DOCUMENTING HATE - "Anti-Heterosexual" vs "Anti-Gay" Crimes

"Police Are Mislabeling Anti-LGBTQ and Other Crimes as Anti-Heterosexual" by Rachel Glickhouse and Rahima Nasa, ProPublica 5/15/2018

ProPublica sent public-records requests to more than 50 police departments that reported anti-heterosexual hate crimes to the FBI.  None of the reports we could track down actually included evidence of hate crimes against straight people.

Rob heard a loud knock at his door late one night in August 2014.  His landlord had been calling him about maintenance issues in his Columbus, Ohio, apartment, but that night she came with a male companion and began to scream at him.  According to a police report, the man jumped into the argument and threatened Rob — who asked that we not use his full name — with a homophobic slur.  Fearing an escalation, he called the police.

“A thing that I’ve dealt with my entire life as a gay man is extreme prejudice, from threats to constant harassment,” Rob said, noting that his landlord had previously told his neighbors that he was a “filthy queer.”

Columbus police acknowledged Rob’s concern that the incident may have been motivated by bias, but they got a key detail wrong in their incident report: They mistakenly marked it as a case of anti-heterosexual harassment.

Since 2010, Columbus police have reported six incidents that list bias against heterosexuals as the purported motivation.  That’s more than any other local law enforcement agency in the nation reported during that period.  Columbus Police Department Sgt. Dean Worthington acknowledges it’s likely that the officers who filed the reports marked the wrong box.

“Given the fact that our officers are human, we are prone to make the occasional mistake,” said Worthington.  “I can assure you these mistakes were not intentional.”

Each officer has a supervisor whose duty is to check such reports, but it’s possible the errors still got through, Worthington added.

Those reports made their way from Columbus to Washington, D.C., where they were compiled with thousands of others into what the FBI calls the Uniform Crime Report.  Every year a small number of anti-heterosexual hate crime reports end up in the UCR.  From 2010 to 2016, the FBI reported that local law enforcement agencies noted a total of 142 of them.

ProPublica reviewed dozens of these reports, however, and found few, if any, actual hate crimes targeting people for being heterosexual.

We sent Freedom of Information Act requests to every law enforcement agency that reported a heterosexual bias crime in 2016 — the most recent year for which FBI data was available.  We also sent requests to every agency that had reported two or more such crimes since 2010, as well as to any agency available in an online service used to send public-records requests called Muckrock.

In total, we were able to locate records for 58 cases.

None described hate crimes spurred by anti-heterosexual bias.  As with the case in Columbus, about half were actually anti-gay or anti-bisexual crimes that were miscategorized.  Seven cases appeared to reflect other types of bias, with victims targeted because they were Jewish or black or women.  Some 18 cases don’t seem to have been hate crimes at all, containing no discernible bias element.

The findings reflect a larger problem: Many local law enforcement agencies do a poor job tracking hate crimes.  It’s a problem that can endanger public safety and leave policy makers blind when grappling with the growing problem of hate crimes and bias incidents in America.

Rob says he was discouraged from pressing charges against his landlord due to a lack of witnesses present.  The police filled out an incident report but he decided not to pursue it further, in part because he feared reprisal from his landlord.  When he found out from ProPublica that the police had marked the report wrong, he said it felt like yet another slight.

“It’s just sad to hear because I know she was targeting me for being a gay man,” he said.

As ProPublica reported last year, when asked for hate crimes data, many police departments said they hadn’t investigated any hate incidents, had no records on file, or that their records were poorly kept.  Some police departments don’t mark bias-motivated crimes as such, or officers aren’t sure of how to mark hate crimes within their record systems.

ProPublica found that many of the anti-LGBTQ crimes mismarked as anti-heterosexual were vandalism and involved the use of a common anti-gay slur.  Even Palm Springs, California — which has one of the highest proportion of same-sex couples in the country, according to a census analysis by UCLA’s Williams Institute — misreported an anti-gay hate crime as anti-heterosexual.

In a few cases, victims were straight but were targeted by suspects who believed them to be gay.  Even in cases of mistaken identity, the FBI instructs police to mark the perceived bias of the aggressor — in these cases, as anti-LGBTQ.  In Columbus, Ohio, a straight man was called a “faggot” before he was assaulted.  The report, however, indicated that the attack was motivated by anti-heterosexual bias.  In Gainesville, Florida, a straight woman and her female roommate were targeted, police correctly marked it as an anti-lesbian hate crime on the incident report, but it was reflected in the FBI’s data as an anti-heterosexual incident.  Officials weren’t sure why.

In the FBI’s bias codes system, 44 is the code for an anti-heterosexual crime, while 41 is the code for an anti-gay male hate crime, making such a mistake a matter of a single digit.  Several police departments pointed to drop-down menus and online tracking systems as the reason behind mislabeling.

For example, San Leandro, California, reported three anti-heterosexual hate crimes to the FBI between 2014 and 2016.  Judy Park, the department’s records supervisor, acknowledged that all three were in fact anti-gay hate crimes.  She said the cases had been added to the department’s internal system correctly, but the computer software had extracted the bias code number wrong — showing a 44 (anti-heterosexual) instead of a 41 (anti-gay male) on the incident reports.  Park said she would work with the software vendor to fix the problem and try to correct the mistake with the FBI.  “Thank you for bringing it to our attention, because we never would have known,” she added.

Officials from five other police departments — Tehachapi, California; Evesham and Princeton, New Jersey; Columbus, Ohio; and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville — also said they would work to correct such errors with state or federal agencies.

In some cases, police reports obtained by ProPublica showed no indication of a bias motivation in the description of the crime.

A number of these cases involved thefts, robberies and credit card fraud.  In Benton, Kentucky, a few days before Christmas 2016, a suspect walked out of a Walmart with a shopping cart full of stolen merchandise, including drones, a scooter and a video game controller, according to Benton Police Chief Jeremy Hicks.  He acknowledged the case was mistakenly mislabeled as an anti-heterosexual hate crime.

The erroneous reports suggest that the FBI is undercounting anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, which represent a significant portion of U.S.  bias crimes.  The FBI’s 2016 hate crimes report showed that sexual orientation-based bias crimes were the third most common hate crimes.  The vast majority of those targeted victims for being gay, lesbian or bisexual.  According to a National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs report, 2016 was “the deadliest year on record” for the LGBTQ community.

A statement from the FBI was unavailable at press time.  We will update this story once we receive it.

To be sure, hate crimes against heterosexual people are possible.  Federal law lists “sexual orientation” as a category of hate crimes, and a crime perpetrated against somebody for being straight would be a hate crime under federal law.  But if there have been any of these crimes investigated or charged, it’s tough to find them in public records.

The difficulty of finding bona fide anti-heterosexual bias crimes or incidents is reflected by the lack of tips gathered by ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project.  We’ve collected more than 500 tips from people who say they or someone they know was targeted because of their sexual orientation — but no tips at all from people who say they were targeted based on being heterosexual.

Anti-heterosexual hate crimes are so rare that experts working on hate crimes for years struggled to recall them, citing two cases of straight men getting assaulted at gay bars and a few attacks on religious institutions by gay activists in the 1990s.

ProPublica identified a handful of anti-heterosexual cases that fell into a gray area.

In Canton, Ohio, a yard sign opposing gay marriage was knocked over, damaging the steel posts holding it up.  In Louisburg, North Carolina, signs encouraging people to vote for a state amendment to ban same-sex marriage were stolen multiple times in front of a Baptist church.

Police officials from Stark County, Ohio, and Franklin County, North Carolina, told ProPublica they weren’t sure why the incidents were reported to the FBI as prompted by anti-heterosexual bias.  Experts weren’t sure how to classify these crimes, saying they could potentially reflect political or ideological bias.

Jeannine Bell, a law professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law who has studied hate crimes for more than two decades, says poor data collection indicates law enforcement agencies don’t take hate crimes seriously.

“It means that police fundamentally are not investigating hate crimes,” she said.  “Hate crime needs to be more than checking a box.”

PULITZER PRIZE - ProPublica and New York Daily News

"ProPublica, New York Daily News Win Pulitzer Gold Medal" ProPublica 4/10/2017

ProPublica and the New York Daily News today won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, honoring their joint investigation on abuses in the New York City Police Department's enforcement of the nuisance abatement law.  The award is the fourth Pulitzer Prize for ProPublica and the 11th for the Daily News.

THE STORY:

"The NYPD Is Kicking People Out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven't Committed a Crime" by Sarah Ryley for ProPublica and the New York Daily News, 2/4/2016

THE MORNING OF MAY 4, 2011, Jameelah El-Shabazz watched out the window of her Bronx apartment as a team of police officers fanned across the rooftop of Banana Kelly High School?  The 43-year-old mother of five said she didn't think much of the scene — drug raids were common in her neighborhood.

As she did most mornings, El-Shabazz said she went to her bedroom to feed her newborn son and to worship before a shrine of candles and carvings arranged atop her wardrobe?  Her most treasured object was a wooden tray her father had brought her from Nigeria?  A deity of the Ifa religion, which she practices as a high priestess, was carved on its surface and covered in a residue of finely crushed eggshells?  El-Shabazz used the substance, known in her faith as efun powder, to cleanse the shrine?  She took fresh clumps of the powder from a cup and began to break it up in her hands.

That's when the narcotics officers kicked in the door.

Her baby shrieked as the gun-wielding officers tore apart rooms looking for PCP, which an anonymous informant had claimed was being sold from the apartment?  They ordered everyone to lie on the ground, then turned to her eldest son, Akin Shakoor, who along with another son was having frequent run-ins with police?  El-Shabazz said the officers told Shakoor if he didn't give up the drugs, “they would take all of my children away from me and make sure that I was put out of my apartment.”

As evidence, police seized 45 paper cups of the eggshell powder, the sacred wooden tray, and a small amount of marijuana?  They arrested El-Shabazz, her teenaged sister Najah El-Shabazz, and Shakoor, then 21, and took them outside past the handcuffed residents of four other apartments that were raided that morning.

Najah was released, court filings say, but Jameelah El-Shabazz and Shakoor sat in cells on Rikers Island for the next week awaiting the results of police lab tests?  Finally, the results confirmed what she had told the officers all along: the wooden tray and the 45 paper cups of powder were drug-free?  Jameelah El-Shabazz and Shakoor were released from Rikers and fully exonerated.

But El-Shabazz's battle with New York's legal system was only beginning?  That September, another of her sons called to say the police were back, this time with a lawyer and a court order to seal the Bronx apartment?  Her entire family had to leave — immediately.

El-Shabazz was facing a nuisance abatement action, a little-known type of lawsuit that gives the city the power to shut down places it claims are being used for illegal purposes?  The case against her was based on the same drug allegations that had been dismissed in May?  Incredibly, the filing, signed by a New York Police Department attorney, stated, “recovered during the execution of the search warrant were forty-five (45) paper cups of cocaine.”

The nuisance abatement law was created in the 1970's to combat the sex industry in Times Square?  Since then, its use has been vastly expanded, commonly targeting apartments and mom-and-pop bodegas even as the city's crime rate has reached historic lows?  The NYPD files upward of 1,000 such cases a year, nearly half of them against residences.

The process has remarkably few protections for people facing the loss of their homes.

Three-quarters of the cases begin with secret court orders that lock residents out until the case is resolved?  The police need a judge's signoff, but residents aren't notified and thus have no chance to tell their side of the story until they've already been locked out for days?  And because these are civil actions, residents also have no right to an attorney.

Perhaps most fundamentally, residents can be permanently barred from their homes without being convicted or even charged with a crime.

A man was prohibited from living in his family home and separated from his young daughter over gambling allegations that were dismissed in criminal court?  A diabetic man said he was forced to sleep on subways and stoops for a month after being served with a nuisance abatement action over low-level drug charges that also never led to a conviction?  Meanwhile, his elderly mother was left with no one to care for her.

In partnership with ProPublica, the Daily News reviewed 516 residential nuisance abatement actions filed in the Supreme Courts from Jan?  1, 2013 through June 30, 2014?  Our analysis also reviewed the outcomes of the underlying criminal cases against hundreds of people who were banned from homes as a result of these actions.

• 173 of the people who gave up their leases or were banned from homes were not convicted of a crime, including 44 people who appear to have faced no criminal prosecution whatsoever.

• Overall, tenants and homeowners lost or had already left homes in three-quarters of the 337 cases for which the Daily News and ProPublica were able to determine the outcome?  The other cases were either withdrawn without explanation, were missing settlements, or are still active.

• In at least 74 cases, residents agreed to warrantless searches of their homes, sometimes in perpetuity, as one of the conditions of being allowed back in?  Others agreed to automatically forfeit their leases if they were merely accused of wrongdoing in the future.

• The toll of nuisance abatement actions falls almost exclusively on minorities, our analysis showed?  Over 18 months, nine of 10 homes subjected to such actions were in minority communities?  We identified the race of 215 of the 297 people who were barred from homes in nuisance abatement battles?  Only five are white.

Runa Rajagopal of the Bronx Defenders, who leads a division that represents people in the civil courts, called the practice a “collective punishment” on the entire family of those accused of a crime, “used by the NYPD to exert power and control largely over communities of color.”

The NYPD declined to answer any questions about specific cases.

Officials emphasized that because these are civil cases, they're handled separately from criminal cases and thus have lower standards of proof.

“The law does not require criminal conviction, does not require [a] particular disposition of a criminal case, does not even require an arrest of anyone,” said Lawrence Byrne, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters in an interview with the Daily News last year.

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Excerpt

Assistant Commissioner Robert Messner, who heads the NYPD's Civil Enforcement Unit, concurred, saying, “You have to remember, it's an action about a place.  It's not about people.”

The department's chief spokesman, Stephen Davis, said in a statement that the suits are intended to prevent crimes from reoccurring at 'repeat offender' locations.  “Each nuisance abatement order and settlement is signed-off by a judge.” Davis added.

Though a nuisance abatement threatened to force El-Shabazz out of her home, she doesn't appear to have been the intended target.  Two of El-Shabazz's sons were already known to police when her apartment was raided in 2011.

Akin Shakoor had been arrested at the building at least twice before, in 2009, for misdemeanor possession of drugs.  He pleaded both cases down to non-criminal violations.  Her other son, Jehadh Shakoor, was arrested in the neighborhood with marijuana in 2008, and with PCP in 2009, and convicted of misdemeanor possession charges.  (El-Shabazz said the officers also often harassed a third son, who was an honor student in high school and is now in college.)

The narcotics officer behind nuisance abatement cases against El-Shabazz and others, Detective Peter Valentin, has his own history.  The Daily News earlier identified him as the most-sued officer on the NYPD's 35,000-member force.  Valentin was put on desk duty in 2014 for allegedly fabricating buys from confidential informants.

The NYPD has embraced nuisance abatement actions as part of its controversial “Broken Windows” strategy of aggressively pursuing low-level offenders to prevent more serious ones.

This decades-old approach — which has introduced large numbers of black and Hispanic New Yorkers to the criminal justice system through stop-and-frisks, summonses and misdemeanor arrests — has touched off waves of protests in recent years.

Though little heard of, nuisance abatement actions have long been a key component of the strategy.  William Bratton, fresh into his first tenure as the city's top law enforcement official, hailed such actions in a 1995 white paper on quality-of-life policing as “probably the most powerful civil tool available to the police,” allowing officers to “sweep down on a location and close it without warning.”

Since Bratton wrote those words, the number of nuisance abatement actions filed each year has quintupled.

Bratton was hired back as police commissioner in 2014.  While he has significantly reformed other aspects of quality-of-life policing, the department does not appear to have adjusted its policies when it comes to nuisance abatement actions. 

Sidney Baumgarten, the former city official who commissioned the drafting of the nuisance abatement law in the 1970s, said it is now being abused.  He is alarmed by the sheer volume of cases, especially those aimed at households in which no one has been convicted of a crime.

“I think it's wrong.  I think it's unconstitutional.  I think it's over-reaching,” he said.  “They're giving up their constitutional rights.  And why?  Because they're afraid they're going to be evicted from their home, with their children.  There's a certain amount of compulsion, and threat and coercion, by the very nature of the process they're using.”

In most other cities, officials can't initiate a nuisance abatement action unless they've given landlords the opportunity to solve problems first.  Authorities can only restrict access to a home after a court process that involves all parties.

But in New York, the NYPD begins nearly every nuisance abatement action by making an emergency appeal to a civil court judge without the landlord or tenant present, alleging the dangers a residence poses.  Affidavits detailing three instances of a particular crime, such as drug dealing or gambling, in a one-year period are enough for a judge to authorize an action.

The allegations can be based entirely on the work of confidential informants or undercover officers and need not have led to arrests.  The Daily News and ProPublica identified 17 nuisance abatement actions against residences and 64 against businesses in which no arrests were documented.

When they file a case, the police always ask the judge for permission to lock out the occupants of the residence until the case is resolved.  These requests for what's known as “temporary closing orders” state that the location is being used in an “ongoing illegal manner,” and that the “public health, safety and welfare require immediate abatement of the public nuisance.”

However, the NYPD's court filings routinely do not describe the alleged “ongoing” illegal activity that would justify immediately throwing people out of their homes.  Instead, the Daily News and ProPublica analysis found, police filings describe purported offenses that occurred, on average, at least five months earlier for businesses and six months earlier for residences.

Judge Fern Fisher, the deputy chief administrative judge for the city's courts, expressed concern.  “If it's six months old, then it's not all that much of an emergency that you can't wait three or four days for the (other) party to come in and tell their side of the story,” she said.

Prompted by the Daily News and ProPublica's findings, Fisher issued an advisory notice to judges on Feb. 1 that recommended limiting the granting of temporary closing orders of homes before the tenant or homeowner has come to court.  The notice also cautioned against granting such orders when the evidence of alleged illegal activity is old, or based on “statements with multiple layers of hearsay” and the word of confidential informants.

The Daily News and ProPublica found temporary closing orders were granted in 75 percent of the residential cases examined.  Some judges granted the requests nearly every time.  Queens Judge Orin Kitzes signed them in 235 out of 236 cases that came before him.  Others, such as Manhattan Judge Michael Stallman, routinely crossed out that portion of applications.  Stallman said he does this because the NYPD's attorneys never have any evidence of ongoing illegal activity or information about the outcomes of the underlying criminal cases.

“I can't remember the last time that I've ever had information about the disposition of a criminal case,” he said.  “I've repeatedly indicated that it's difficult for me to evaluate a civil case where I don't even know whether the criminal case is pending.”

NYPD's Messner said his lawyers “talk to” the precinct officers to confirm the location still poses a problem, but don't include this information in court filings for the sake of efficiency.

“The judges don't want to read tomes,” he said.  “We could do 100 cases a year instead of 800 cases a year, with, you know, tremendous levels of detail.  But we wouldn't end up with a better product.  We'd just end up helping a lot less people.”
 The NYPD's Byrne said when officers serve temporary closing orders, they can use their discretion to determine if certain family members can stay.

By law, people affected by temporary closing orders have a right to a court appearance within three business days.  But they could wait as long as five days if their court date would otherwise fall on a weekend.  At the courthouse, the NYPD's attorney usually offers to settle the case without going to trial — often by requiring tenants to bar specific people from their homes or to give up their leases.  Then the closing order is lifted.

But if tenants decide to fight the case, they may not be allowed to go home until the case is resolved.  Though cases rarely go to trial, settlement negotiations can take weeks.

Luis Rivera, 58, was shut out of his apartment in the Bronx for nearly a month in 2013 while he fought his case.  It alleged the requisite three violations: Five months earlier, police said a confidential informant had bought heroin at the apartment on two occasions.  Shortly thereafter, during a raid on the apartment, police said they found seven small paper envelopes of white powder, a marijuana cigarette and two gravity knives.  They arrested Rivera, along with two other men who were staying with him.

Rivera was described by people who knew him as having significant mental and physical impairments.  One woman, who asked not to be named, said she let Rivera sleep on a chair in her studio apartment after the nuisance abatement action left him homeless.  She said the officers should have known he was too sick for the streets.

“He was not doing good at all,” she said.  “He had cancer; he was on the transplant list.  You could tell he was very sick.  There were times when he didn't remember what was what.  He would shit on himself and everything.”

In court filings, Rivera said he did not understand what was happening when the police arrested him a second time as they served him with the nuisance abatement action.  When he was released, he simply went home, then was arrested a third time for violating a temporary closing order.

“My understanding was that I could go back to my apartment because I was given my keys.  I was handed some papers but I am not able to read or understand them on my own,” he said in an affidavit filed through his attorney, Rajagopal.  “I am still very confused as to how or why the police were able to evict me from my home without a hearing or trial.”

The criminal charges against Rivera and the other two men were eventually dismissed, and Rivera was allowed back in his apartment after signing a settlement with strict terms limiting who could visit.

He died last September.

JUSTICE IN AMERICA - Oakland California Police, the Report

"Study slams troubled Oakland police department for racial bias" PBS NewsHour 6/15/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The Oakland police department’s history of misconduct — particularly involving African-Americans — has made it the subject of federal oversight for 13 years.  Wednesday, Stanford researchers released the results of a two-year-long study into the department, confirming that Oakland officers exhibit significant racial biases in their day-to-day work.  Special correspondent Jackie Judd reports.

JACKIE JUDD (NewsHour):  The report confirms what African-American residents of Oakland, California, have long known, seen and felt.  Police often treat them very differently than white residents.

REBECCA HETEY, Stanford University:  We found a significant pattern of racial disparities in who was stopped, in who was handcuffed, in who was searched, and in who was arrested.

JACKIE JUDD:  Rebecca Hetey is a Stanford University researcher and an author of the report.

REBECCA HETEY:  More importantly, these disparities remained significant after we took into account a wide range of factors that we would expect to influence police decision-making, like crime rate, like neighborhood demographics.

REV. MICHAEL MCBRIDE, Operation Ceasefire:  It is an insult.  And no one can make me believe that this would be happening in any other community, except for a community that is defined by black, brown and poor people.

JACKIE JUDD:  Activists and brothers Michael and Ben McBride are longtime critics of the Oakland Police Department.

REV. BEN MCBRIDE, Operation Ceasefire:  We have a broken relationship because, while there have been some steps moving forward to try to repair it, there still has not been the kind of honest discourse that needs to happen around truth and reconciliation.

JACKIE JUDD:  According to the most recent FBI statistics, Oakland has more violent crime than any other U.S. city except for Detroit and Memphis.  It was in this supercharged atmosphere that city officials took an unprecedented step.  They decided to have outsiders analyze their officers’ behavior, knowing the results wouldn’t be pretty.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf....

MAYOR LIBBY SCHAAF, Oakland:  It is incredibly important that we ask these hard questions, so that we can get to the bottom of making the department something that the community trusts and that is, in fact, bringing justice.

WOMAN:  So, this when I just broke down the entire stops into both race and gender.

JACKIE JUDD:  Researchers at nearby Stanford University spent two years analyzing vast amounts of data, field reports from 28,000 stops officers made on the streets and roads during a 13-month period, and body-cam video from 2,000 of those encounters.  They expected to find about 7,800 stops of African-Americans.  In fact, there were more than double, almost 17,000 stops.

What surprised everyone involved even more was the huge gap in handcuffing.

HOMICIDE IN AMERICA - The Surge in Cities

"After declining for decades, homicides surge in cities across the country" PBS NewsHour 8/4/2015

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  The first half of this year has been a more violent and tragic one in many cities, leading police, community leaders, families and friends of victims to ask, what’s happening?

Across the country, scenes like these are playing out, at an escalating pace.  The Major Cities Police Chiefs Association reports homicides have spiked this year after hitting 50-year lows in 2013.  Members of the group voiced alarm at a Washington meeting on Monday.

J. THOMAS MANGER, President, Major Cities Chiefs Association:  What we focused on was the fact that we’re going to shooting scenes now where you have got more and more victims being shot, you have got more spent rounds being collected as evidence, and we’re finding more and more high-capacity magazines involved in these shootings.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  The association reports homicides are up an average of 19 percent in 35 big cities.  Chicago has the dubious distinction of leading the list, with 252 killings, up 20 percent.  But Saint Louis and Milwaukee have seen increases of 64 to 88 percent.  The city of Baltimore had 45 homicides in July alone, the most since 1972.

That followed the death of Freddie Gray in police custody last April, and the resulting riots.  Yesterday, Baltimore leaders announced federal agencies will embed special agents with city detectives.

Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings:

REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS (D), Maryland:  The only people who are getting — making — doing pretty good now are the morticians.  They’re the only ones.  And I say that we are a city that is better than that.  And so to all of our — all those folks who think that you have got to — you get your power from carrying a gun and shooting somebody and hurting somebody, I’m begging you, put your guns down.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Meanwhile, police chiefs say they are still trying to fully understand what’s behind the surge in killings.

"What caused the dramatic tipping point in deadly shootings?" PBS NewsHour 8/4/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Why has there been a dramatic spike in homicides this year?  Judy Woodruff speaks to Col. Sam Dotson, chief of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, and Edward Flynn, chief of the Milwaukee Police Department, two cities that have seen a substantial rise in murders, about the wide availability of guns, scrutiny of the criminal justice system, an increase in heroin use and systemic poverty.

POLICING - Repercussions of Ferguson

"Will events in Ferguson help define the future of American policing?" PBS NewsHour 3/12/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Hours after the chief of the embattled Ferguson Police Department resigned, two officers were shot from afar during a peaceful protest.  For reaction to the events and how they affect law enforcement, Judy Woodruff talks to Chuck Wexler of the Police of Executive Research Forum, Cincinnati Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell and Darrel Stephens of Major Cities Chiefs.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Late today, Saint Louis County police told the NewsHour that county and state police will take over security at any Ferguson protests tonight.

Now for a look at what this moment means for law enforcement officers in Ferguson and around the country, I’m joined by Cincinnati police chief Jeffrey Blackwell, who is in Atlanta for a law enforcement conference, by Chuck Wexler.  He’s the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum.  And Darrel Stephens, he’s the executive director of the Major Cities’ Chiefs Association.

Welcome to all three of you.

Darrel Stephens, let me start with you.  You do represent tens of thousands of police officers across the country.  What is your reaction to what happened last night in Ferguson?

DARREL STEPHENS, Executive Director, Major Cities Chiefs Association:  Well, unfortunately, it’s another one of those tragic situations where police officers have been ambushed.  Police officers that were at a peaceful protest that were completely unaware that someone was waiting in the background to take a shot at them.

So it’s — it puts the police officers not only in the Saint Louis County area in a situation of being fearful when they hit the streets.  It has an impact throughout the country.  It’s something that they’re used to, something that they’re trained to respond to, but, nevertheless, it’s an increasing challenge for them to go out, do their job, police, and police effectively when they have this on their mind all the time.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Chief Blackwell, what were your thoughts when you heard about what happened?  And do you agree with Mr. Stephens that this kind of thing has an impact everywhere?

JEFFREY BLACKWELL, Chief, Cincinnati Police Department:  It absolutely does.  I agree with him wholeheartedly.

I think anything like this, what affects — I say it all the time — what affects us anywhere affects us everywhere in American policing.  And so this act of cowardly injustice committed against these police officers has those officers more on edge now today, at a time when we’re trying to increase collaboration and mend the fracture that is existing in that community.

It makes it hard to move forward when you have these type of activities taking place.

POLICING - How Ferguson Got There

"How tickets, fines and fees undermined police focus on community in Ferguson" PBS NewsHour 3/5/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  A U.S. Justice Department investigation into law enforcement in Ferguson discovered many disturbing incidents that helped drive distrust and hostility between the community and police.  Gwen Ifill discusses the report’s findings with Rev. Starsky Wilson and Kevin Ahlbrand of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police, two members of an independent commission set up by the state of Missouri.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  We turn now to two members of the independent commission set up by the state of Missouri to look into the events in Ferguson.  Starsky Wilson chairs the commission and is pastor of Saint John’s Church in Saint Louis, and Kevin Ahlbrand is a police detective in Saint Louis and president of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police.  Tonight, he’s in San Diego.

Reverend Wilson, that was just scraping the surface of the findings in that Department of Justice report.  What surprised you the most about what you read?

REV. STARSKY WILSON, Co-Chair, Ferguson Commission:  Quite frankly, while the report was disheartening, the overall findings were not surprising.

We knew, based on the testimony we have heard from people not only in the streets, but through our commission’s work over the first 100 days, that people experience racialized policing, that they believed in their truth that this was driven by profit.  We now see the evidence of that.

The things that surprised me, quite frankly, were the kind of salacious narrative of the fact that we have an e-mail from the finance director of the city directly to the chief of police suggesting that revenues be raised through direct policing practices.  These are the kinds of things that should never be in public — in the public administration of justice, quite frankly, and they’re the kind of things that undermine the trust in governance that we need for the project of inclusive democracy to work.

GWEN IFILL:  Kevin Ahlbrand, what struck you, especially this part about policing for profit that Reverend Wilson just brought up?  What struck you the most about that report?

KEVIN AHLBRAND, Ferguson Commission:  Well, and — basically that, the whole municipal court system.

We have known for a long time that it’s been a problem.  We have never condoned ticket quotas.  We are vehemently opposed to them.  We are supporting a bill that is currently making the way through the Missouri legislature which would reduce the percentage that cities could use fees and fines for their budget.  And we have always been opposed to that.

Part of the big problem is, if the police officer has to write X-number of tickets, that’s time that he can’t be out there in the community doing community-oriented policing.  And that’s what we have gotten away from, and I think really that is what we need to get back to.

"‘Searing’ Ferguson report claims revenue came before public safety" PBS NewsHour 3/5/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  An extensive federal investigation into police practices in Ferguson, Missouri, uncovered new details about the department's racially based and profit-driven enforcement and prosecution.  While the U.S. Justice Department declined to bring a civil rights case against former policeman Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, Brown’s family to filed a wrongful death suit Thursday.  Gwen Ifill reports.

DOJ - Reforming Police Departments

"How the DOJ Reforms a Police Department Like Ferguson" by Sarah Childress, Frontline 4/4/2015

Ferguson, Mo., police officers regularly discriminate against black residents, subjecting them to illegal stops, excessive force and arrests for petty offenses like “manner of walking in roadway,” according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation released on Wednesday.

The DOJ opened a probe into the department in September 2014, one month after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18 year old.  No criminal charges were brought against the officer, who has resigned from the department.  A civil-rights investigation into Wilson yielded no charges, the DOJ said Wednesday.

The broader DOJ investigation examined whether the Ferguson police department fostered a culture of bias against African-Americans that could have contributed to the circumstances surrounding Brown’s death.

“Of course, violence is never justified,” Attorney General Eric Holder said at a press conference following the report’s release.  “But seen in this context – amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by illegal and misguided practices – it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg.”

The investigation also began amid nationwide protests that erupted over a series of police killings of unarmed black males last year, including Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a New York (NYPD) police officer in July; John Crawford III, gunned down by police in an Ohio Wal-Mart in August; Brown, who was killed a few days later; Akai Gurley, shot to death in a housing project stairwell on Nov. 20 by a NYPD officer; and Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy shot dead in a park by Cleveland police on Nov. 22. Rice had been holding a toy gun.

Their deaths have led to widespread calls for police reform and brought to the surface longstanding sentiments in the African-American community that they are treated with more suspicion and hostility by police.

Policing the Police

The investigation of the Ferguson police department is one outcome of a federal law, passed in the wake of a notorious incident of police violence, the 1991 case of Rodney King, a black man who was beaten by Los Angeles police after being stopped for speeding.  Three years later, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which included a provision that gave the Justice Department unprecedented power to investigate law enforcement agencies for systemic problems — such as use of excessive force, or racial profiling — and force them to implement reforms.

The law is the only tool that exists to compel widespread change within a police department.  The Justice Department can threaten to sue a department for constitutional violations, forcing it to enter into a negotiated settlement, such as a consent decree.

“It’s often hard to reform police departments without external intervention,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California-Irvine law school, and an expert on constitutional policing.  “Institutions are resistant to change.  None of us like to have somebody outside telling us what to do.  And police departments are especially that way.  They have their own internal culture.”

In the past 20 years, the Justice Department has launched at least 65 so-called “pattern or practice” investigations of law enforcement agencies, 32 of which have led to agreements to reform, according to an analysis of DOJ data by Stephen Rushin, a professor at the University of Illinois Law School who studies police misconduct.

That’s a small number compared to the nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Still, the reforms have had an impact: today, nearly one in five Americans is served by a law enforcement agency that has been subject to a DOJ investigation under this law, according to Rushin’s analysis.

Most investigations zero in on whether, when and how officers are allowed to use force, including deadly force.  Also atop the list: a focus on discriminatory policing of minorities — specifically, blacks and Latinos.  The DOJ has also examined allegations of gender discrimination, the treatment of people in the LGBT community, and how officers handle people who are mentally ill.

A New Push for Civil-Rights Investigations

The Obama administration has used its power aggressively to take on widespread problems of police brutality, discrimination and other abuse in local jurisdictions, negotiating more settlement agreements than either the Clinton or George W. Bush administrations.

“In case you haven’t heard, the Civil Rights Division is once again open for business,” said Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general tapped to lead the division, in a 2010 speech.  Combating police misconduct, he said, had become an important priority — and pattern or practice investigations were a “critical tool” for bringing change.

Under Attorney General Eric Holder, the Justice Department has opened 20 investigations and negotiated agreements to implement reforms in 15 departments, including major cities like New Orleans, La., Portland, Ore., and Newark, N.J.  It currently has nine open investigations.

Even the Justice Department admits flaws in the process.  It’s expensive and can take years to fulfill an agreement.  In Los Angeles, which is widely considered the most successful test case, it took more than a decade for the police to complete the required reforms, at a cost of $15 million.  And the DOJ’s process for choosing departments to investigate, often sparked by a combination of news reports and complaints from local civil-rights groups or public officials, can make the law feel haphazardly applied.

The DOJ assessed its process in 2010, noting that some police chiefs said that federal investigations create a negative stigma that’s difficult to dispel.  They urged a more collaborative approach.

But in some departments, it may be the only way to bring about significant change.  Charles Ramsey was the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. when he asked the Justice Department to investigate in 1999, following a series of stories in The Washington Post that said that the department killed more residents per capita than police in any other major city.  The resulting agreement led to major reforms, significantly reducing the number of police shootings and boosting the department’s credibility in the community, Ramsey said.

“We would not have been able to make the changes we made without the consent decree,” he said at a 2013 conference.  “We would have encountered push back from the union, and we would not have obtained the funding.”

What the Justice Department Found in Ferguson

In its Ferguson investigation, the DOJ was looking for a pattern or practice of discriminatory policing, and examining the department’s use of force.

What it found included routine violations of black residents’ civil rights.  For example, the DOJ found that black drivers were more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during traffic stops, but 26 percent less likely to be found with contraband.  Even so, black drivers were more likely to be cited and arrested during a traffic stop.

The report also found that 88 percent of documented police use-of-force cases involved blacks, and in particular juveniles and people with mental health problems or cognitive disabilities.

Some petty offenses appear to be reserved largely for African-Americans.  From 2011 to 2013, a full 95 percent of people charged with a crime called “Manner of Walking in Roadway” were black, as were 94 percent of those charged with “Failure to Comply.”

“Many FPD uses of force appear entirely punitive,” the report concluded.

The city used these kinds of citations to generate revenue, the DOJ found.  In 2015, the city anticipated raising more than $3 million in fines and fees — more than double the total from five years earlier.

“Many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue,” the report said.

Next Steps for Ferguson

The Justice Department made 26 recommendations for reform in Ferguson and will insist on a court-enforced agreement to make those changes.  The next step for Ferguson will be to decide whether to negotiate or fight federal officials in court.  That process can take months, or even years.

Some departments, like Newark, have cooperated with federal authorities.  In July 2014, the Justice Department found that Newark police had a pattern or practice of disproportionately stopping and arresting black residents and using excessive force against them.  It found that 75 percent of the stops by NPD officers had no justifiable basis, and that some officers stole citizens’ property and money.

The city moved quickly to cooperate with the DOJ, announcing that it would enter into an agreement on the same day federal investigators released their findings.

Others have fought back.  In North Carolina’s Alamance County, Justice Department officials found a pattern or practice of discriminatory treatment by police — in targeting, stops, searches and arrests — of Latino residents.  The department refused to cooperate during the investigation, and has refuted the charges.

The DOJ is now suing Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson in his official capacity for fostering a culture of discriminatory policing.  In the complaint, federal officials said that Johnson told his deputies to “Go out there and catch me some Mexicans,” encouraging them to arrest Latinos, but not others, for minor infractions.  Johnson’s attorney has described the charges as baseless.

Ferguson city officials said in a statement on their website that they were reviewing the findings and would hold a press conference later on Wednesday.  On the website, the city also outlined steps it has taken to improve relations with the community since Brown’s death.  In October, it set up a citizen review board to make recommendations to the mayor.  It also began installing body and dashboard cameras for police officers and launched an effort to recruit officers from more diverse backgrounds.

Next Steps for the Nation

In December, President Barack Obama convened a task force on 21st century policing.  Its preliminary report, released this week, recommended compiling data on officer-involved shootings and establishing independent investigations of such incidents.  It also recommended reducing police use of military equipment during protests, though it stopped short of recommending the widespread use of body cameras for officers, citing privacy concerns.

The task force also recommended that departments work to build trust in communities of color.  A survey it conducted found that 72 percent of whites said they were confident officers would treat people of other races the same way; only 46 percent of Hispanics and 36 percent of blacks agreed.

POLICE - Force Not Always Black and White

"Police use of force not always black and white" PBS NewsHour 2/20/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In recent days, two incidents have added to national concern about excessive police force against minorities.  Police shot and killed a Hispanic man in Washington state, and in Alabama, an Indian man was partially paralyzed after an officer knocked him down.  Judy Woodruff talks to Suman Raghunathan of South Asian Americans Leading Together and David Klinger of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  The issue of how police use force is again making headlines, this time outside the lens of black and white.  The Hispanic and Indian-American communities are in the spotlight after separate encounters with police left one man dead and another partially paralyzed.

A warning:  This report contains graphic images.

The two confrontations making headlines happened in opposite corners of the country, Alabama and Washington State, first, Pasco, Washington, early last week.  This cell phone video captured 35-year-old Antonio Zambrano-Montes seeming to throw something at police and then run away, before turning around with open arms.  That’s when three officers shot and killed him.

The police involved say the man was throwing rocks.  The community in the majority Hispanic town quickly reacted with protests and a call for a federal investigation.  The officers involved are on paid leave.  In a news conference yesterday, local police said they want their officers to defuse community tension.

SGT. KEN LATTIN, Kennewick Police Department:  And regardless of what anybody might say to you, do the right thing and now, more than ever, show everybody who we are, and that we are — we can be fair, we can be just.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  From the Pacific Northwest to the Southeastern U.S. and Madison, Alabama, on February 6.  Police car video shows officers confronting 57-year-old Sureshbhai Patel.  A neighbor had called 911 concerned about a — quote — “skinny black man” walking down the street.

Patel is from India, visiting his son and grandchild and doesn’t speak English.  Officers ask him not to move.  Video from a second police car shows a slight movement and then one officer forcefully knocks him to the ground.  That action injured Patel’s spine, leaving him partially paralyzed and in the hospital.  The family is suing the police department.

COMMENT:  Since when is it a crime to just walk down a street?  It's a crime in Alabama if you are NOT white.

NEW MEXICO - Albuquerque Police

"Albuquerque holds police department accountable after many fatal incidents" PBS NewsHour 2/9/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The Albuquerque Police Department has come under national scrutiny for shootings involving officers, including 28 fatal incidents in the last five years.  In March, two policemen shot and killed a mentally ill homeless man, all captured on a body camera.  Unlike other high-profile cases around the country, these officers were charged.  Special correspondent Kathleen McCleery reports from New Mexico.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  From Ferguson, Missouri, to New York City, police killings where the officers were not charged have sparked some intense debate and protests across the country.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, which has one of the highest rates of shootings involving police in the country, it’s a different story.

Special correspondent Kathleen McCleery has that.

And a warning:  Her report contains graphic footage.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY (NewsHour):  Fourteen-year police veteran Jim Jury knows he and the 935 officers on Albuquerque’s force are getting national attention.

OFFICER JIM JURY, Albuquerque Police Department:  It’s shaken the department up.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY:  The intense scrutiny stems in part from charges filed against two officers last month.

KARI BRANDENBURG, District Attorney, New Mexico:  We did file an open — what we refer to as an open count of murder.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY:  District attorney Kari Brandenburg took a tough stand after two policemen shot and killed a mentally ill homeless man last March.  She charged officer Dominique Perez and detective Keith Sandy with murdering 38-year-old James Boyd.

He was illegally camping here in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains overlooking the city of Albuquerque.  The police were called.  A four-hour standoff followed, and the scene was recorded by a camera worn by one of the officers.

DIVERSITY - Why So Difficult in Police Forces

"Why it’s so difficult to retain a diverse police force" PBS NewsHour 8/15/2014

Excerpt

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  The city of Ferguson, with a population of 21,000, is more than two-thirds African-American, but just three of its 53 police officers are black.  It’s a factor in other communities across the country as well.

And we explore the issue Tracie Keesee, the co-founder of the UCLA Center for Policing Equity.  She’s also a 25-year veteran of the Denver Police Department.  And Commander Malik Aziz, chairman of the national black police association.  He is deputy chief of the Dallas Police Department and has 23 years experience in law enforcement.

Tracie Keesee, let me start with you.  And I do want to start with a question about today’s news, because there’s still a lot of confusion and even anger over the issue of when the officer involved in the shooting was named and the release of the video of Michael Brown.

What’s your reaction to that today?

TRACIE KEESEE, UCLA Center for Policing Equity:  Well, I think there is a couple of things going on here.

First of all, if you want to have the trust of the community, transparency is always going to be key.  And the faster you can get information out to the community is going to be helpful.

I think, in addition to that, you have to balance the safety of the officer at the time, before we knew his name, to make sure that they were safe, and he was receiving threats.  But I think you also have to that balance, but I think you also have to be mindful of the community that you serve and that they really deserve to hear who is involved in what and what’s going on with in the investigation.

FERGUSON MISSOURI - A Militarized Zone?

"Why doesn’t Ferguson’s police force reflect the community?" PBS NewsHour 8/14/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Judy Woodruff talks to Yamiche Alcindor of USA Today in for a closer look at the drama unfolding over the police killing of Michael Brown, as well as local reaction to the governor’s order for State Highway Patrol to take over security.  Former Ferguson Mayor Brian Fletcher and Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch weigh in on Ferguson’s disproportionately white police force.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  For a look at what’s happening on the ground in Ferguson, we turn to USA Today reporter Yamiche Alcindor, who was there last night.  She regularly covers social issues relating to criminal justice. I spoke to her a short time ago.

Yamiche Alcindor, we thank you for talking with us.

First of all, reaction to the governor’s announcement that the Missouri Highway Patrol is going to be taking over law enforcement there?

YAMICHE ALCINDOR, USA Today:  Residents here for the last two days that I have been here have really been complaining about what they consider military-style policing.

People are welcoming this announcement.  I just talked to a woman who said she was scared to have her child out in the street and that she was going in extra early.

I think people are really excited about.  And even though they don’t know exactly what’s coming and they — and they’re still kind of worried about what the Highway Patrol is going to do, people think, if it’s not going to be tanks or tear gas, that may something will be better.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Well, you were very much there last night.  You were reporting on it, tweeting about it.  What did you see?  Because, as you know, officials are saying people in the crowd were throwing rocks, throwing firebombs.

YAMICHE ALCINDOR:  So, I didn’t see people throwing rocks and firebombs.  But I know that there are some images of people doing that, so I continue — I think that that might have actually happened.

What I saw mostly were people crowding in different areas, picking up their arms, saying, don’t shoot, hands up.  People were in some ways aggressively walking up to police and kind of taunting them.  At about 2:00 in the morning, I was at the Ferguson Police Station, and a group of six to seven people actually walked on to the Ferguson police property and were kind of taunting the police there.

Soon after, the Saint Louis County police showed up with about four trucks and about 60 officers in riot gear.  So I think — I saw that.  And I also saw officers with rifles drawn kind of pointing at people that they thought were either taunting them or — or that they thought might be shooting at them.

"Why military equipment is in the hands of local police" PBS NewsHour 8/14/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Violent clashes between local police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, has highlighted the distribution of military equipment to police departments around the country from the U.S. Defense Department.  Hari Sreenivasan talks to Matt Apuzzo of The New York Times about the concerns over the militarization of domestic law enforcement.

SAN DIEGO - Firm Investigation of SDPD

"Firm Investigating SDPD Has Strong Ties to Ex-Chiefs" by Liam Dillon, Voice of San Diego 6/25/2014

The ongoing Justice Department review of the San Diego Police Department is supposed to be independent.  City leaders have taken great pains to emphasize that they will have no control over what’s in the report.  The federal government – not SDPD – is paying the group conducting the review, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit research firm called the Police Executive Research Forum, to help preserve its independence.

But the head of the firm doing the review has deep ties to two former SDPD leaders, and the firm itself has faced some criticism over its close relationships with police chiefs.

Since the probe began in late March, few details have come out about what the firm is doing – save a May community meeting PERF hosted in City Heights.

SDPD Chief Shelley Zimmerman said that PERF officials have visited the city a couple times, including as recently as last week, gone on done ride-alongs and spoken with people inside and outside the department.  The police union had an hour-long meeting with PERF and discussed recruitment and retention problems.  Zimmerman said the firm is evaluating the department’s hiring practices and how it handled a dozen or so recent misconduct cases.

Zimmerman, who said she has no affiliation with PERF, said the firm’s SDPD ties have no bearing on the review.

“I’ve made it very clear that I wanted a thorough, independent critical assessment of our police department,” Zimmerman said.  “I welcome any and all recommendations for us to improve any of our processes.”

Neither the Justice Department nor PERF responded to requests for comment.

The PERF-SDPD Connection

Chuck Wexler, a former official in Boston’s police department, has led PERF for more than two decades.  He’s had very long relationships with former San Diego police chiefs Jerry Sanders and William Lansdowne.

In the 1990s, PERF helped Sanders develop the city’s neighborhood policing model, the nationally renowned approach that emphasized crime prevention.  Sanders served as PERF’s treasurer and as a board member. Sanders’ wife, Rana Sampson, worked at PERF as a senior researcher and trainer.

When Sanders left SDPD in 1999, Wexler called him “one of the most progressive, innovative and compassionate leaders in the country.”

Wexler goes back with Lansdowne, too.  Wexler began a recent PERF report on minimizing officer use of force with an anecdote about Lansdowne.

Lansdowne also served as PERF’s treasurer and taught a senior management class for the firm.  Earlier this month, Lansdowne took a job with a mobile phone recycling company, and the job announcement said he was on PERF’s board.  (Neither PERF’s website nor the firm’s most recent tax form list him as a current member.)

Lansdowne retired in February, just as the SDPD misconduct scandal was heating up again.  Evidence in a civil lawsuit has revealed department leadership missed numerous red flags about a sexual predator in the force and lacked key policies to prevent misconduct.

When problems first struck the department in mid-2011, Wexler had nothing but praise for Lansdowne.  He tweeted links to a U-T San Diego story on Lansdowne’s plan to address officer misconduct allegations and our profile of his response to the problems.

NEW MEXICO - Police Accused of Unjustified Force

"Justice Department accuses Albuquerque police of ‘unjustified force’" PBS NewsHour 4/10/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  The U.S. Justice Department today released a scathing report finding what it calls a pattern of unjustified force in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, Police Department.

Jeffrey Brown has that story.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  The report cites incidents dating back to 2010, 37 people shot by police, 23 of them fatally.  The most recent occurred just last month and was caught on videotape: the fatal shooting of James Boyd, a 38-year-old homeless man with a history of mental illness.

That led to a violent street protest against alleged police brutality.

Gene Grant is host of “New Mexico in Focus” on New Mexico Public Television.  He has been covering this story and joins us tonight from Albuquerque.

AMERICA - New Orleans, Most Corrupt Police Department in U.S.

"Citing Corruption and Abuse, Feds Mandate Major Reform for New Orleans Police" PBS Newshour 7/25/2012

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (Newshour): For years, the New Orleans Police Department has labored under a long shadow of misconduct, investigations, charges and criminal convictions. Now the city has agreed to major reforms.

New Orleans now faces a sweeping federal mandate, to reform a police department plagued by corruption and abuse for decades.

ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: This consent decree will allow us to move forward, and move forward together, and will enable the people of New Orleans to have, in the words of Mayor Landrieu -- and I quote him -- a world-class police department.

GWEN IFILL: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder formally outlined the deal yesterday, an agreement Mayor Mitch Landrieu estimates will cost roughly $11 million a year to put in place. Landrieu said it will fundamentally change the culture of the New Orleans police once and for all.

The planned reforms include mandatory training for officers in the use of force, routine stops and searches and bias-free policing, new standards for recruiting to increase diversity on the force, and videotaping of interrogations involving suspected homicides and sexual assaults. The department must also install video cameras in all patrol cars.

ERIC HOLDER: This consent decree belongs to the entire community and includes ideas that were brought to us by community members, front-line officers and experts alike.