The students have filed freedom of information requests in California, Hawaii, Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Louis, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, and other Northeastern markets, Hawaii.)Ī team of 15 college journalists is digging into cases where misconduct has been swept under the rug. We’re pitching the stories to groups promoting criminal justice education and to public media nationally and in key markets (St. The project is a blend of explanatory and investigative stories that we hope will interest public media outlets and criminal justice reformers. The goal of this project is to explain each of the roadblocks to police accountability in a digestible way that citizens can understand. Until recently, only 37 states reported names of decertified officers to a national database, and that database keeps them secret. The result is "wandering" police officers who abuse citizens in one jurisdiction and move on to another. Those pattern or practice suits were authorized by Congress in response to the Rodney King beating.Īnother potentially powerful method of accountability - police licensing - is disarmed by a hodgepodge of different state laws.
The Trump administration has decided to forgo the use of pattern or practice investigations that lead to enforceable consent decrees requiring police reforms. Others are government muscle the government doesn’t flex. Other roadblocks are union-related, tying accountability in knots by blocking the release of names of wrongdoers and using arbitration to keep them on the street. Some are legal-qualified immunity the willfulness requirement that makes it hard to convict police in brutality cases court decisions giving police the benefit of the doubt. Several roadblocks stand in the way of police accountability.
0 kommentar(er)
