The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/author/jackatme/page/2/)
Using punitive justice system tools to combat street drug dealers is a waste of resources that could be better oriented towards addressing the public health issues linked to addiction and substance abuse, leading advocates said during the second day of the John Jay Justice Innovations Conference.
Recruits should receive training equivalent to an undergraduate degree in some form of police science, says Kirk Burkhalter, now a professor at New York Law School.
Short-term responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated that more fundamental reforms to the system of probation and parole are feasible, the 2020 Innovations Conference at John Jay College was told.
If the bill passed by the Georgia General Assembly is signed into law by the governor, it will stiffen sentencing for those convicted of targeting a victim because of their race, color or religion, among other things.
Criminal justice reforms have so far largely been limited to large cities, while racial inequities in incarceration and policing in rural areas go ignored, says former Utah prosecutor Maybell Romero.
“It’s not about making a broken system better,” Foxx told a webinar organized by John Jay’s Institute for Innovation in Prosecutions on Juneteenth. “It’s about transforming it.”
The Justice Department moved abruptly to oust Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan overseeing key prosecutions of President Donald Trump’s allies and an investigation of his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Berman initially refused to leave his post but quit after it became clear that his deputy would replace him temporarily.
Would defunding increase crime? No one really knows the answer, but police spending per capita has increased 46 percent in 25 years while crime rates have dropped.
Although President Donald Trump has dismissed calls for defunding police as “radical,” versions of the approach have been employed successfully by law enforcement agencies in several European countries. The nation of Georgia abolished its entire police force in 2004, then replaced it with a scaled-back version.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration cannot carry out its plan to shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has allowed nearly 800,000 young people, known as “Dreamers,” to avoid deportation and remain in the U.S. The White House could try again to end the DACA program by providing a better explanation.