Harvard Study Shows Actual Number of People Killed by U.S. Police
"In a revelatory new study published Tuesday, Harvard public health researchers report that in 2015, a total of 1,166 people were killed by police in the United States. What’s staggering about this research is not just the massive number of police killings it reports — and knowing that many of those police aren’t disciplined, — but the fact that scientists were able to conduct the study at all. Historically, the U.S. government has been unable to provide a full count of people killed by police that has the confidence of federal statisticians.

This new study, published Tuesday in PLoS Medicine, is the first to quantify the undercounting of police-related deaths in both a nationwide death certificate data and in a news media-based database — which makes it the most accurate count the public has to date."

View the Study

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Debate over Police Shootings Raises Questions Over Police Versus Tactics

 

Can Big Data Stop Bad Cops?
" This article is part of an ongoing examination by The Washington Post of fatal shootings by police. In 2015, The Post began tracking cases nationwide and compiled a database of all fatal shootings by officers in the line of duty. The project has expanded this year to include details about the officers involved. View the 2016 database here.

The Justice Department’s investigation of Baltimore police this month rebuked the agency for an entrenched culture of discriminatory policing. Deep within their findings, Justice investigators singled out a core failure: Baltimore’s system for identifying troubled officers was broken and existed in name only.

In Baltimore, Justice found that critical disciplinary records were excluded from its early intervention system, that police supervisors often intervened only after an officer’s behavior became egregious and that when they did, the steps they took were inadequate....

...The problems with Baltimore’s early intervention system are not isolated to police in that city. In numerous departments nationwide, police have failed to use early intervention systems effectively, Justice has found. Since 1994, 36 civil rights investigations by Justice discovered that local agencies had deeply flawed early intervention systems or no system in place at all, according to a review of those investigations by The Washington Post."

View the DOJ Report 

U.S. Police Leaders, Visiting Scotland, get Lessons on Avoiding Deadly Force
"The United States and Britain are bound by a common language and a shared history, and their law enforcement agencies have been close partners for generations.

But a difference long curious to Americans stands out: Most British police officers are unarmed, a distinction particularly pronounced here in Scotland, where 98 percent of the country’s officers do not carry guns. For them, calming a situation through talk, rather than escalating it with weapons, is an essential policing tool, and one that brought a delegation of top American police officials to this town 30 miles northeast of Glasgow."

Watching the Watchmen: Best Practices for Police Body Cameras
"Coverage of recent police killings has prompted a much-needed debate on law enforcement reform, and proposals for police body cameras have featured heavily in these discussions.  Body cameras undoubtedly gather valuable evidence of police misconduct, and although research on the effects of body cameras is comparatively limited there are good reasons to believe that they can improve police behavior.  

However, without the right policies in place the use of police body cameras could result in citizens' privacy being needlessly violated.  In addition, poorly considered police body camera policies governing the storage and release of footage might be too costly to implement.
 
This paper examines the research on the costs and benefits of police body cameras, arguing that the devices can, if properly deployed and regulated, provide a valuable disincentive to police abuses as well as valuable evidence for punishing abuses when they occur."

Black Americans Killed by Police Twice as Likely to be Unarmed as White People
"Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed during encounters with police as white people, according to a Guardian investigation which found 102 of 464 people killed so far this year in incidents with law enforcement officers were not carrying weapons.

An analysis of public records, local news reports and Guardian reporting found that 32% of black people killed by police in 2015 were unarmed, as were 25% of Hispanic and Latino people, compared with 15% of white people killed.

The findings emerged from a database filled by a five-month study of police fatalities in the US, which calculated that local and state police and federal law enforcement agencies are killing people at twice the rate calculated by the US government’s official public record of police homicides. The database names five people whose names have not been publicly released."

Related Articles:

• Fatal Police Shootings in 2015 Approaching 400 Nationwide 
• U.S. Senators Call for Mandatory Reporting of Police Killings
• I'm a Black Ex-Cop, and this is the Real Truth about Race and Policing

Report on Philadelphia Police: New Rules, Training Needed
"A long-awaited U.S. Justice Department report on police shootings in Philadelphia concluded Monday that there is "significant strife between the community and the department," and recommended wholesale changes in procedures and training.

The federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) issued 48 findings and 91 recommendations for the Philadelphia department to consider in 'reforming its deadly force practices.'

...Much of the report echoed criticisms raised for years in community meetings, past audits of the department, and lawsuits against the city....

Paul Messing, a Temple University Law School professor and civil-rights lawyer, said the report 'confirmed what we've known for years' - that the department's disciplinary process has 'a complete lack of teeth.'

The Justice Department's report also criticized police policies on use of force, calling them confusing and inconsistent. The main directive on using deadly force was deemed 'too vague,' the report said.

It noted that under current rules, an officer who had violated its deadly force policy three times could get off with only a reprimand. And it found that the department's investigations of officer-involved shootings had 'a general lack of consistency in quality.'

The report called for a specialized unit to investigate such cases. It also recommended that officers involved in shootings be interviewed by investigators soon after the incident. Now, those officers are interviewed only after the district attorney's investigation into the matter is concluded, which can take months...."

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Want to Stop Police Brutality? Start Disciplining Officers
"As they strive to solve the public crisis of police use-of-force incidents, illuminated again by the deaths of several black victims last year, officials from the White House on down have coalesced around 'community policing''  When it comes to influencing the national conversation on a local issue like this, it doesn't get more official than the U.S. Conference of Mayors, or USCM.  The non-partisan organization is comprised of more than one thousand mayors representing the nation's largest cities.  Its mission is to shape national urban policy and the positions adopted at their annual meeting are distributed to the President of the United States and to Congress.

On January 30, the USCM released a report on strengthening 'police-community' relations in American cities.  the six-page report came full of recommendations for everything from 'youth study circles' to new equipment.  The report was completed with the help of a working group of police chiefs, including Philadelphia Commissioner Charles Ramsey, the man appointed by President Obama to chair his Task Force on 21st Century Policing in response to rising unrest around the issue of police brutality.  

Absent from their suggestions, however was a single mention of officer discipline...."  

Every Mother's Son (A Video)
"In the late 1990s, three victims of police brutality made headlines around the country: Amadou Diallo, the young West African man whose killing sparked intense public protest; Anthony Baez, killed in an illegal choke-hold; and Gary (Gidone) Busch, a Hasidic Jew shot and killed outside his Brooklyn home.  

Every Mother's Son profiles three New York mothers who unexpectedly find themselves united to seek justice and transform their grief into an opportunity for profound social change. It was Iris Baez, who had become a veteran activist since her son Anthony’s death, who approached Amadou’s mother, Kadiatou, and Gary’s mother, Doris, after their sons were killed. As a Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx, a West African woman who relocated to New York, and a Jewish woman from Long Island, they made an unlikely but powerful team.

The grassroots movement they inspired in New York is challenging the militarization of law enforcement and the erosions of constitutional protections. When police kill someone under suspicious circumstances, the mothers assemble to help the family deal with its grief and to seek the truth and accountability. The mothers have also become advocates for police reforms, including better training and more citizen oversight, and have connected to a larger national movement against police brutality."

* Free streaming until May 3, 2015