In Worcester, Mass., 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, Miss., 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, N.J., and Mount Vernon, N.Y. The Biden administration launched the probes amid 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 force and the kind of racial profiling associated with those high-profile cases. Beyond the most shocking examples of police violence, the reports have highlighted something else: the pernicious ways that other patterns of unlawful policing can cause deep harm to local communities, reports the Washington Post. 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 DOJ official who oversaw the investigation into the Ferguson, Mo., 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 reports provide a road map for police accountability plans that could help reduce abuses and improve community trust. 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. The incoming Trump administration vows to reverse federal oversight of local policing, and some cities have aggressively opposed DOJ 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. In Worcester, federal authorities determined that the 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; 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. Worcester officials called the report “unfair, inaccurate, and biased.” Interim Worcester Police Chief Paul 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.”
Comentarios