging in sex acts during undercover investigations, the ACLU said officials initially withheld a substantial amount of records, citing a statute meant to protect the privacy of sexual abuse victims. Worcester eventually relented and provided more records, the ACLU said, but still withheld 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.
A spokesperson for the city of Worcester rejected the ACLU’s assertion that the reports were withheld to protect the police department. “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,” the spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement.
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, in its report, the ACLU found that a number of the law enforcement agencies’ use-of-force records were not detailed and thorough, making it difficult for the public or the agencies themselves to identify problems or prevent excessive-force issues.
Borchetta said that the ACLU’s review is ongoing and the organization will take whatever action is needed to unlock more public information.
“You can make real change when people in the community want change and are pushing for it,” she said. “So we expect and hope that we can continue to work with communities and support them with this information, so that they can get the reform the DOJ tried to deny them.”
