Panel says it is too early to judge impact of Minneapolis police consent decree
Legal experts, state officials and Minneapolis police reform leaders say it is still too soon to know whether the state consent decree is changing the culture inside MPD that allowed racism and abuse to persist. At a public forum, speakers pointed to funding gaps, weak technology, limited public awareness and deep mistrust as obstacles to real community driven change.
Legal experts, civil rights officials, and Minneapolis police reform leaders said Thursday that it’s still too soon to know whether the state’s consent decree is changing the culture that allowed racism and abuse to persist within the Minneapolis Police Department. The comments came during a Nov. 20 panel at The Glass House.
“The answer is we don’t know yet,” said Minnesota Department of Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero.
The panel featured Lucero; GaneishaEff Martin, chief of MPD’s Constitutional Policing Bureau and one of the first civilians to hold a high-ranking role within the department; and Arlinda Westbrook of Effective Law Enforcement for All (ELEFA), the independent monitoring team overseeing MPD’s compliance with the agreement.
Martin said MPD needs significant technology upgrades to track reforms and share real-time information with the public, improvements she said remain difficult to fund due to resistance toward increasing the police budget.
“There’s not technology where you can automatically put it in and it has analytics,” she said. “I’m in the process of trying to hire the right people who can do that type of work in the police department, which is a whole situation.”
Transparency, she added, depends on tools the department simply does not yet have. “You can’t be transparent to the community, and you can’t properly manage your standards and try to create cultural change, if you don’t have the technology.”
How Minnesota got here
The Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) launched a sweeping investigation after former MPD officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes on May 25, 2020. MDHR found a decade-long pattern of racial discrimination and unconstitutional policing. The findings led the state to negotiate a court-enforceable consent decree intended to reform MPD practices.
A separate federal investigation reached similar conclusions, and the U.S. Department of Justice initially sought a federal consent decree. But in June 2025, the DOJ under President Donald Trump moved to dismiss its lawsuit.
However, the state consent decree remains in effect, overseen by MDHR and monitored by ELEFA.
Who shapes reform
The discussion grew tense at moments as panelists weighed in on how the public should participate in revising MPD policies.
Westbrook said that while the decree calls for public input, both MPD and ELEFA could strengthen how they respond to community comments, especially by making clear which suggestions are accepted and which are not.
“That doesn’t require a system,” she said.
Last summer, community advocate Mara Schanfield urged MPD and ELEFA to extend public comment periods, arguing that 30 days was insufficient for meaningful engagement. ELEFA cofounder David Douglas responded at the time that the 45-day requirement applies only to four core areas under the MDHR agreement, and that the monitoring team’s authority to change the timeline is limited.
Martin pushed back on the suggestion that no additional infrastructure was needed. “Respectfully, Miss Monitor, this may change to ‘The Real Housewives of Consent Decree,’” she said, drawing laughs from the audience.
“There is one guy who is writing policy, reviewing it, doing best practices, and taking in all those lovely comments, trying to translate them. And so we do need a system to help us be transparent, unless we get more money to hire more people.”
Public awareness still limited
Lucero urged ELEFA and MPD to take the consent decree process back into the courtroom through public hearings. “People should be able to provide their feedback and comments too,” she said.
Martin said even cities years into their decrees face major challenges with public engagement. “Seven or eight years into consent decrees in other cities, a lot of people still don’t know about them,” she said. “People either don’t trust it, don’t believe it, or don’t feel safe.”
Westbrook argued that the state-led approach in Minnesota could prove stronger than the federal model, which she said has often faltered once federal oversight ends.
“What was exciting here is that it was led by community who came to the commissioner at the state level,” she said. “There’s already a community–state partnership.”
Lucero emphasized that constitutional compliance should be seen only as a baseline. “You can do constitutional policing in a race-based way,” she said. Real culture change, she added, requires confronting racial bias directly and moving beyond the minimum legal thresholds.
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