Policing

Rather than encouraging more faith in the police, true reform requires dismantling the system that empowers them.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. “Donald Trump has long understood that he can leverage homelessness to motivate people,” writes David Graham for The Atlantic. “In the early 1980s, the developer was desperate to get […]

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. While progressives and reformers wax poetic about reducing low-level arrests, one group is making it happen: the NYPD. Not out of some newfound understanding about the moral […]

Law enforcement’s old guard claims that policing low-level crime protects communities. That’s not just wrong; it’s dangerous.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. At 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, while attempting to serve a warrant, Philadelphia police found themselves under fire. Six of them were shot, and although none were seriously […]

On the morning of Nov. 23, 2004, Malaika Brooks was driving her 11-year-old son to school when Seattle police pulled her over for speeding. When the officers gave her a ticket and asked her to sign it, Brooks refused, believing that she had been wrongly pulled over and thinking, mistakenly, that her signature would be […]

With Appeal contributors Amir H. Ali and Emily Clark of the MacArthur Justice Center

In 2015, the Chicago City Council passed a reparations ordinance. That ordinance, the first of its kind in the country, was the city’s official acknowledgment that Jon Burge, a Chicago police commander, and detectives under his command, “systematically engaged in acts of torture, physical abuse and coercion of African American men and women at Area […]

On Saturday, Injustice Watch and BuzzFeed News published an investigation into racist and violent social media posts by current and retired police officers. The article by Emily Hoerner and Rick Tulsky came out of a collaboration with the Plain View Project, which examined the Facebook accounts of police officers from eight departments across the county. The Plain View Project looked […]

With Appeal contributor Meg O’Connor

Attorneys representing the arrestees in Cartersville, Georgia, say they were mistreated in jail, lost jobs, and endured public humiliation.

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.

Our staff picks 12 stories worth reading (or rereading) before the new year.

SB 4 encourages officers to ask for the status of anyone they detain.

With Angela J. Davis, Appeal contributor and professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law.

Campus police forces have become more professionalized, but critics say they operate behind a veil of secrecy and often exceed their jurisdiction.

A white cop joked about bringing explosives to a Black Lives Matter protest in Columbus with no consequences. A black cop joked about ‘black on black’ crime and may be fired.

Families are torn apart by the criminal justice system every day.

A sex crimes detective with the Memphis Police Department will keep her job despite leaking confidential investigative files to the family of a rape suspect, the Commercial Appeal reported last week. Before Detective Ouita Knowlton became the subject of a criminal investigation, she was the supervisor of the DNA Unit, which was formed in 2014 to investigate long-neglected […]

In Bedford-Stuyvesant’s historic Mount Pisgah Baptist Church on Tuesday night, candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in the race for Brooklyn’s next district attorney gathered to compare their progressive track records and reform-driven plans. The forum, hosted by Faith Over Fear, a “faith and justice coalition,” focused heavily on police accountability, the protection of immigrants, […]

Activists in New York City are engaging in profound acts of resistance against over-policing in the subways. Politicians are listening, but are they really hearing them?

Earlier this week, the Oregonian newspaper reported that Ted Wheeler, the Mayor of Portland, Oregon had narrowed the field of candidates for Portland police chief to four candidates.