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 […]
Los Angeles Police Department analysts are each tasked with maintaining “a minimum” of a dozen ongoing surveillance targets for future targeting, using Palantir software and an updated “probable offender” formula, according to October 2017 documents, obtained through a public records request lawsuit by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and given exclusively to The Appeal. These […]
These days, former Sheriff Jim Pendergraph calls himself an “Old School Conservative,” but not so long ago he identified as a Democrat. This is back in early 2006, when Pendergraph was like most sheriffs — an enormously powerful guy who managed to get around unnoticed. He was 35 years into his law enforcement career and 12 years […]
In cities across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations agents can mine local police reports using COPLINK, a data program little known outside law enforcement circles. While public records have revealed ICE’s access to this program in the past, new documents, obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts and shared with The Appeal, offer the first […]
On April 11, President Trump signed the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), legislation that would make it possible to hold the operators of websites criminally and civilly liable if third parties were found to have posted advertisements for prostitution. Days before the legislation was enacted, however, federal authorities seized Backpage.com, essentially locking sex […]
“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 […]
On April 30, 2015, William Aubin Jr. was at home with his wife in Livingston Parish, Louisiana when a patrol car from the sheriff’s office pulled onto his street. The deputy, William Durkin, was there to investigate a reckless driving complaint. Aubin wasn’t involved in the incident but he knew about it and went outside […]
On Jan. 23, 2007, a pair of officers from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Narcotics Field Unit (NFU) received information from a “reliable source” that drug sales were being conducted in the vicinity of 22nd and Jackson Streets, on the city’s south side. “Numerous B/Ms” — NFU officers Reginald Graham and Sylvia Jones would later write in a […]
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 […]
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 March 14, Herman Bell learned that after 45 years behind bars, he would soon be released from prison. The 70-year-old former Black Panther was convicted in the 1971 shooting deaths of two New York police officers. Since 2004, he appeared before the state’s parole board seven times; each time, he was denied parole because of the nature of […]
I love New York. It’s my favorite city in the world. I live and work here by choice. We get a lot of things right. Every day I walk down the street or hop on the subway, I am reminded that I am a citizen of a very big, incredibly diverse world. But our progressive […]
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently unveiled a legislative proposal packaged as part of a budget amendment to expand already onerous residency and presence restrictions for some sex offenders in New York. The proposal expands blanket presence and residency restrictions for sex offenders who are on parole or post-release supervision by vastly increasing the number of places they cannot be […]
On March 13, roughly two dozen community activists and supporters gathered outside a courtroom in Franklin County Municipal Court to support four young activists accused of disrupting last June’s pride parade in Columbus, Ohio. The Black Pride 4 — Wriply Bennet, Ashton Braxton, Deandre Miles-Hercules, and Kendall Denton — and six other activists blocked the […]
Across the country, police departments have chronically failed to investigate rape cases, leaving rape kits — the physical evidence collected from a rape victim’s body — untested. Unfortunately, a false narrative has taken hold around the concept of a rape kit backlog.
Her former partner assaulted her in her home. When the police arrived, she was arrested and he walked free.
Polaris, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization best known for operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline, says it has located a new front in the fight against human trafficking: what it describes as “illicit massage businesses,” or IMBs. The nonprofit, which brought in $10 million in 2016 (of which $2.1 million is government funding, according to IRS […]
For decades, the New York Police Department has subjected people it arrests to a labyrinthine and bureaucratic process for retrieving their seized property. Often, poor New Yorkers — many without the legal assistance needed to navigate this process — give up on their property instead of trying to get it back. In a rare disclosure to the public, the […]
President Trump’s 2019 budget proposal, released Monday, requests nearly $30 billion for drug control. The majority of that funding is slated for law enforcement and an $18 billion border wall, with the purported dual purpose of stopping the flow of immigrants and illicit drugs from entering the country. The budget requests $2.2 billion in funding for […]
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 […]
In New York City, chants of “I can’t breathe” have given way to neatly run press conferences featuring Mayor Bill de Blasio’s boasts about how the NYPD’s “neighborhood policing” program, described as a collaborative crime-fighting strategy, brings the police and community together. Eric Garner’s killer still on the job and hasn’t faced justice? A horrifying story of rape involving cops from […]
Since its initiation in 2013, the NYPD’s gang policing program has operated with little outside scrutiny. Based on evidence it has kept almost entirely hidden from public view, the police have targeted and surveilled entire social networks inside low-income communities, breaking down doors in pre-dawn military-style raids that have resulted in over 2,000 arrests in just the […]
Early on the morning of January 19, the New York Police Department and local and federal partners raided the Sheepshead/Nostrand Houses, a large public housing complex in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, arresting 13 alleged members of the “Towaz Boyz gang.” Unnamed law enforcement authorities described the scene to the Daily Newsas a “New Jack City-style sales operation” — a reference […]
The New Orleans Police Department, the Louisiana State Police, and the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control (ATC) have raided eight French Quarter strip clubs in the past 10 days. At a Monday press conference, both NOPD and ATC claimed the raids were the result of a multi-month, ongoing “human trafficking” operation, yet they also admitted they made no trafficking arrests, nor did they identify any victims of trafficking.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear filed lawsuits last week against several pharmaceutical companies, including Purdue Pharma and McKesson Corporation, that manufacture and distribute opioid pain relievers, alleging that they are getting rich to the tune of $13 billion annually from an overdose crisis that kills 120 people each day. “By suing […]
For decades, Philadelphia held the dubious honor of hosting America’s largest open-air heroin market in a tangle of pockmarked streets on the city’s north side, known as the “Badlands.” On Tuesday, less than two weeks after Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf declared the overdose crisis a public health emergency, city officials, including District Attorney Larry Krasner and […]
On January 31, 2013, a California Highway Patrol officer pulled over Carlos David Sanchez for playing his car stereo too loud. During the stop, the officer asked Sanchez, then 19, if he was on probation or parole. He was not, Sanchez said, but he was under a gang injunction, as was his younger brother, also in […]
null null By the end of his senior year in a Philadelphia high school in June 2017, Jamal had missed out on completing his certification in the culinary arts, playing on the basketball team, attending prom, and walking across the stage at his graduation. He was barred from working a job to help his mother […]
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 […]
This article was published in collaboration with The Nation. Editor’s note: After publication, The Appal received letters from David Kennedy and other proponents of the Ceasefire model that challenged this article’s characterization of the model and its effectiveness. An internal review determined that the story contained a number of inaccuracies related to the BRAVE program and the description of […]
On January 5th, Baltimore Police Sergeant Wayne Jenkins entered a guilty plea in federal court on an array of charges such as racketeering, conspiracy, and robbery. Sergeant Jenkins is just one of eight indicted members of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a specialized unit focused on getting guns off the streets. The list of crimes Jenkins […]
In a thoughtful and poignant piece in the New York Times, Bärí A. Williams described her concerns about racial bias in predictive policing software and the effect such software might have on her own family. In response, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson published an excellent article on In Justice Today that clarified some of the points raised in Ms. Williams’s […]
Philadelphia implemented the “focused deterrence” model of gang policing, which includes the promise of critical social services. The reality is much different.
Overdoses on fentanyl, an uber-potent synthetic opioid, are the main driver of the opioid crisis: deaths related to the drug more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, killing nearly 20,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pennsylvania is a locus of the crisis. In 2016, fentanyl was present in over half of the […]
Yang Song fell four stories onto a sidewalk in Flushing, Queens on the night of November 25th. An officer with the New York City Police Department accompanied her, unconscious, to New York Presbyterian Hospital where doctors placed her on a respirator. They worked for hours: the 35 units of blood they transfused did not take, given the severity of her injuries from the thirty foot fall.
A new report from The Sentencing Project offers a blueprint for putting an end to a deadly epidemic.
Once again, police are vilifying kids.
Sunday, the New York Times published a well-meaning op-ed about the fears of racial bias in artificial intelligence and predictive policing systems. The author, Bärí A. Williams, should be commended for engaging the debate about building “intelligent” computer systems to predict crime, and for framing these developments in racial justice terms. One thing we have learned about new technologies is […]
Alameda County Superior Court reversed license suspensions for 54,000 people who were punished for their inability to pay fines.