President Donald Trump has called for a return to “law and order” policing and shown support for stop and frisk and heavy use of force. Many modern police leaders aren’t buying in.
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American cities all have crime and violence in some neighborhoods. People in these communities, and the police who work there, all want less crime and greater safety. So why do police and communities find themselves mistrusting each and unable to work together? How can we break out of this cycle?
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We hear a lot about crime trends, almost always involving homicides or felonies. But the vast majority of criminal offenses are misdemeanors. These convictions can have a major impact on employment, education, you name it - yet they are hardly studied at all.
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From Obama-era task forces to widespread protests, the idea of community policing has become part of our national conversation. But even if you wanted to make a difference, where would you start?
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We know that the current system for police interrogation, the Reid Technique, can lead to false confessions. It’s been taught to hundreds of thousands of police officers for decades. But now there’s another way to question suspects: the PEACE method. Developed in the United Kingdom in response to terrible false confession cases there, it’s revolutionizing police questioning across the world. Will it work in the U.S. too?
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Facial recognition technology is being used by police all over the U.S. using images of millions of innocent Americans. It’s a lot less accurate than what we see on TV, and it may be pointing police at a disproportionate number of minority citizens.
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The largest provider of services to the mentally ill in America is not a health care provider – it is the criminal justice system. And on any given day, Chicago's Cook County Jail is actually the largest mental health institution in the entire country.
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The NAACP used the legal system to overcome separate but equal, desegregate schools and public facilities, and bring some measure of equal justice to African Americans living under Jim Crow laws in the U.S. What role does this legendary organization have now in the era of Black Lives Matter, and how would Thurgood Marshall interpret it all?
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More than ten years ago, states began passing Stand Your Ground Laws: the laws said people defending themselves could use force, even deadly force, in any public place where they had a right to be. Proponents said we’d be safer from crime and especially violence and murder.
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Do the legal rules for using deadly force, set by the Supreme Court in the 1980s, still make sense? Do they protect the officer and the public, or is it time to change how police make the decision to take a life?
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When a sexual assault occurs, police encourage the victim to complete a “rape kit” – a standardized procedure to collect evidence needed to find and prosecute the assailant. But instead of rapid usage of this evidence, tens of thousands of the completed kits still sit in police warehouses – untested and waiting.
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When police officers get in trouble, we think their law enforcement careers end. But some resign before they’re canned and move on to serve – creating new and bigger problems – in other police departments. Is this legal? What about background checks? Does anyone track this?
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Police departments in the U.S. are under scrutiny like never before. Calls for change are the only constant. So how does a police chief lead a department in this climate? And what’s most important as we look forward, two years after Ferguson?
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What would innovation in probation look like? For years, it’s meant reporting to your agent, obeying conditions set by the court, drug testing – and eventually, you screw up and go back to jail. The only constants were huge caseloads and high failure rates.
Wayne McKenzie, General Counsel to the New York City Department of Probation, says change is here in the form of Neighborhood Opportunity Networks and their growing cohort of city partnerships.
New thinking, borrowed from progressive policing and social justice programs, has made probation a genuine launching pad for a second chance and public safety.
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DNA exonerations have proven that some people confess to serious crimes they didn’t commit, even without physical abuse or mental illness. Why would anyone do this? Do police cause this, intentionally or not, because of the questioning techniques they use? And what can we do to make sure this doesn’t occur?
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Since the mid 1980s, mandatory minimum drug sentences have served as the driving force behind the explosion in the federal prison population, and also the vast racial disproportionality in that population.
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The Serial podcast, and its host Sarah Koenig, pulled off two amazing feats. Serial broke podcasting open: it was the first podcast to see 5 million downloads and now has well over 80 million. But it also pointed the lens of a full, in-depth journalistic examination on just one murder case.
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Police departments in the U.S. are under scrutiny like never before. Calls for change are the only constant. So how does a police chief lead a department in this climate? And what’s most important as we look forward, two years after Ferguson?
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We see it over and over: police officers confront a person in the throes of mental illness. Some of these people may be dangerous; most are not violent, but they are confused, disturbed, and not acting rationally. Police officers are trained for a different job: detecting and preventing crime and disorder, and too often, things go terribly wrong, resulting in violence and even the death of a person with a mental illness.
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The prosecutor sits in a powerful position in the American criminal justice system, deciding who to charge and with what, and wielding significant discretion. Some prosecutors use this power to focus narrowly on crime but George Gascon, District Attorney in San Francisco, CA, uses his office to attempt to better the system, to increase public safety, and to make his city a stronger community.
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