By ACLU
Photos: YouTube Screenshots
MOUNT VERNON, NY – The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and local partners launched the Seven States Safety Campaign today, filing coordinated public records requests to uncover police misconduct in Mount Vernon, NY and six other jurisdictions where the U.S. Department of Justice under former President Biden found police engaged in unconstitutional and racially discriminatory policing.
The Trump administration has pledged to halt federal oversight and has begun reversing course, including by rescinding near-final agreements in Minneapolis and Louisville and retracting findings of unconstitutional policing practices in Mount Vernon. In addition to New York, these requests are being submitted today in Tennessee, Massachusetts, Arizona, Mississippi, Minnesota, and Kentucky – states where federal civil rights investigations and reports confirmed widespread patterns of police abuse.
“After a three-year intensive investigation, the Department of Justice found that the Mount Vernon Police Department has engaged in disturbing patterns of civil rights abuses that often target people of color. These violations include the use of excessive force, illegal arrests and degrading strip searches,” said Daniel Lambright, Special Counsel for Criminal Justice Litigation at the NYCLU. “As the Trump Administration is hellbent on shielding police departments from accountability, the NYCLU and the ACLU are joining impacted communities to demand transparency and justice. The Mount Vernon Police Department cannot police itself: the department must now be fully transparent about their policing practices and implement necessary changes to confront police misconduct and protect the residents they have sworn to serve.”
From 2021 to early 2025, the DOJ launched 12 “pattern or practice” investigations into local police departments. In the seven departments that are the focus of this campaign, investigators found that police routinely used excessive force, targeted people of color, and violated constitutional rights as a matter of practice. Despite these findings, the seven departments nationwide continue to operate without binding consent decrees in place to hold them accountable and to address these documented civil rights abuses.
“The DOJ under Biden found police were wantonly assaulting people and that it wasn’t a problem of ‘bad apples’ but of avoidable, department-wide failures,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the ACLU. “By turning its back on police abuse, Trump’s DOJ is putting communities at risk, and the ACLU is stepping in because people are not safe when police can ignore their civil rights.”
The DOJ relied on thousands of police records, thousands of hours of police videos, and interviews with police personnel throughout each department to develop their reports. The investigation into the Mount Vernon Police Department, spurred by community demands for transparency and accountability, took place from 2021-2024 and was released on December 12, 2024. According to the findings, the department:
- Uses excessive force in numerous ways, including by unnecessarily escalating minor encounters and by overusing tasers and closed-fist strikes;
- Conducted unlawful strip searches and body cavity searches of individuals until at least 2023; and
- Makes arrests without probable cause.
As the federal government retreats from oversight, communities are once again stepping up to demand transparency and justice, partnering with the NYCLU and ACLU in this campaign.
You can find the NYCLU FOIL request here: https://www.nyclu.org/uploads/2025/05/5_21_25_-MVPD-Policing-Practices-FOIL-Request.pdf
