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Introduction To Police Misconduct – Part 1
What Is Police Misconduct?While most people automatically think of police brutality whenever the term “police misconduct” is brought up, brutality is but one subset of what we call police misconduct....
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The Conflicting Interests of Public Safety and Police Unions
Labor unions exist, theoretically, to do little more than defend the interests of that union’s members against the interests of those that employ those members. On the face of it, there isn’t anything...
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With Leaders Like These…
According to the DOJ/FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program there are 14,169 county and city law enforcement agencies that participate in their UCR statistics gathering project on crime rates in the...
View ArticleThe Chicago Solution?
On the same day a study released a damning report finding that Chicago’s civil service review board overturns decisions to discipline police officers found to have committed acts of misconduct in a...
View ArticleThe Police Brutality Nobody Talks About – Officer-Involved Sexual Misconduct
In the first 4 days of November the NPMSRP tracked 84 reports of police misconduct in the media, which amounts to an average of about 21 reports a day so far this month.While it’s the reports of...
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Who Wants To Know?
One of the things I try to keep aware of in the course of this project is that what I’m doing is not popular. So, while disappointing, it shouldn’t have been surprising that the NPMSRP was turned down...
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What Can I Do About Police Misconduct?
An image to illustrate the current state of affairs in the battle against police misconduct… On the left a typical anti-misconduct protest and the image on the right is a police union protest against...
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Criminal Justice In The Age of New Professionalism
In 2006, US Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia rendered an opinion in Hudson v Michigan concerning a Fourth Amendment violation case in which he heralded a previously unannounced age of “New...
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Police Accountability Policy Watch – January 2010
I thought I would try something new this month and devote an article to various reports that covered police accountability/transparency policy issues for the month. These reports generally don’t go...
View ArticlePolice Misconduct Disclosure Laws
Scott Greenfield, over at Simple Justice, put up a post yesterday about an incident in Broward County Florida where a plain-clothes police officer was accused of assaulting and falsely arresting a...
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Secrecy In The Name of Officer Safety
Washington state suffered a larger number of police officer deaths in 2009 due to two highly publicized shooting incidents where police officers were randomly targeted by individuals with a grudge. In...
View ArticleOf Human Rights Reports and Police Misconduct
On March 11, the US State Department released it’s global 2009 Report on Human Rights. As usual, one day later, China responded by noting that there was a nation conspicuously absent from that report...
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Trust Us, Or Else
The King County Washington Sheriff’s Office announced yesterday that they want to create a specialized multi-agency task force to identify and track people they suspect of showing risky or threatening...
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HR Bill 413 – A National Police Unaccountability Bill
URGENT UPDATE! -04/13/10 21:36PSTFolks, congress is apparently trying to push this one through on a fast track. Last night Senator Harry Reid introduced Senate bill 3194 that has nearly identical...
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Arguing The Case For Police Accountability – Part 1
In the years that I’ve been monitoring and researching the issue of police misconduct I’ve noticed some prevalent, and quite successful, arguments used by those who feel there is no need for improved...
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Does Honesty Kill?
Something interesting caught my eye the other day as I was reading Scott Greenfield’s Simple Justice blog. Apparently, FoxNews ran a piece the other day in which a professor from the John Jay College...
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Is There a Police Brutality Problem in Denver?
Image of a t-shirt that was sold by the Denver police union as a way to thank their member officers for what they did during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in a way that mocked allegations of...
View ArticleWidespread Police Brutality in Vietnam?
Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently issued a report outlining concerns regarding how the Vietnamese government handles the issue of excessive force by police, specifically surrounding the issue of deaths...
View ArticleA Premature Alarm Regarding Police Fatality Rates
The big law enforcement related news piece dominating the media today comes courtesy of a press release from the Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (LEOMF) insisting that an apparent increase in...
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The Problem with Prosecuting Police in Washington State
Recently, here in the state of Washington, King County prosecutors announced that they would not charge Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk for the shooting death of Native American woodcarver John T....
View ArticleRahm’s Choice?
Chicago Illinois mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel picked Newark New Jersey police director Garry McCarthy to be Chicago’s new police chief. The soon to be chief declared that “I’ll have cops’ backs” in...
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Making Posters
So, I got a little tired of doing work all the time, decided to do some photoshopping instead and made a poster riffing off of the DHS “See Something” ad campaign. It also takes a subtle swipe at...
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The Battle of Brooklyn Bridge Reader’s Poll
In the latest confrontation between “Occupy Wall Street” protesters and the New York Police Department, now being dubbed “The Battle of Brooklyn Bridge” where police claim up to 700 protesters were...
View ArticleMore Police Transparency, Not Less
Yesterday, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a piece I wrote about pending legislation in Pennsylvania to anonymize officers under investigation for use of force. The proposed legislation is supposed...
View ArticleLooking Beyond Racist Police Officers
This week I made my debut at In Justice Today, a blog founded by the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law School. My first post warns reformers not to focus solely on individual racist officers...
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