The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/policing/page/2/)
Officers swarmed the city’s “occupied” protest zone, tore down demonstrators’ tents and used bicycles to herd the protesters when Mayor Jenny Durkan ordered the area cleared after two fatal shootings in less than two weeks.
New York Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said the deadly virus has “ground the criminal justice system to a halt” in his city, sending a troubling message to the larger community.
A majority of New York state voters don’t support reducing funding for police, even as they agree the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta are part of a “pattern of excessive police violence toward black people.”
The extraordinary move created searing images of a police building in flames. It touched off a debate over whether the building’s abandonment helped save lives or inspired more violence and destruction during protests against police brutality.
The Aurora, Co., police department is investigating several officers who posed for photographs near the site where Elijah McClain was forcibly arrested as he walked home from a convenience store last summer. The site became a memorial to the 23-year-old who died in police custody.
Homicide rates fell in April and May in most large cities as part of a general decline in street crime caused by restrictions imposed to contain COVID-19, but a report from Arnold Ventures adds “there’s reason to think 2020 will be more violent than 2019.”
“Proportionally, Native Americans are the most likely racial group to be killed by the police,” says a report by the Lakota People’s Law Project. Native American men are also imprisoned at four times the rate of white men, and Native American women at six times the rate of white women.
A Minnesota judge said he is likely to move the trials of four former police officers charged in George Floyd’s death out of Minneapolis if public officials, attorneys and family members continue speaking publicly about the case.
Among items getting wide backing: forcing officers to reapply for their jobs to help weed out bad cops, limiting policing to serious and violent crimes, and ending police ability to buy military gear.
At least 70 people have died in police custody in the last 10 years after saying “I can’t breathe,” the New York Times finds. More than half were black.