When a homeless man questioned the Phoenix police’s authority to stop him in February 2020, an officer grabbed him and knelt on his neck while another officer shocked him with a Taser. Another unhoused man said officers threw away his belongings, telling him, “You guys are trash and this is trash.” Other people experiencing homelessness were regularly cited and arrested by the city’s officers during early morning hours for “conduct that is plainly not a crime.”

Those were among the abuses alleged by the Department of Justice last June, following a nearly three-year investigation into the city of Phoenix and its police department. The investigation marked the first time the DOJ had found a pattern of violations against homeless people, including that officers and other city employees illegally threw away their belongings.

In addition, DOJ investigators found that officers disproportionately cited and arrested people experiencing homelessness. They comprised 37% of all Phoenix Police Department arrests from 2016 to 2022, though homeless people account for less than 1% of the population. Investigators said many of those stops, citations and arrests were unconstitutional.

The wide-ranging probe also found officers used excessive force, discriminated against people of color, retaliated against protesters and violated the rights of people with behavioral health disabilities — similar issues to those the DOJ has documented in troubled law enforcement agencies in other cities.

But federal officials announced Wednesday that they had abandoned efforts to compel the city and police to address those issues. The DOJ closed its investigations and retracted findings of constitutional violations in Phoenix and five other jurisdictions, including Trenton, New Jersey. Beyond that, the Department of Justice said it was dismissing Biden-era lawsuits against several other police departments, including in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by police five years ago.

The DOJ said requiring the cities to enter consent decrees, which are intended to ensure reforms are enacted, would have “imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.”

The city of Phoenix said in a statement that it has “tirelessly focused on enhancing policy, training and accountability measures to ensure the best public safety for everyone who lives, works and plays in Phoenix.” In recent years, the city has enacted policy changes including employee training and the implementation of body-worn cameras.

Legal experts told ProPublica the wrongdoing the DOJ uncovered in Phoenix should be corrected — even though city officials will be under less pressure to act.

“It is a very real shame and a disservice to the residents of these communities to end the work, to stand down and unwind the investigations and to purport to retract the findings,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

The report’s retraction, along with last year’s Supreme Court decision allowing cities to arrest and cite people for sleeping outside even when they have nowhere else to go, could further embolden cities and police departments to marginalize homeless people, said Brook Hill, senior counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal advocacy group that focuses on racial justice issues. “They will feel like they have a license to do the sweeps and to otherwise make life in public view uncomfortable for unhoused people,” he said.

Indeed, just last week California Gov. Gavin Newsom urged all local governments in that state to “use their authority affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court” to address encampments.

After the DOJ began the Phoenix investigation in August 2021, Fund for Empowerment, an Arizona advocacy group for homeless people, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona sued the city and police department to stop what attorneys called “unconstitutional raids” on unsheltered people. Its lawsuit accused the city of failing to provide housing and instead turning to encampment removals to clear sidewalks and other areas. “The City has made its message to unhoused individuals clear: engaging in sleep and other essential life activities on the city’s public grounds will lead to detention, arrest, displacement, and the loss of the individual’s personal effects,” the Fund for Empowerment alleged in court documents.

Nearly a month later, a judge issued an injunction preventing the city from enforcing its camping ban against people who can’t find shelter, as well as from seizing and throwing away people’s belongings. The lawsuit is ongoing.

The DOJ’s June 2024 report stated that even after the injunction and new city policies were in place, city officials continued to arrest people for camping and to destroy people’s belongings without notice or the opportunity to reclaim them.

ProPublica, as part of its investigation into cities’ handling of homeless people’s possessions, found that Phoenix rarely stored property seized from encampments. From May 2023 to 2024, the city responded to 4,900 reports from the public involving encampments, according to its records. The city said workers, trained to assess which items are property and which are trash, found items that could be stored at only 405 of the locations it visited. Not all of those belongings required storage because people may have removed them between a report of an encampment and the city’s arrival. The city stored belongings 69 times.

In January 2024, the city issued its own report in anticipation of the DOJ’s allegations. The city said it found nothing to support accusations that police “interfered with the possessions of people experiencing homelessness.” Phoenix officials also said in the report that although the city and police department “welcome additional insights” from the DOJ, they were unwilling to be subjected to a consent decree, a binding plan in which an appointed monitor oversees implementation of reforms.

Attorneys and advocates said that the DOJ’s decision has no bearing on lawsuits filed by private attorneys alleging civil rights violations, including against people who are homeless. The ACLU this week also launched a seven-state effort to file records requests to hold police departments accountable, it said.

Elizabeth Venable, lead community organizer with the Fund for Empowerment, who also helped the DOJ connect with the unhoused community in Phoenix, said she viewed the federal findings as a victory for unhoused people. Despite the retraction by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Venable said, the report still has weight.

“No matter what Pam Bondi says, people are not going to forget it, especially people who learned about something that they were horrified by,” she said.