r/ACAB • u/loudmonkey76 • 19h ago
WaPo: Beyond excessive force: How police abuse women, the poor, the homeless
Investigators detailed how officers sexually assaulted women, mistreated the homeless, exploited poor people, threatened and abused minors, taunted and arrested people suffering from mental and behavioral health episodes and punished protesters exercising their constitutional rights to free speech — especially those who denounced police violence.
“Police killings, as terrible as they are, are relatively infrequent. But these other types of abuses are happening every single day to hundreds, if not thousands, of people,” said Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department official who oversaw the federal investigation into the Ferguson, Missouri, police department in 2014-2015. “They’re not minor just because they’re not deadly, and they’re much more prevalent.”
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u/Wolf_Wilma 16h ago
Anyone have a link without mandatory subscription?
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u/loudmonkey76 3h ago
Copy pasta'ed below
By David Nakamura
In Worcester, Massachusetts, police officers enforcing anti-prostitution ordinances coerced women to touch their genitals and perform sex acts. In Phoenix, officers clearing homeless encampments illegally disposed of personal belongings of the people who lived there, including tents, sleeping bags, identification cards and medicine.
In Lexington, Mississippi, officers jailed those unable to pay fines for minor offenses and added more fees, a scheme one federal prosecutor likened to a “debtor’s prison that Charles Dickens wrote about.” These abuses, and others like them, are documented in exhaustive Justice Department reports that followed sweeping police misconduct investigations in those three cities and five others — Minneapolis; Louisville; Memphis; Trenton, New Jersey; and Mount Vernon, New York.
The Biden administration launched the probes in the wake of the national outcry over the police killings in 2020 of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. Reports issued over the last two years have focused largely on excessive use of force and the kind of racial profiling associated with those high-profile cases.
But beyond the most shocking examples of police violence, the reports have highlighted something else: the pernicious ways that other patterns of unlawful policing can disrupt and cause deep harm to local communities.
Investigators detailed how officers sexually assaulted women, mistreated the homeless, exploited poor people, threatened and abused minors, taunted and arrested people suffering from mental and behavioral health episodes and punished protesters exercising their constitutional rights to free speech — especially those who denounced police violence.
“Police killings, as terrible as they are, are relatively infrequent. But these other types of abuses are happening every single day to hundreds, if not thousands, of people,” said Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department official who oversaw the federal investigation into the Ferguson, Missouri, police department in 2014-2015. “They’re not minor just because they’re not deadly, and they’re much more prevalent.”
Federal authorities said the findings provide a road map for police accountability plans that could help reduce abuses and improve community trust. But the Justice Department has nearly run out of time to enter legally binding consent decrees that would require jurisdictions to change use-of-force policies, officer training, disciplinary procedures, data collection and public disclosure.
Members of the incoming Trump administration have vowed to reverse federal oversight of local policing, and some cities have aggressively opposed the Justice Department’s intervention.
Police reform advocates say broad changes are necessary, arguing that the pathology of abusive policing is rooted in a broken culture of law enforcement that allows officers to act with impunity.
“Typically, [the specific abuse] is part of a larger pattern of the way they operate,” said David A. Harris, a criminal law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “You seldom find these things in just one area. There’s usually a breakdown of systems of accountability, policy and training that tend to allow misconduct to fester throughout police departments.”
In Worcester, federal authorities determined that the local police department’s lack of training and supervision allowed “a problematic culture and unlawful conduct to continue unchecked.” Investigators said undercover officers conducting sting operations fondled the genitals of women suspected of prostitution and asked them to reciprocate — even though local laws did not require such touching as a prerequisite for an arrest. In 2019, one woman told authorities, an officer flashed his gun and threatened to arrest her on a drug charge if she did not provide oral sex.
Another woman told investigators that an officer paid her for sex on several occasions and gave her drugs as payment. In one instance, the officer responded to a call for assistance while she was still in the car, according to the federal report.
Worcester officials called the report “unfair, inaccurate, and biased.” Interim Worcester Police Chief Paul B. Saucier told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette that investigators did not provide enough evidence and unfairly painted the entire 400-officer police force as “sexual deviants.”
A 2019 survey of 45 women who worked as prostitutes in the city showed that more than half reported having been tricked or forced by an officer to provide sexual acts during a sting or undercover operation.
“This is an issue I brought to the police, and everybody dismissed or ignored it,” said Nikki Bell-Peña, a former prostitute who commissioned a local university to conduct the poll and then shared the results with the Justice Department. “I don’t believe they can police themselves."
In Phoenix, the police are supposed to refer homeless people to city services rather than arrest them. But the homeless accounted for 37 percent of misdemeanor arrests and citations, according to a three-year Justice Department investigation that concluded in June. One man came into contact with the police 97 times between 2016 and 2022 and was arrested or cited at least 20 times.
Police justified arrests by falsely claiming that people were blocking public spaces and improperly cited them for trespassing on private property, according to the federal report.
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u/loudmonkey76 3h ago
(cont'd)
During a 15-month stretch starting in late 2020, as the city sought to clear a dangerous encampment called “the Zone,” city workers and police officers forcibly removed people, illegally disposing of their personal belongings, investigators said. The disposal of Social Security cards or other personal documents made it more difficult for the people to find permanent housing or jobs, investigators said. Some Phoenix leaders have objected to the federal intervention, arguing that the city has not had a fatal police killing that drew national attention on the scale of the deaths of Floyd and Taylor. In August, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) said the Justice Department probe “could impose overly burdensome costs, and ultimately have unintended consequences that will undermine the safety of our community.”
But Jared Keenan, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said the federal report showed that Phoenix police have “a whole host of problematic behaviors.”
“It shouldn’t take a high-profile police killing to force changes within a police department,” he said.
The Justice Department launched an investigation in Memphis after the police beating death of motorist Tyre Nichols nearly two years ago. A findings report released this month highlighted “serious concerns” over the department’s treatment of children, asserting that police routinely escalate encounters with aggressive and demeaning language and needless force.
Officers ticketing two Black teenagers for violating a youth curfew threatened to take them to jail, with one officer, angry that he might have lost his mobile device, threatening to assault them. In another instance, an officer pointed a Taser at an autistic 14-year-old boy who had run away from home after being released from a mental health facility. The officer threatened to imprison the teen, the report said.
In Lexington, Mississippi, the tiny 10-member police force operated a scheme to ramp up city revenue by jailing poor residents who failed to pay fines for relatively minor violations and added processing fees, extending their incarceration if they were unable to pay, investigators said.
In one case, according to the Justice Department’s report, officers arrested a man three times in four months, twice for misdemeanors and once because he had not paid outstanding fines. He was released each time after paying a portion of what he owed but was simultaneously charged new processing fees, putting him further in debt.
“One interaction [with police] could involve multiple constitutional violations,” said former Justice Department trial attorney Puneet Cheema, who now manages the Justice in Public Safety Project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “What people might experience is a stop for little or no reason and then, during the stop, officers are aggressive and escalate the encounter and use excessive force.”
One of the most common forms of police misconduct cited by the Justice Department is the targeting of people who protest in public against the conduct of officers.
Federal authorities said police in Louisville made improper, warrantless arrests during the 2020 street demonstrations that followed Taylor’s death, citing people for “vague subjective reasons, like causing ‘annoyance,’ ‘alarm’ or ‘inconvenience.’” In one instance, police issued a mass-produced boilerplate citation with generic charges that was used to improperly arrest more than 70 people.
Minneapolis police retaliated against people — including journalists — who observed, recorded or questioned their conduct during public demonstrations in 2020 and 2021, using pepper spray and attempting to confiscate and destroy their cellphones or cameras, investigators said. Officers pointed 40mm grenade launchers at demonstrators, according to the Justice Department report. One sergeant jokingly offered a pack of beer if his officers fired on the crowd, and another encouraged officers to shoot people in their private parts.
Lopez, the former Justice official, said the reports show that misconduct is deeply rooted and justifies federal intervention, even when it falls shorts of excessive force.
“You don’t need police to kill someone before you have a pattern that needs to be corrected because people’s rights are being violated,” she said.
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u/CupForsaken1197 11h ago
WAPO Opinion: the police just want to be your friends, you're not giving them a chance
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u/Kuroboom 19h ago
It's basically like the accident triangle . For every fatality, there are 30 serious crimes committed by the police, and 300 petty abuses of power.