Police Brutality

In 2009, Anaheim police shot and killed Theresa Smith’s son. A new California law promises police transparency, but her quest for answers faces a substantial cost.

With Appeal contributor Ko Bragg

A new coalition of people in the sex trades wants New York to become the first state to fully decriminalize their work.

Since Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s 2017 election, at least five people have died at the hands of the law enforcement in Mississippi’s capital city.

Senate Bill 1421 requires law enforcement agencies to make public investigative records of officer-involved shootings and uses of force resulting in great bodily harm. But law enforcement unions argue that the law threatens the privacy of their members.

Advocates say the case hasn’t been handled fairly and there’s little hope for justice.

People who view body cam footage of an incident are less likely to attribute blame to a police officer than those who see the same incident through the lens of a dashboard camera.

She is suing the Division of Human Rights for saying it’s not authorized to investigate her complaint.

The officers were part of the department’s Street Crimes Unit, known among residents for its aggressive patrols.

Then he ordered another officer to arrest the man.

Dozens of former detainees at the Gwinnett County jail in Georgia claim they were subjected to brutality at the hands of its Rapid Response Team.

A lawsuit brought by a Compton resident detailing an alleged beating by deputies is just one of nearly three dozen federal civil rights lawsuits alleging brutality and racial bias at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

This fall, however, an initiative goes to voters that would change the law on deadly force by the police, which has led to no officer there being convicted of wrongfully killing someone in the line of duty in more than 30 years.

Rep. John Becker doubles down on his recent comments about the tasing of an 11-year-old for allegedly shoplifting.

Between 2001 and 2017, the department justified officers in 99 percent of use-of-force cases, according to data released through a public records request.

Jeffery Parker was shot to death by a police officer in his Huntsville home. A grand jury handed up an indictment for murder, but the mayor and City Council appear to be throwing their support behind the officer.

After the Gun Trace Task Force scandal rocked the police department, plainclothes policing was spurned. But a recently resigned commissioner championed plainclothes units, a decision the department seems to be sticking with.

A former Baltimore cop questions how a department with a nearly half-billion-dollar budget that is riven by rampant corruption and brutality, bloated overtime spending, and unaccounted for patrol officers can continue to justify its existence

Jurors were barred from hearing about the eight civil rights lawsuits against Detective Jeremiah Williams.

Lawrence Parrish faces charges including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and remains jailed on $500,000 bond even though the Austin police admitted he never shot at them.

A former Baltimore Police officer says that a plan to flood the streets with local and federal law enforcement is likely to yield more of the same ineffective ‘broken windows’-style arrests.

The solution to problems like unsolved homicides, especially in communities of color, cannot be reinvestment in institutions that wage violence against them.

On May 23, 2013, Khari Illidge, a 25-year-old Black man in Lee County, Alabama, was face down and hogtied, with a 385-pound police officer kneeling on his back, when he suddenly went limp and a mixture of white froth and blood seeped from his mouth. Sheriff’s deputies had confronted Illidge while he was running in […]

On December 28, 2017, 28-year-old Andrew Finch of Wichita, Kansas, opened his front door to a horde of shouting police officers. Ten seconds later, he was fatally shot in the head — yet the officer who pulled the trigger isn’t the one being charged with his death. The events of that tragic late December day were set […]

“Police brutality in the United States is not worse. Phones and social media just make it feel that way.” I see and hear some version of that thought pretty much every single day. It’s a lie. It sounds good. I wish that was what we were dealing with right now. But it’s not. See, some […]

Late last month, local students and community members participated in a sit-in at Chicago City Hall to oppose a massive new police and fire training academy on the West Side of Chicago. Protesters set up tombstones labeled with the names of closed public schools, mental health clinics, and people killed by the police. It was one of […]

Last week, the night after Saheed Vassell was shot and killed by the NYPD, a large crowd gathered for a vigil and a speak-out on the Brooklyn street corner where Vassell died. Several of the speakers asked rhetorically who called 911, summoning the police who shot him. As reporting in the New York Times showed, many of Vassell’s […]

In 2012, Gilbert Narvaez was convicted on drug-dealing charges and sent to a Pennsylvania prison for a three- to eight-year sentence. Narvaez maintained his innocence and argued that he was the victim of a bad cop named Christopher Hulmes, who claimed that in 2011 he had seen Narvaez in Philadelphia’s Fairhill neighborhood peddling narcotics. “He was just […]

On Sept. 6, 2017, then-Seattle Seahawks player Michael Bennett penned a letter describing, in excruciating detail, how Las Vegas police officers physically assaulted him while investigating shots fired in the area of the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight.

On the morning of February 9, 2017, 17-year-old Quanice Hayes knelt on the ground in front of heavily armed Portland police officers as they yelled instructions at him. “Stay down on your knees,” they told him. “Move towards us.” A police dog barked. Hayes, who was unarmed, reached down toward his waistband. Why? We’ll never […]

National Review, the influential right-wing magazine, recently raised eyebrows for its public mea culpa on being wrong about New York City’s Stop and Frisk program, which peaked at nearly 700,000 police stops in 2012 but has reportedly declined dramatically since. The magazine, like most conservative media (and even Democratic strategists), predicted gloom and doom if the police department’s […]

“Victory,” the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office tweeted in October after Keith Davis Jr. was found guilty of second-degree murder. Keith’s wife Kelly and members of the activist group Baltimore Bloc who have been advocating for Davis for years called attention to the language: the SAO, headed by celebrated, purportedly progressive prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, best known for indicting the six […]

A New York State grand jury indicted Rensselaer County District Attorney Joel E. Abelove on charges of official misconduct and perjury on Friday afternoon. The indictment stems from Abelove’s concealment of evidence about the shooting of an unarmed black man by a Troy police officer, and allegations that Abelove lied during a subsequent investigation.

Fifteen men had their tainted convictions vacated by State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office, but this isn’t the norm when it comes to prosecutors.

A staggering 1,094 people have been killed by American police so far in 2017. At the current pace, this will make 2017 the second deadliest year ever measured for police violence. As I’ve said many times here, and across the country, most Americans can’t name a single victim. Trump has all but sucked the wind out of […]

Rallies & petitions grow for the rapper Meek Mill
I want to preface what I’m about to say by first making it clear that I’m not a Meek Mill fan.

We live a deeply problematic era in American history. As I type this, the nation is reeling from yet another mass shooting in which 26 people were shot and killed in a rural Texas church. Federal prosecutors are currently investigating and indicting members of Donald Trump’s campaign team for various levels of corruption. And while […]

Police brutality is roaring ahead I use this database to track police brutality in the United States. Many other databases exist, but this simple one is the most up to date and links to local news stories covering each case. Take those news stories with a grain of salt, though, because they tend to only cover the law […]

U.S. Attorney says the evidence against him is “overwhelming”

Note: This first appeared in our daily In Justice Today newsletter. To get stories like these in your inbox every day, you can sign up here. In today’s news roundup, we bring you stories about Chicago activists protesting a new police training academy, the St. Petersburg Police Department trying out gun cameras, Pensacola’s State Attorney directly filing kids […]