The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/tag/policing/)
In the aftermath of the shooting in a Tucson mall in 2011, leaving six people dead and 13 injured, including Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, the Tucson police department has developed a proactive approach to dealing with the mentally ill.
American policing has drifted disturbingly far from the liberal values that gird our democracy, warns Luke William Hunt, a justice professor and a former FBI agent. In a conversation with TCR, he discusses his new book, which offers a blueprint for getting us back to our roots.
Some hate crimes are so heinous there’s no debate about whether they should be prosecuted. But the law isn’t always so clear-cut for police. Oregon is a good example.
Despite claims by law enforcement that people who are most susceptible to hate crimes are “hard to reach” populations, a UK study finds that victims would report incidents to officers if they didn’t feel barriers were insurmountable.
A report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found that although the number of full-time sworn officers has increased from 1997 to 2016, the rate per 1,000 residents decreased by 11 percent, as the general population in the U.S. increased by 21 percent over the same period.
Law enforcement efforts to avert the kind of violence seen in Charlottesville last year and Portland, Or., this year would be boosted by anti-street gang strategies, say two researchers.
All states have opted in to FirstNet, meaning that they agreed not to build their own competing broadband lanes for law enforcement and public safety. AT&T says that FirstNet’s core — the infrastructure that isolates police traffic from the commercial network — had become operational at last. “It’s like having a super highway that only public safety can use,” the company says.
Civil rights groups filed the suit on behalf of the advocacy group Black Love Resists in the Rust after a 2012 “Strike Force” unit established traffic checkpoints in high-crime areas in Buffalo, with what it claimed were adverse affects on minorities. These checkpoints were disproportionately placed in Black and Latino communities.
The cost of police misconduct is increasingly sending cities around the country into debt, generating a burden for taxpayers but profits for investors–and effectively leading to a “financialization of police violence,” according to one advocacy group.
Training cops to avoid excessive use-of-force is only part of the challenge. The hardest part is learning a different mindset about policing—in the face of society expectations and peer pressure, experts and senior officers tell TCR.