Los Angeles has a particularly grim history when it comes to police violence. The acquittal of five white police officers in the brutal beating of Black motorist Rodney King sparked days of civil unrest in the city. This was fueled in part by the fact that a bystander caught the entire attack on camera. Police killings remain common in LA. In fact, a recent in-depth analysis by the Los Angeles Times found that LA County law enforcement has killed at least people since The city has only charged two officers.
Police killings in Phoenix have also been the subject of public and media scrutiny. A study by The Arizona Republic showed that fatal police shootings in Phoenix surged in despite the expansion of the racial and criminal justice movement. Other cities have seen police killings increase dramatically. Accounting for population differences, the deadliest police department in the U. The population-adjusted rate of police killings by San Bernardino police was 2. According to a Mapping Police Violence analysis of San Bernardino police shootings, in 74 percent of shootings since , the officers involved did not attempt non-deadly force first.
Los Angeles, which had the highest number of killings over the past five years, had one of the lowest population-adjusted rates in , while Phoenix had one of the highest. At the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests after the murder of George Floyd were discrepancies between the rate at which police kill white people and the rate at which they kill Black people, Native Americans, and Hispanic people.
Black Americans make up about 13 percent of the U. Hispanic and Native American people are also overrepresented in police killings. In the U. Phoenix police most consistently have high population-adjusted rates of killings of Black, Hispanic, and Native American people.
Police have killed people in Download Full Database. Compare Cities. Compare States. Police Scorecard. Similar forecasting models could recognize patterns of bad behaviour among officers. Data from the New York City Police Department suggests that officers who had repeated negative marks in their files were more than three times as likely to fire their gun as were other officers 6.
Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings. Such wrongdoing might even be contagious. Another study, published in February, looked at complaints filed against police officers in Chicago, Illinois. Other officers connected to them were also found to be at greater risk of shooting. But carrying out disciplinary action, let alone firing a police officer, is notoriously difficult in the United States.
Union contracts give officers protections that have been tied to increases in misconduct 8. In many states, a bill of rights for law-enforcement officers shields personnel from investigations into misconduct. Massive protests after the death of George Floyd have renewed pressure to reform policies for US law-enforcement agencies.
Lawrence Sherman, director of the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing in Cambridge, UK, suggests that states have the constitutional power to license, or revoke, the power of any individual to serve as a police officer. Even officers who are fired for misconduct are frequently rehired.
The police officer in Cleveland, Ohio, who fatally shot year-old Tamir Rice in had previously resigned from another police department after it had deemed him unfit to serve. The study, published in May, found that these officers tended to move to smaller agencies which served a slightly larger proportion of Black residents, but with no significant difference in crime rates 9. They also appeared to be more likely to commit misconduct in the future compared to officers who had never been fired.
How environmental racism is fuelling the coronavirus pandemic. Federal legislation introduced last month targets barriers to good and fair policing. One bill would effectively end the doctrine of qualified immunity, by which courts have largely prevented officers from being successfully sued for abuse of power or misconduct since the mids ref. A similar bill proposes a number of measures intended to increase police accountability, training and data collection, including a national police misconduct registry to keep record of when an officer is fired or quits.
Although Democrats in Washington DC broadly support the bills, Republicans unveiled a competing, weaker proposal that does not address the issue of qualified immunity. This came on 17 June — a day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that incentivizes police reform. The order drew swift criticism over its relatively narrow breadth and lack of teeth.
Robin Engel, director of the Center for Police Research and Policy in Cincinnati, Ohio, suggests that the real capacity for change is at the state and local levels.
It remains unclear which law-enforcement practices are actually best, largely because of a lack of data and science. Political leaders and activists pushing for change in the United States have widely endorsed body-worn cameras, de-escalation training, implicit-bias training, early intervention systems, the banning of chokeholds, and civilian oversight since the tragedies of Researchers are advocating collection of better data, such as tracking situations in which force was avoided by de-escalation strategies or, when force was used, recording whether it was at a lower level than it might previously have been.
Bias detectives: the researchers striving to make algorithms fair. The Oklahoma City Police Department is among agencies working to fill that void.
It now collects details on the applicability of each specific de-escalation tactic and technique any time force is used. The collection of data might itself hold police officers more accountable. In one study, a requirement that officers file a report when they point their guns at people but do not fire was associated with significantly reduced rates of gun death The use of body-worn cameras could be among the easiest interventions to enhance accountability.
The technology gained traction after a randomized experiment published in compared shifts in which all officers wore cameras all the time with shifts in which they never did The likelihood of force being used by officers with cameras was roughly half that of officers without cameras.
Furthermore, camera-wearing officers received about one-tenth the number of complaints as did officers without cameras. Results of more-recent studies have been mixed. When the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in Nevada implemented body cameras, it experienced significant drops in both the rate of complaints and the use of force But when the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia did the same, it found no benefits see go.
The differences might have more to do with policies that allow officers to choose when to turn on their cameras, as well as a lack of controls for situations in which one officer shows up wearing a camera while another does not, notes Sherman. The latter could dilute true differences in the rates of complaints or uses of force.
A one-day training programme based on these principles of procedural justice — a model of policing that focuses on respect, neutrality and transparency — was shown to reduce both citizen complaints and use of force by officers in the Chicago Police Department His work suggests that such trust-building requires the police to both acknowledge its role in creating the distrust, as well as apologize for it Any half-hearted attempts at reconciliation could backfire, he says.
Some researchers caution against fully abolishing police departments.
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