CONTENTSPREFACE Show
1. SOME OPERATING ASSUMPTIONS 2. GETTING STARTED — IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM 3. GATHER THE FACTS 4. CONTROLLING THE POLICE — COMMUNITY GOALS 5. ORGANIZING STRATEGIES A FINAL WORD RESOURCES CREDITS & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACEIn the early hours of March 3, 1991, a police chase in Los Angeles ended in an incident that would become synonymous with police brutality: the beating of a young man named Rodney King by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. An amateur video, televised nationwide, showed King lying on the ground while three officers kicked him and struck him repeatedly with their nightsticks. No one who viewed that beating will ever forget its viciousness. The Rodney King incident projected the brutal reality of police abuse into living rooms across the nation, and for a while, the problem was front page news. Political leaders condemned police use of excessive force and appointed special commissions to investigate incidents of brutality. The media covered the issue extensively, calling particular attention to the fact that police abuse was not evenly distributed throughout American society, but disproportionately victimized people of color. But six years later, police abuse is still very much an American problem, as the following examples from three recent months demonstrate:
The fact that police abuse remains a significant problem does not mean there has been no progress. In communities all across the United States people have organized to bring about change, and some of the most successful strategies are described in this manual, now in its 3rd printing. This manual was not inspired by, nor is it intended to generate, animosity toward the police, or to promote the perception that all police officers are prone to abuse. They are not. Rather, it arose out of our realization that, ultimately, it will take a strong and sustained effort by community groups to bring about real and lasting reform. And it is to those efforts that this manual is dedicated. Ira Glasser August 1997 1. SOME OPERATING ASSUMPTIONSTHE BAD NEWS is... The problem is national: no police department in the country is known to be completely free of misconduct. Yet it must be fought locally: the nation's 19,000 law enforcement agencies are essentially independent. While some federal statutes specify criminal penalties for willful violations of civil rights and conspiracies to violate civil rights, the United States Department of Justice has been insufficiently aggressive in prosecuting cases of police abuse. There are shortcomings, too, in federal law itself, which does not permit "pattern and practice" lawsuits. The battle against police abuse must, therefore, be fought primarily on the local level. THE GOOD NEWS is... To fight police abuse effectively, you must have realistic expectations. You must not expect too much of any one remedy because no single remedy will cure the problem. A "mix" of reforms is required. And even after citizen action has won reforms, your community must keep the pressure on through monitoring and oversight to ensure that the reforms are actually implemented. Nonetheless, even one person, or a small group of persistent people, can make a big difference. Sometimes outmoded and abusive police practices prevail largely because no one has ever questioned them. In such cases, the simple act of spotlighting a problem can have a powerful effect that leads to reform. Just by raising questions, one person or a few people — who need not be experts — can open up some corner of the all-too-secretive and insular world of policing to public scrutiny. Depending on what is revealed, their inquiries can snowball into a full blown examination by the media, the public and politicians. 2. GETTING STARTED — IDENTIFY THE PROBLEMYou've got to address specific problems. The first step, then, is to identify exactly what the police problems are in your city. What's wrong with your police department is not necessarily the same as what's wrong in that of another city. Police departments differ in size, quality of management, local traditions and the severity of their problems. Some departments are gravely corrupt; others are relatively "clean" but have poor relations with community residents. Also, a city's political environment, which affects both how the police operate and the possibilites for achieving reform, is different in every city. For example, it is often easier to reform police procedures in cities that have a tradition of "good government," or in cities where racial minorities are well organized politically. The range of police problems includes — 1) Excessive use of deadly force. 2) Excessive use of physical force. 3) Discriminatory patterns of arrest. 4) Patterns of harassment of the homeless, youth, racial minorities and gays, including aggressive and discriminatory use of the "stop-and-frisk" and overly harsh enforcement of petty offenses. 5) Chronic verbal abuse of citizens, including racist, sexist and homophobic slurs. 6) Discriminatory non-enforcement of the law, such as the failure to respond quickly to calls in low-income areas and half-hearted investigations of domestic violence, rape or hate crimes. 7) Spying on political activists. 8) Employment discrimination — in hiring, promotion and assignments, and internal harassment of minority, women and gay or lesbian police personnel. 9) The "code of silence" and retaliation against officers who report abuse and/or support reforms. 10) Overreaction to gang problems, which is driven by the assumption that those who associate with known gang members must be involved in criminal activity, even in the absence of concrete evidence that this is the case. This includes illegal mass stops and arrests, and demanding photo IDs from young men based on their race and dress instead of on their criminal conduct. 11) The "war on drugs," with its overbroad searches and other tactics that endanger innocent bystanders. This "war" wastes scarce resources on unproductive "buy and bust" operations to the neglect of more promising community-based approaches. 12) Lack of accountability, such as the failure to discipline or prosecute abusive officers, and the failure to deter abuse by denying promotions and/or particular assignments because of prior abusive behavior. 13) Crowd control tactics that infringe on free expression rights and lead to unnecessary use of physical force.
3. GATHER THE FACTSObtaining the most relevant information on the activities of your police department can be a tough task. That's the first thing to bear in mind about the "homework" community residents have to do in order to build a strong case for reform. In answer to critics, police chiefs often cite various official data to support their claim that they are really doing a great job. "Look at the crime rate," they say. "It's lower than in other cities." Or: "My department's arrest rate is much higher than elsewhere." The catch is that these data, though readily available to citizens, are deeply flawed, while the most important information is not always easy to get. Forget the "crime rate." The "crime rate" figures cited by government officials are based on the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) system, which has several serious flaws. To name only a few: First, the UCR only measures reported crime. Second, since the system is not independently audited there are no meaningful controls over how police departments use their crime data. Police officers can and do "unfound" crimes, meaning they decide that no crime occurred. They also "downgrade" crimes — for example, by officially classifying a rape as an assault. Third, reports can get "lost," either deliberately or inadvertently. There are many other technical problems that make the UCR a dubious measure of the extent of crime problems. The National Crime Survey (NCS), published by another part of the U.S. Justice Department, provides a far more accurate estimate of the national crime rate and of long-term trends in crime. But it is a national-level estimate and does not provide data on individual cities. So the NCS isn't much help on the local level. Forget the "clearance rate." A police department's official data on its "clearance rate," which refers to the percentage of crimes solved, do not accurately reflect that department's performance. The fact that one department "clears" 40 percent of all robberies, compared with 25 percent by another department, doesn't necessarily mean it is more effective. There are too many ways to manipulate the data, either by claiming a larger number of crimes "cleared" (inflating the numerator), or by artificially lowering the number of reported crimes (lowering the denominator). Forget the arrest rate. Police officers have broad discretion in making and recording arrests. The Police Foundation in Washington, D.C., which conducts research on policing issues, has found great variations among police departments in their recording of arrests. In many departments, police officers take people into custody, hold them at the station, question and then release them without filling out an arrest report. For all practical purposes, these people were arrested, but their arrests don't show up in the official data. Other departments record such arrests. Thus, the department that reports a lower number of arrests may actually be taking more people into custody than the department that reports more arrests. Forget the citizen complaint rate. Official data on the complaints filed by citizens regarding police conduct are important but present a number of problems. Many departments do not release any information on this subject. Some publish a smattering of information on complaints and the percentage of complaints sustained by the department. In more and more cities, a civilian review agency publishes this data. Data on citizen complaints are difficult to interpret. Some examples —
Thus, the official "complaint rate" (complaints per 1,000 citizens), rather than being a reliable measure of police performance, more than likely reflects the administrative customs of a particular police department. WHAT YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW, AND WHY A. Police shootings. You need to know about police firearm discharges, which refer to the number of times a police weapon has been fired. This information is more complete than statistics on the number of persons shot and wounded or killed. (However, information on the race of persons shot and wounded or killed is important.) Particularly important is data on repeat shooters, which can tell you whether some officers fire their weapons at a suspiciously high rate.
With this information, you can evaluate the use of deadly force in your department. You can also evaluate the long-term trends in shootings. Are shootings increasing or decreasing? Has there been a recent upsurge? How does the department compare with other departments — are officers shooting at a significantly higher rate in your department than elsewhere? B. Use of physical force. You need to know how frequently police officers in your city use physical force in the day-to-day course of their encounters with citizens. Do officers try to refrain from using such force against citizens, or do they quickly and casually resort to force? In its report on the Los Angeles Police Department in the aftermath of the March 1991 beating of Rodney King, the Christopher Commission confirmed a long held suspicion: A small number of officers were involved in an extraordinarily high percentage of use-of-force incidents. Ten percent of the officers accounted for 33.2 percent of all use-of-force incidents. The Commission was able to identify 44 such officers who were not disciplined despite the fact that they were the subjects of numerous citizen complaints. In 1981, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found a similar pattern in Houston and recommended, as a remedy, that police departments establish "early warning systems" to identify officers with high rates of citizen complaints. Patterns in the use of physical force reveal a lot about the "culture" of a particular police department. Clearly, a department whose officers repeatedly engage in physically coercive conduct needs reform. Police officials often deny that their personnel are prone to using force inappropriately, so if your community believes it has a problem in this area citizens must be able to support their claims with existing data, or data they have gathered themselves. C. Official policies. You need to know what your local police department's formal, written policies are on how officers are supposed to behave in particular situations. How does the department treat domestic violence complaints? What is the policy on how officers are supposed to deal with homeless people? Does the department use canine patrols and, if so, under what circumstances? In examining official policies, you need to evaluate them in comparison to recommended standards. D. Lawsuits. You need to know how many lawsuits citizens have filed against your local police department. You'll want to know what the charges were, the number of officers involved, whether certain officers are named repeatedly in suits, what was the outcome and, in the case of successful suits, how much the city paid in damages. The number of lawsuits filed against a police department can be very revealing. For example, according to the Christopher Commission the taxpayers of Los Angeles spent $67.5 million between 1991 and 1995 to resolve lawsuits brought by victims of police abuse. In 1990 alone, New York City paid victims of police misconduct a record high of more than $13 million. This kind of information can be used to mobilize middle-class taxpayers and "good-government" activists, who can then be brought into a community coalition against police abuse.
E. Minority employment. You'll need to know how many African Americans, Latinos, Asians, other minorities and women are employed by your police department and their distribution throughout the department's ranks. This information is useful in assessing, again, the "culture" of your local police department — is it internally diverse, fair and equitable? It also suggests how much value the department places on the "human relations" aspects of its work, and how responsive it is to community concerns. WHERE TO GET INFORMATION, AND HOW Police business is generally shrouded in secrecy, which conceals outdated policies and departmental inertia, encourages cover-ups and, of course, breeds public suspicion. But remember: Police departments are an arm of government, and the government's business is your business. Police policies, procedures, memoranda, records, reports, tape recordings, etc. should not be withheld from public view unless their release would threaten ongoing investigations, endanger officers or others, or invade someone's personal privacy. Demanding information about police practices is an important part of the struggle to establish police accountability. Indeed, a campaign focused solely on getting information from the police can serve as a vehicle for organizing a community to tackle police abuse. Regarding all of the following categories, one of the tactics your community could employ is to interest a local investigative journalist in seeking information from the police for a series of articles. Once in hand, the information your community has collected or helped to expose is a tool for holding the police accountable for their actions.
A. Police Shootings. Virtually every big city police department has this information on hand, since officers are required to file a report after every firearms discharge. However, departments don't usually release the information voluntarily. Strong civilian review boards in a few cities now publish the information. As for repeat shooters, this information exists in police reports, but police departments vigorously resist identifying repeat shooters. There are several ways to proceed —
B. Physical Force. There are three potential sources of data on police use of physical force —
C. Official Policies. Your police department has a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) manual (it may have another title) that contains the official policies of the department. The SOP manual is a public document and should be readily available. Some departments place current copies in local libraries. Others treat it as an internal document not available to the public — a practice which is unacceptable. Demand to see the manual, if your department withholds it. As a last resort, you may be able to file suit under your state's open records law to obtain the SOP manual. D. Lawsuits. Lawsuits brought against police departments are matters of public record. Records of suits brought in state courts reside at your local state courthouse; of suits brought in federal district court, at the nearest federal courthouse. The Lexis computer database is a source of published opinions in civilian suits brought against the police. However, collecting information from any of these sources is a very laborious task. It's better to contact your local ACLU affiliate and/or other relevant public interest groups, which may have done most of the work for you. In the back of this manual, find the name and address of your local ACLU and other organizations. E. Minority Employment. Official data on this issue are generally available from your local police department. If the police stonewall, you can get the information from the city's personnel division. The point is to evaluate the police department's minority employment record relative to local conditions. Using current data, compare the percentage of a particular group of people in the local population with that group's representation on the police force. If, for example, Latinos are 30 percent of the population but only 15 percent of the sworn officers, then your police department is only half way toward achieving an ideal level of diversity. 4. CONTROLLING THE POLICE — COMMUNITY GOALSGOAL #1 — A CIVILIAN REVIEW BOARDCivilian review of police activity was first proposed in the 1950s because of widespread dissatisfaction with the internal disciplinary procedures of police departments. Many citizens didn't believe that police officials took their complaints seriously. They suspected officials of investigating allegations of abuse superficially at best, and of covering up misconduct. The theory underlying the concept of civilian review is that civilian investigations of citizen complaints are more independent because they are conducted by people who are not sworn officers. At first, civilian review was a dream few thought would ever be fulfilled. But slow, steady progress has been made, indicating that it's an idea whose time has come. By the end of 1997, more than 75 percent of the nation's largest cities (more than 80 cities across the country) had civilian review systems. Civilian review advocates in every city have had to overcome substantial resistance from local police departments. One veteran of the struggle for civilian review has chronicled the stages of police opposition as follows —
Strong community advocacy is necessary to overcome resistance, even after civilian review is established. WHAT IS CIVILIAN REVIEW? Civilian review systems create a lot a confusion because they vary tremendously. Some are more "civilian" than others. Some are not boards but municipal agencies headed by an executive director (who has been appointed by, and is accountable to, the mayor). The three basic types of civilian review systems are —
Although the above are the most common, other types of civilian review systems also exist. WHY IS CIVILIAN REVIEW IMPORTANT?
GOAL #2 — CONTROL OF POLICE SHOOTINGSConsiderable progress has been made in the area of police misconduct in the use of deadly force. Although the rate of deadly force abuse is still intolerably high, national data reveal reductions in the number of persons shot and killed by the police since the mid-1970s — as much as 35-to 40 percent in our 50 largest cities. This has been accompanied by a significant reduction in the racial disparities among persons shot and killed: since the 1970s, from about six people of color to one white person, down to three people of color to one white. This progress serves as a model for controlling other forms of police behavior. And was achieved though hard work and perseverance. In the mid-1970s, police departments began developing restrictive internal policies on the use of deadly force. They adopted the "defense of life" standard: the use of deadly force only when the life of an officer or some other person is in danger. In 1985, the Supreme Court finally upheld this standard in the case of Tennessee v. Garner (see table). However, the majority of policies adopted by police departments go beyond the Court's Garner decision, prohibiting warning shots, shots to wound and other reckless actions. Most important, these policies require officers to file written reports after each firearm discharge, and require that those reports be reviewed by higher-ranking officers. To meet goal #2, your community must —
GOAL #3 — REDUCE POLICE BRUTALITYYour community's principal aim here should be to get the police department to adopt and enforce a written policy governing the use of physical force. This policy should have two parts —
Your community's second objective should be to get the police department to establish an early warning system to identify officers who are involved in an inordinate number of inappropriate physical force incidents. The incidents should then be investigated and, if verified, the officers involved should be charged, disciplined, transferred, retrained or offered counseling, depending on the severity of their misconduct. The Christopher Commission's report on the Rodney King beating ascertained that L.A. police leadership typically looked the other way when officers were involved in questionable incidents, a tolerance of brutality that helped create an atmosphere conducive to police abuses. GOAL #4 — END POLICE SPYINGPolice spying or intelligence gathering on legal but politically unpopular activities is a problem. And it's particularly difficult to deal with because spying, by definition, is a covert activity, unknown to either the victim or other witnesses. During the 1970s, the ACLU and other organizations brought lawsuits against unconstitutional police surveillance in several cities around the country, including New York City, Chicago, Memphis and Los Angeles. The result was increased controls on police spying. In 1976, Seattle residents discovered local police were spying on organizations of black construction workers, local Republican Party operatives, Native Americans, advocates for low-income housing and other activists whose conduct was perfectly lawful. In response to the revelations, the ACLU, along with the American Friends Service Committee and the National Lawyers Guild, formed the Coalition on Government Spying. After several years of hard work and lobbying, the coalition succeeded in bringing about passage of a comprehensive municipal law — the first of its kind in the country — that governs all police investigations and restricts the collection of political, religious and sexual information. Called the Seattle Police Intelligence Ordinance, this law is a model for responsible police intelligence operations —
GOAL #5 — OVERSIGHT OF POLICE POLICYPolice policies should be subject to public review and debate instead of being viewed as the sole province of police insiders. Open policy-making not only allows police officials to benefit from community input, but it also provides an opportunity for police officials to explain to the public why certain tactics or procedures may be necessary. This kind of communication can help anticipate problems and avert crises before they occur. The Police Review Commission (a civilian review body) of Berkeley, California, holds regular, bi-monthly meetings that are open to the public where representatives of community organizations can voice criticisms, make proposals and introduce resolutions to review or reform specific police policies. The Police Practices Project of the ACLU of Northern California successfully pressured the San Francisco Police Department to adopt enlightened policies regarding the treatment of the homeless; the use of pain-holds and batons; the deployment of plainclothes officers at protests and demonstrations; intelligence gathering; the selection of field training officers, and AIDS/HIV education for police officers. The Project has also prevented the adoption of an anti-loitering rule, a policy that would have made demonstrators financially liable for police costs, and other bad policies. In Tucson, Arizona, a Citizens' Police Advisory Committee was incorporated into the city's municipal code in July 1990. Composed of both civilian and police representatives, it has the authority to initiate investigations of controversial incidents or questionable policies, and other oversight functions. CITIZEN-POLICE ADVISORY COMMITTEE TUCSON, ARIZONA |