Resources On Police Brutality

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-policebrutality-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-yearold 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-andliberty-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-yearold 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?

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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 rightsrelated 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-policebrutality-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-417police-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-americanpolicing.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMedia High&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=topnews&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/in-aftermath-of-missouri-protestsskepticism-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/