Justice Dept. to Release Minneapolis Police Report After George Floyd Murder

The Justice Department is expected to announce the results of an investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department on Friday, according to two people familiar with the planning, capping a multiyear examination of the long-troubled agency, whose abuses captured global attention when an officer murdered George Floyd in 2020.

The report is expected to be released at a news conference with Attorney General Merrick Garland, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta and city officials. The contents of the report are not yet known, but people familiar with the investigation said the inquiry uncovered significant systemic problems and could lead to an agreement between the parties, known as a consent decree, overseen by a federal judge.

The expected announcement was previously reported by Bloomberg Law and KSTP-TV in Minnesota.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has negotiated consent decrees in the past to enforce policing overhauls in Baltimore, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo., among other cities, after similar investigations.

The murder of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, by Officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020 touched off protests and civil unrest across the country and led to calls to fundamentally rethink or defund policing. Mr. Floyd’s death, video of which circulated widely online, brought condemnations from across the political spectrum and criminal convictions for the police officers who were involved, a relatively rare occurrence. Mr. Chauvin was convicted of murder in state court and pleaded guilty to a federal charge of violating Mr. Floyd’s civil rights. Three other officers at the scene that night — Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane — were also convicted of federal and state charges.

In Minneapolis, long a center of progressive activism, the murder and the unrest changed the city. Activists and several City Council members initially called for the abolition of the police force and pledged to implement changes to ensure a similar killing would not happen again. Hundreds of officers left the police department, with some receiving disability payments for post-traumatic stress that they linked to the unrest.

In the years since, the politics around crime and policing have shifted again. Minneapolis voters rejected a ballot measure in 2021 that would have replaced the Police Department with a new public safety agency. Mayor Jacob Frey, who was jeered by protesters in the days after Mr. Floyd’s murder when he spoke against defunding the police, was elected to a second term.

But the troubles of the Minneapolis police force, which had faced protests for other killings in the years before Mr. Floyd’s death, have only became more clear. Amid uncertainty about its future, the department struggled to retain officers and hit recruiting goals. Concerns about rising crime led some residents to avoid public transit.

And a report last year from the Minnesota Department of Human Rights affirmed what many residents had complained about for years: a police force with a “culture that is averse to oversight and accountability” and that routinely engages in racially discriminatory policing.

After that report, the state reached a legal settlement with Minneapolis. That agreement, announced earlier this year, included a pledge to rein in the use of force and discontinue the practice of using the smell of marijuana as a pretext to search people. It is not clear if some of those measures will also be included in any future federal consent decree.