US police brutality: the five worst examples

From Oscar Grant's death to the severe beating of Angela Garbarino, we

look at five shocking examples of police brutality
By Paul Harris, October 24, 2011
Oscar Grant was shot dead by Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle in
2009 in Oakland, California. Mehserle and other police officers had been responding to reports
of a fight, and arrested and handcuffed Grant and several others in a subway station. Grant
was cuffed, unarmed and lying on the ground when Mehserle pulled out his gun and shot him
in the back. In court Mehserle claimed he thought his gun was his Taser. He was sentenced to
two years in jail and let out on parole in June 2011.

Christopher Harris was walking home in 2009 in Seattle when sheriff's deputy Matthew Paul
slammed him into a wall after mistaking him for an assault suspect. Paul was left in a coma,
and still requires massive medical care after suffering permanent serious head and spinal cord
injuries. Paul escaped all charges in the incident and remains a police officer. A local police
spokesman explained the incident by saying that sometimes " … bad things happen to good
people."

Iraq war veteran Walter Harvin suffered a vicious 2010 beating at the hands of New York
police officer David London. London had been closing the door to a building in a housing
project when Harvin – who lived there – tried to slip in. An altercation began, in which London
beat Harvin with his baton and then continued to hit and kick him after he was on the ground
and not moving. London, who told the court Harvin had pushed him, was acquitted.

Robert Davis, a retired school teacher, was beaten and arrested by four police in New
Orleans. He was 64 at the time of the assault in 2005. The beating was captured by passing
Associated Press journalists, one of whom was also beaten by police. He was accused of
public drunkenness. One officer was fired over the incident, one was suspended and another
was acquitted of all charges. Davis said he was teetotal and had not had a drink for at least 25
years.

Angela Garbarino was severely beaten in 2008 by police officer Wylie Willis in Shreveport,
Louisiana after becoming angry in a police booking room. Garbarino, who was drunk, got into
an argument with Willis, who manhandled her to the floor. He then switched off a camera in
the room. When it was turned on again, Garbarino was lying in a spreading pool of blood on
the floor and was removed from the room on a hospital gurney. She suffered two black eyes,
broken teeth and a broken nose. Willis claimed the woman fell on her face while trying to leave
the room. Garbarino settled out of court and Willis was reinstated to his job.

Source: The Guardian UK, (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/24/us-police-

brutality-worst-examples)
What is police brutality? Depends on where you live
Monday Jan 13, 2014 9:02 PM
By Tony Dokoupil, Senior Staff Writer, NBC News

When can police officers use force, and when is use of force excessive?
Those questions hang in the air after the family of Jonathon Ferrell, an unarmed 24-year-
old man shot ten times by Charlotte police officer Randall Kerrick last September — and
pronounced dead at the scene — filed a wrongful death lawsuit in civil court on Monday.

There are no hard national standards, no binding state policies, not even a national database
that tracks how often, where, and under what circumstances police use deadly force. The
result, say scholars, is a free-wheeling space in American law and police policy. The
nation’s 17,000 law enforcement agencies set their own terms—and when citizens cry foul,
the courts spit out wildly inconsistent results.

"Pick up the paper any day and there’s an excessive force case here and an excessive force
case there, and yet there’s no national data at all," says William Terrill, a professor of
criminal justice at Michigan State University. That contributes to a larger problem of
excess subjectivity, he says, where cops who commit brutality can end up going free —
guilty of what Terrill calls "lawfully awful behavior."

The legal test for excessive use of force, according to a 1989 Supreme Court ruling, is
whether the police officer "reasonably" believed that the force he or she used was
"necessary" to accomplish a legitimate goal. But there are no universal definitions of
"reasonably" or "necessary," and in a drive from one jurisdiction to another, the court
standards — and the local police department policies — can shift as briskly as songs on the
radio.

"Excess is in the eyes of the beholder," adds Terrill, a former military police officer. "To
one officer ‘objectively reasonable’ means that if you don’t give me your license, I get to
use soft hands, and in another town the same resistance means I can pull you through the
car window, I can tase you."

That leaves the lower courts to spin their own "ad-hoc, often inconsistent, and sometimes
ill-considered" conclusions, says Rachel Harmon, a professor of law at the University of
Virginia. They support a bullet fired in Newark, perhaps, and find a similar shot
unconstitutional in Trenton. The result, she says, is a national patchwork, one where "many
unconstitutional uses of force go uncompensated and undeterred."
This soft spot in the law and the data exists at a time when police shootings seem to be on
the rise in many cities.

Charlotte police killed five people last year, the most in a decade—but less, City Manager
Ron Carlee told the Charlotte Observer, than were killed by police in Washington (49),
Memphis (42), Fort Worth (32), or Austin (17), all of which have seen their own numbers
creep upward.

Boston police (along with their counterparts at the state level) have fired more bullets in
each of the last five years, hitting at least 23 people last year, 11 of them fatally.
Philadelphia police shot 52 people in 2012, prompting the commissioner to ask the U.S.
Justice Department for a special review. Dallas, Miami, Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Las
Vegas, Los Angeles, New York City: all have been rocked by use of force scandals in
recent years.

But does any of this add up to a national problem? No one knows for sure.

The FBI is a clearinghouse for national crime data, from break-ins on the San Francisco
Bay to stolen property on the streets of New York. But while it issues an annual report on
law enforcement killed or assaulted by civilians, it doesn’t do the same for civilians
unjustifiably killed or assaulted by police.

In 1994, Congress required the Attorney General to "acquire data about the use of
excessive force by law enforcement officers," and "publish an annual summary" of these
data."

"It was never implemented," says Terrill. The Justice Department did not return a request
for comment. The FBI, meanwhile, acknowledged the shortcomings in its data.
"The data collected is general in nature," said FBI spokesperson Stephen G. Fischer Jr., in
an email to NBC News, "and does not allow for the level of detail to determine the
occupation of the offender."

To help fill the data gap, Terrill and colleagues recently completed a national survey of
police use of force policies, examining how those policies translate to outcomes on the
street. He got more than 600 departments to participate, and he isolated eight more—
including Charlotte — for a deeper look, including a survey of officers and a two year
review of crime, complaints and instances of police violence.

He went looking for what amounts to a standard policy, and hopefully an ideal one, but
what he found was jarring: there’s no such thing as a standard policy — and nothing
currently in use is ideal. More than 80 percent of departments train officers on a use of
force "continuum," running from less lethal to more lethal, depending on the level of
civilian resistance. Within that continuum, however, there is variety allowing for "nearly
all types of force against nearly all types of resistance."

Based on the survey results, Terrill picked eight comparable cities for a closer look, and he
won cooperation from Charlotte, Portland, Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, St. Petersburg,
Fort Wayne, and Knoxville. That offered him a good mix of policies on police violence.
And by stacking one policy against another, he hoped to isolate the best one, something
researchers have never been able to do before.

Terrill concluded that Charlotte police officers had one of the worst policies under review.
The city’s officers didn’t use force more often, but when they did use it they injured
suspects at by far a greater rate, 73 percent compared to 45 percent for the next city on the
list. Charlotte’s officers were also among the most likely to point their guns, and compared
to the other cities, they used more force "relative to citizen resistance." Charlotte’s officers
also rated their city’s force policy as comparatively unhelpful and vague.
The Video Revolution in Policing
September 4, 2014
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project

We may have reached the point where video technology is producing a full-fledged
revolution in policing. That revolution has been crystalized, or at least revealed by, the
events in Ferguson.

The first element of that revolution is a growing expectation among Americans that any
dramatic event that takes place in public will be recorded on video…

…Sure enough, in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, we saw much
discussion of video, or the lack of it. The result of this trend is that, like it or not, the
actions of police officers will increasingly be photographed. Officers or departments can
fight mandates to wear body cameras, they can try turning them off when they don’t want
their actions recorded, they can refuse to release video to the public, they may allow
mysterious technical “accidents” to swallow up video that has been captured, they can try
to intimidate citizens into not photographing them, they can even try to steal cameras or
memory chips (or seize them as “evidence”) in an effort to prevent video from coming to
light. But as the police (along with the rest of us) become increasingly enveloped by video
cameras, none of these measures will ultimately withstand the pressure of public
expectation. “Something bad has happened? Well let’s see the video!”

If there is no video, that in itself will increasingly come to be viewed as suspicious, and the
police will find their credibility weakened…

…In America, African-Americans, especially but not exclusively those in poor inner-cities,
are part of the mistreatable class. Take for example a video like this one, in which a St.
Paul man is Tasered (Tasers often being used for punitive torture in response to the act of
“dissing a cop”) and arrested for no legitimate reason after he had questioned why he was
being ordered to leave an apparently public seating area while waiting to pick up his
children from school. It is very hard to imagine that this would have happened to an
otherwise identical man who was white.

What about the point Greene’s character makes about “mutual agreement”? The St. Paul
man, and most other victims, certainly don’t seem to consent to their mistreatment.
Perhaps Greene refers to the fact that oppressed people in some times and places, when
their oppression is bad enough, quite rationally recognize that any protest would be
futile—a helplessness that contributes to a broader social reality that the authorities are
“allowed” to mistreat certain people.

Invisibile or not believed

If police have generally been able to get away with abusing people, then much of the
problem lies in the fact that judges, juries, prosecutors, and the public have too often
deemed police officers more credible than abuse victims—especially black and poor
victims. Part of the power that police have wielded comes from knowing that, should their
victims complain, they will experience the nightmare of not being believed…
…So that is the other part of the video revolution in policing: increasingly, abuse of this
kind will no longer be hidden, and the victims will be believed. Without his cellphone
camera, the St. Paul man may well have received jail time, or at best have just been sent
along to stew in his own anger. Instead, he’s at least had the satisfaction of seeing his
situation become a controversy, sparking press coverage and forcing a response from the
police. And his formal complaint may or may not be satisfactorily addressed, but it will
certainly not be buried…

…That Ferguson may represent a watershed moment in this dynamic is somewhat ironic
since the shooting of Michael Brown was not caught on video. But the very lack of a video
record of Brown’s shooting has only confirmed the dynamic I discussed above, sparking
widespread calls for mandatory police body cameras (and prompting the Ferguson police
to adopt the technology several weeks after the shooting). And the video-driven “death of
trust” in police probably played a role in amplifying the situation in Ferguson—drawing
the interest of reporters and the national public, influencing the balance of opinion about
how likely it was that the police officer was in the wrong, and generally changing how the
situation was perceived.

The Ferguson uprising may be forgotten in a year, but there’s also a chance that it will
come to be seen as a significant inflection point—the moment when awareness crystalized
among both African Americans and police officers that there is no longer a "torturable
class" in the United States.

Published on American Civil Liberties Union (https://www.aclu.org)

Source URL: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech-national-security-technology-and-
liberty-criminal-law-reform/video-revolution
What Caused the Ferguson Riot Exists in so many other Cities, too.
Elijah Anderson, The Washington Post, August 13, 2014

SWAT teams and angry protesters clashed in a small St. Louis suburb for a third
day Tuesday, following the death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. The
eruption of protests and violence has been a long time coming. While I certainly
do not condone rioting, examining the conditions surrounding Brown’s death —
and the deaths of several other unarmed black men killed by law enforcement
recently — makes clear that community reactions like those in Ferguson, Mo.,
are bound to happen. America has continued to isolate poor black people in
economically depressed neighborhoods under increasingly oppressive police
tactics that breed distrust and hostility.

Ferguson has suffered from “white flight” in recent years, leaving pockets of
structural poverty and deeply alienated black people. The once predominantly
white suburb now is 65 percent black. Poverty afflicts 22 percent of residents,
twice as many as in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. Ferguson’s story isn’t
uncommon in the United States. Authorities often see fit to heavily police towns
with growing black and poor populations, to surveil them, and occasionally to
harass them in the name of a “broken windows theory” of policing, banking on
such methods to control crime. The broken windows theory, promulgated by
James Q. Wilson, holds that where there is urban disarray, there is crime. Wilson
argued that cleaning up trash and fixing broken windows — but also quickly
policing deviants and miscreants for even small-scale crimes — would lessen
crime overall. The thinking was that by taking care of the small stuff, you won’t
face as much big stuff. The theory caught on, and authorities began to use it all
over the country. For example, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and police commissioner
Bill Bratton employed this theory in New York City, and it seemed to reduce
crime. But increased “stop-and-frisk” incidents — which allow officers routinely
to stop sometimes law-abiding citizens in search of illegal drugs, firearms or
other criminal possessions — resulted in ever greater tension between
communities of color and police, and in ever larger numbers of minority men
being incarcerated.

The use of “broken windows” policing meant, in practice, increasing harassment

of young black men. This sort of harassment is doing as much to breed hostility
as to prevent crime. For example, the New York Police Department’s use of the
controversial stop-and-frisk practice is most commonly exercised against young
blacks and Latinos. A recent report by the Center for Constitutional Rights found
that black and Latino people are stopped much more frequently than whites under
this program, even in mixed and especially in predominantly white communities.
Further, the report noted, “Blacks and Latinos are treated more harshly than
whites, being more likely to be arrested instead of given a summons when
compared to white people accused of the same crimes, and are also more likely to
have force used against them by police.” The racial biases underlying this
disparity extend to other forms of aggressive policing, causing black people to
associate police officers with humiliation and injustice, and stirring distrust for
police in black communities around the country.

The intensified police presence in poor black communities fosters this negative
association in residents from a young age. As children, they see police officers
walk the hallways of their schools like in a prison. When black boys are involved
in an altercation or disruption, instead of being sent to the principal’s office, they
are too often handcuffed on the spot and given a criminal record. Experience
teaches black men that police officers exist not to protect them, but to criminalize
and humiliate them. Few black boys get through adolescence without a story of
police harassment, and with age, their stories proliferate. Aggressive police
tactics turn black males into subjects of suspicion and skeptical scrutiny. This
makes them vulnerable to harassment, whether their crime is real or imagined.
Black men engaged in innocuous activities — walking home from a corner store,
holding a BB gun at Walmart, leaving his bachelor party — become targeted as
criminals by authorities. With each negative encounter, black men build up
antagonism toward law enforcement. They develop defense mechanisms and
toughen up to protect their pride and perceived respectability. With this built-up
hostility, interactions over minor offenses, like suspicion of selling loose
cigarettes, become quickly charged.

While this is not the first time in history that aggressive police tactics have
plagued black communities, this generation of young people have limited
tolerance for such experiments in policing at their expense. Compared to their
grandparents, the millennial generation — regardless of race — is less inclined to
blindly respect and trust authority. A 2011 MTV poll found that 70 percent of
millennial respondents believed they could “successfully negotiate anything with
authority figures.” Further, a Pew Research poll found that millennials are
detached from hierarchal institutions and are distrustful of people in general. This
generation isn’t intimidated by authority. On top of that, images of police
brutality against black men have proliferated online, turning what might have
been isolated local antagonisms into national grievances.

Practices like stop-and-frisk have exacerbated tensions between blacks and police
officers. At the same time, police departments are increasingly militarized,
applying military-grade weapons to a domestic population — especially to those
they see as criminal — and effectively criminalizing the everyday lives of black
people. Under authoritarian oversight and normalized police harassment, a
generation of young people were bound to get fed up and respond with the
defiance and turmoil we are witnessing in Ferguson. Clearly, the relationship
between the police and the communities they are charged with “protecting and
serving” needs to change.

Elijah Anderson is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale

University and a leading urban ethnographer. He has authored several books on
urban black life, including Code of the Street and The Cosmopolitan Canopy.
What I've Learned from Two Years Collecting Data on Police Killings
By D. Brian Burghart, Gawker.com, August 22, 2014

It began simply enough. Commuting home from my work at Reno's alt-weekly newspaper,
theNews & Review, on May 18, 2012, I drove past the aftermath of a police shooting—in
this case, that of a man named Jace Herndon. It was a chaotic scene, and I couldn't help but
wonder how often it happened.

I went home and grabbed my laptop and a glass of wine and tried to find out. I found
nothing—a failure I simply chalked up to incompetent local media.

A few months later I read about the Dec. 6, 2012, killing of a naked and unarmed 18-year-
old college student, Gil Collar, by University of South Alabama police. The killing had
attracted national coverage—The New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN—but there
was still no context being provided—no figures examining how many people are killed by
police.

I started to search in earnest. Nowhere could I find out how many people died during
interactions with police in the United States. Try as I might, I just couldn't wrap my head
around that idea. How was it that, in the 21st century, this data wasn't being tracked,
compiled, and made available to the public? How could journalists know if police were
killing too many people in their town if they didn't have a way to compare to other cities?
Hell, how could citizens or police? How could cops possibly know "best practices" for
dealing with any fluid situation? They couldn't.

The bottom line was that I found the absence of such a library of police killings offensive.
And so I decided to build it. I'm still building it. But I could use some help. You can find
my growing database of deadly police violence here, at Fatal Encounters, and I invite you
to go here, research one of the listed shootings, fill out the row, and change its background
color. It'll take you about 25 minutes. There are thousands to choose from, and another
2,000 or so on my cloud drive that I haven't even added yet. After I fact-check and fill in
the cracks, your contribution will be added to largest database about police violence in the
country. Feel free to check out what has been collected about your locale's information
here.

The biggest thing I've taken away from this project is something I'll never be able to prove,
but I'm convinced to my core: The lack of such a database is intentional. No government—
not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police
forces license to use deadly force—wants you to know how many people it kills and why.

It's the only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence. What evidence? In attempting
to collect this information, I was lied to and delayed by the FBI, even when I was only
trying to find out the addresses of police departments to make public records requests. The
government collects millions of bits of data annually about law enforcement in its Uniform
Crime Report, but it doesn't collect information about the most consequential act a law
enforcer can do.

I've been lied to and delayed by state, county and local law enforcement agencies—almost
every time. They've blatantly broken public records laws, and then thumbed their
authoritarian noses at the temerity of a citizen asking for information that might embarrass
the agency. And these are the people in charge of enforcing the law.
The second biggest thing I learned is that bad journalism colludes with police to hide this
information. The primary reason for this is that police will cut off information to reporters
who tell tales. And a reporter can't work if he or she can't talk to sources. It happened to me
on almost every level as I advanced this year-long Fatal Encounters series through
the News & Review. First they talk; then they stop, then they roadblock.

Take Philadelphia for example. In Philadelphia, the police generally don't disclose the
names of victims of police violence, and they don't disclose the names of police officers
who kill people. What reporter has time to go to the most dangerous sections of town to try
to find someone who knows the name of the victim or the details of a killing? At night, on
deadline, are you kidding? So with no victim and no officer, there's no real story, but the
information is known, consumed and mulled over in an ever-darkening cloud of
neighborhood anger.

Many Gawker readers watched in horror as Albuquerque police killed James Boyd, a
homeless man, for illegal camping. Look at these stats, though (I don't know if they're
comprehensive; I believe they are): In Bernallilo County, N.M., three people were killed
by police in 2012; in 2013, five. In Shelby County, Tenn., nine people were killed by
police in 2012; in 2013, 11.

Who the hell knew Memphis Police were killing men at more than double the rate the cops
were killing people in Albuquerque? But when I emailed the reporter at the
Memphis Commercial Appeal to track the numbers back further, I got no response. I
bought a subscription, but haven't been able return to research in that region…

…There are many other ways that bad or sloppy journalism undermines the ability of
researchers to gather data on police shootings. Reporters make fundamental errors or
typos; they accept police excuses for not releasing names of the dead or the shooters, or
don't publish the decedents' names even if they're released; they don't publish police or
coroner's reports. Sometimes they don't show their work: This otherwise excellent St. Louis
Post-Dispatch article claims there were 15 fatal shooting cases involving law enforcement
agencies between January 2007 to September 30, 2011—but provides few names and dates
for further research efforts.

And that list doesn't even get into fundamental errors in attitude toward police killing—for
example, the tendency of large outlets and wire services to treat killings as local matters,
and not worth tracking widely. Even though police brutality is a national crisis. Journalists
also don't generally report the race of the person killed. Why? It's unethical to report it
unless it's germane to the story. But race is always germane when police kill somebody.

This is the most heinous thing I've learned in my two years compiling Fatal Encounters.
You know who dies in the most population-dense areas? Black men. You know who dies
in the least population dense areas? Mentally ill men. It's not to say there aren't dangerous
and desperate criminals killed across the line. But African-Americans and the mentally ill
people make up a huge percentage of people killed by police.

And if you want to get down to nut-cuttin' time, across the board, it's poor people who are
killed by police. (And by the way, around 96 percent of people killed by police are men.)
Ferguson is Everytown, U.S.A.
August 18, 2014
By Nusrat Choudhury, Staff Attorney, ACLU Racial Justice Program

The tragic killing of college-bound teenager Michael Brown has raised questions
about the frequency with which police kill unarmed black men in America. The
answer, unfortunately, is far too often.

Just three months ago, on a warm April afternoon, a white police officer shot and
killed Dontre Hamilton, a 31-year-old black man, in downtown Milwaukee's Red
Arrow Park. According to the Milwaukee police chief, the officer was "defending
himself in a violent situation." But the eyewitness report of a Starbucks barista paints
a very different picture.

According to the barista, Hamilton had been sleeping on the concrete sidewalk next
to Starbucks when two police officers approached him, asked him questions, and left
after determining that he was doing nothing wrong. But an hour or so later, she heard
yelling. Looking out the Starbucks window, she saw a different white police officer
standing up against Hamilton, "who was holding the officer's own baton in a defense
posture." The officer "lunged" at Hamilton in an attempt to get the baton, but failed.
The barista watched in horror as the officer stood 10 feet away from Hamilton,
pulled out a gun, and shot Hamilton 10 times in quick succession without issuing
any verbal warnings. The barista reports that she never saw Hamilton hit the officer
with the baton.

The tragic killing of Hamilton bears a striking – and deeply troubling – resemblance
to the killing of Michael Brown, who was shot by an officer six times, including
twice in the head, after being stopped for walking down the middle of a street.
Including Hamilton and Brown, at least six black men were shot and killed by police
since April in circumstances that suggest the unjustified use of excessive force and
possible racial profiling.

In July, Eric Garner was killed in New York by officers who placed him in a
chokehold – a banned tactic – and slammed his head into a sidewalk during an
attempt to arrest him for allegedly selling illegal cigarettes.

In early August, police in Beavercreek, Ohio, fatally shot John Crawford III in a
Walmart, where Crawford had been holding a BB gun that he had picked up on a
store shelf.

Just days after the killing of Brown, Ezell Ford was killed by police on a Los
Angeles sidewalk during an investigative stop. While police contend that officers
opened fire after a "struggle," Ford's mother reports that he was lying on the ground
complying with the officers' order when he was shot three times in the back.

And the very next day, pressman Dante Parker was killed in Victorville, California,
after being repeatedly shocked with a stun gun by police attempting to arrest him as
a suspect in a nearby robbery. Apparently, police suspected him because he was
riding a bicycle, and the robbery suspect was reported to have fled on a bike.
The stories of these six people make one thing painfully clear: The killing of black
men in incidents that begin as investigatory police stops are anything but unusual in
America. In this sense, Ferguson is Everytown, U.S.A.

There is a reason for this. More than 240 years of slavery and 90 years of legal
segregation in this country have created a legacy of racialized policing. Killings and
beatings lie at one end of a spectrum in which black people – and young black men
in particular – are routinely stigmatized, humiliated, and harassed as targets for
police stops, frisks, and searches, even when they are doing nothing wrong.

The numbers show the reality.

Studies of Rhode Island traffic stops and New York pedestrian stops confirm that
police stop blacks at higher rates than whites. Even more troubling is that the New
York study determined that a neighborhood's racial composition was the main factor
for determining NYPD stop rates, above and beyond the "role of crime, social
conditions, or the allocation of police resources." In other words, New York cops
targeted blacks because of their race – not because they happened to live in a
dangerous place or in an area flooded by police.

Data from Ferguson mirrors these racial disparities. Last year, blacks not only
accounted for 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches, and 93 percent of arrests
by Ferguson police, the state attorney general's office calculated that blacks were
overrepresented in these encounters in light of their population figures. Even more
damning is the fact that although police were twice as likely to search blacks than
whites after initiating a stop, whites were far more likely to be found with
contraband.

It is not a leap to conclude that the same biases that cause those racial disparities also
make it more likely that black men will die during the course of police arrests.
According to the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, although black
men made up only 27.8 percent of all persons arrested from 2003-2009, they made
up 31.8 percent of all persons who died in the course of arrest, and the majority of
these deaths were homicides.

Why does racialized policing persist despite the end of slavery and Jim Crow? While
explicit racial bias may be less prominent today (albeit anything but eliminated),
implicit racial biases plague all of us, including those charged with keeping our
streets safe. A large body of compelling research has demonstrated how these
unconscious, automatically activated, and pervasive mental processes translate into
action with devastating consequences for black people.

In particular, researchers have well-documented shooter bias. One video game

study simulated the nearly instantaneous decisions made by police officers to shoot
armed individuals and to refrain from shooting the unarmed. The study revealed that
participants were more likely to shoot black people than white people in error….
Accountability vs. Privacy: The ACLU’s
Recommendations on Police Body Cameras
October 9, 2013
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at
11:00am

Today we’re releasing our policy recommendations on police “body cameras” (also called
“on-officer recording systems” or “cop cams”), small cameras that clip on to an officer’s
uniform and record audio and video of the officer’s interactions with the public.

This is a technology that, from what we are hearing, is being rapidly adopted by police
departments around the country. It’s also a technology that raises a lot of complex policy
questions: it has the potential to serve as an excellent oversight mechanism to prevent
police abuses, but also a very real potential to invade privacy.

Our basic position is that we support this technology, as long as it is accompanied by a

proper policy framework that addresses two tricky but crucial questions around how these
cameras will be deployed and used:

 Will police officers have the discretion to control what the cameras record? If
officers can “edit on the fly,” that will destroy this technology’s value as a police
accountability tool. Should officers’ cameras be on at all times during their shift, or
would it be too oppressive for officers to have every chat between partners in a
patrol car recorded, and to worry that recordings will be misused by police
supervisors against whistleblowers or union activists? But if they are under officer
control, how do we ensure that an officer won’t manipulate the recordings to permit
abuse?

 Are good policies put in place to ensure that these cameras do not invade the
privacy of particular individuals, or become yet another vector for mass
surveillance? How can we ensure that citizens are made aware that they are being
recorded; that video taken inside a person’s home (during a domestic violence call
or burglary investigation, for example) or in other sensitive situations does not
embarrass someone and cause others to hesitate to call for help? How can we
ensure that video of embarrassing or titillating incidents does not get circulated
within a police force for laughs, or end up on the internet? How can we ensure that
the public has faith that video of their interactions with the police will be strictly
handled?

In our brief (5 ½ page) paper, we offer recommendations for how departments should
achieve these important goals. We suggest rules for notice, retention of video, the use of
recordings, and access to recordings by the subjects and by the public, as well as
technological controls for how video data is stored and handled.

We will be watching to see how the technology plays out in the real world, and will revise
our position if needed to ensure the right balance between police oversight and Americans’
privacy rights.
Oakland Spent $74 Million Settling 417 Police Brutality Lawsuits
Oakland Police Beat, by Abraham Hyatt, Apr 9, 2014

A Catholic priest who said an officer put him in a chokehold and slammed his head into a
glass door. A woman who said she shouldn’t have been handcuffed when officers arrested
her.

A father who claimed officers beat him in the hallway outside of his child’s hospital room until
his head was bloody. A bank robber who was shot by officers after a high-speed chase. A man
whose head was slammed into something so hard that the bones in his face broke.
In each situation the Oakland Police Department was sued. And in each one, the City of
Oakland chose to settle out of court rather than take the case to trial.

A review of Oakland City Attorney lawsuit data and hundreds of federal and state court cases
has found that since 1990, Oakland and private insurance carriers have spent $74 million
dollars to settle at least 417 lawsuits accusing its police officers of brutality, misconduct and
other civil rights violations.

Oakland spends more on civil-rights police lawsuits than nearly any other California law
enforcement agency, with multimillion-dollar settlements coming directly out of funds that
could go to libraries, police and fire services or road repair.

Supporters of the Oakland Police Department say that high number is a reflection of the city’s
willingness to settle at any cost. But Oakland Police Beat’s analysis found that the City of
Oakland has successfully defended itself against many lawsuits it considers to be unfounded.
Our investigation found that more than 500 officers were named in those lawsuits. At least 72
of those officers were named in three or more of the suits. Settlement amounts per lawsuits
range from $100 to the nearly $11 million paid out following the so-called Riders scandal,
where more than 100 plaintiffs accused officers of beating, kidnapping and planting evidence
on suspects…

…The Oakland Police Department was given advance opportunity to preview our findings and
respond. It has not done so. This story will be updated if that occurs.

Why Oakland Settles Instead of Fights

Civil rights cases most often involve allegations that an officer or officers used excessive force.
Cases also include allegations of discrimination, false arrest, illegally obtained search
warrants, wrongful death and other types of misconduct.

In settling the cases the city does not admit to wrongdoing. It pays the plaintiff a mutually
agreed upon amount of money; in return the plaintiff drops the litigation…

…Jayne Williams, Oakland’s City Attorney from 1987 to 2000, said that the city first
investigates the facts of each case to determine if the city is in fact liable. Alex Katz, the
current City Attorney’s chief of staff, declined to comment on other details about the process,
citing the need to keep the city’s legal strategy private.

However, court records show the back-and-forth legal wrangling the city goes through —
usually over several years — in an effort to get a case thrown out. It can be an expensive
process. Because the City Attorney’s office has a small staff, it sometimes brings in outside
council to assist with cases. That’s happened with 61 OPD use of force-related lawsuits since
2000. Those extra lawyers have cost the city nearly $40 million.

According to Katz, the City Council’s final decision is often based on how much money the city
would spend taking the case to trial — and how much it would lose if a jury found in favor of
the plaintiff. Williams described the final steps in determining whether the city should settle as
a cost-benefit analysis.

After publication Katz clarified: “Every decision on settlements is based on the facts and
evidence of the case. You are correct that factors can include a cost benefit analysis. For
example, if a case will cost $100,000 to take to trial, or if there’s a significant risk of a much
higher judgment against the city, then it may be in the city’s interests to settle for $5,000. Of
course, you can’t do that analysis without considering the facts of each case.”

Private insurance carriers often cover part of the cost of a settlement. The total that Oakland is
responsible for comes out of the city’s general fund. Oakland’s general fund is typically used to
run the city. It finances the city’s departments, its debts, its staff, as well as programs and
services like parks and recreation and economic development.

Except in a case where a judge awards punitive damages, California law exempts officers
from having to pay for all or part of a settlement. According to Williams and Katz, since 1990
no Oakland Police Department officer has covered the cost of a settlement in a civil rights-
related case.

Oakland vs. California and the Nation

Oakland’s high settlement total for civil rights-related cases is unique in California — and likely
the nation — for cities and police departments of a similar size.

Data for comparison is difficult to obtain. California cities were either unresponsive to our
requests for police lawsuit information, or only had information from a small time span. Or, as
in the case of San Jose, has no way of differentiating between civil rights and non-civil rights
cases in its records. Bakersfield redacted the public records they sent us so heavily that they
provided little useful information….

... New York City, with 36,000 officers, spent $350 million on 6,113 cases; the sheriff’s
department for Cook County, Illinois, where Chicago is located, has 5,655 officers and spent
$76 million on 507 cases. Oakland, with only 766 officers, spent $22 million on 55 cases.

Oakland was ranked similarly in California during that same time period:

 Los Angeles County Sheriff (9,461 officers): $54 million on 248 cases
 Los Angeles Police Department (9,727 officers): $48 million on 155 cases
 Oakland Police Department (766 officers): $22 million on 55 cases
 California Highway Patrol (7,202 officers): $19 million on 68 cases
 Santa Anna Police Department (365 officers): $2.8 million on 21 cases
 San Diego Police Department (1,951 officers): $374,000 on five cases…

John Russo, City Attorney from Sept. 2000 to June 2011 could not be reach for comment for
this story. Laura McCamy contributed reporting to this story. The Oakland Police Beat Officer
Database was researched and compiled by Abraham Hyatt, Rin Kelly and Laura McCamy.

(http://oaklandpolicebeat.com/2014/04/oakland-spent-74-million-settling-417-police-
brutality-lawsuits/)

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – an organization that is always checking on

the government and observing the justice system to protect people’s rights.
https://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/police-practices
https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/police-brutality
Oakland Police Beat – an organization that watches and reports on the police department
in Oakland, California
http://oaklandpolicebeat.com/2014/04/oakland-spent-74-million-settling-417-
police-brutality-lawsuits/

New York Times – one of the oldest and most trusted sources of news in the world. They
report on stories over years to make sure they are always looking at many sides of the story
and that they are presenting the truth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/us/the-rise-of-the-swat-team-in-american-
policing.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMedia
High&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-
news&_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/in-aftermath-of-missouri-protests-
skepticism-about-the-prospects-for-change.html

HuffingtonPost – a an online newspaper that tries to report on all sides of a story, cover
stories that other major newspapers and tv shows aren’t covering, and never make
judgments before learning all the facts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/police-brutality/

Democracy Now! A radio news program that tries to bring stories about current events
that are not being covered by other newspapers or news shows on TV

http://www.democracynow.org/topics/police_brutality

Salon.com – an online newspaper that tries to report on all sides of a story, cover stories
that other major newspapers and tv shows aren’t covering, and never make judgments
before learning all the facts.

http://www.salon.com/topic/police_brutality/