Overview of "Race, Class, and State Crime"
2000; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-641X
Autores Tópico(s)Crime Patterns and Interventions
ResumoSIDNEY L. HARRING'S THE DIALLO VERDICT: ANOTHER 'TRAGIC ACCIDENT' IN NEW York's War on Street Crime? challenges the premise that excessive police violence is the price we must pay to improve the quality of urban life. He argues that Amadou Diallo's shooting death resulted from aggressive and racist police practices, deeply rooted in current New York police policy. Such practices led to the killing of four unarmed black men in 13 months. The article describes the brutal circumstances of the police shooting and the mishandling of the trial, which legally justified New York's aggressive policing policy by concluding that the killing of Diallo was an accident, an unavoidable consequence of good police work. Harring examines how tactical squads, like the one that killed Diallo, routinely violate the Fourth Amendment and the civil rights of the victims of the searches. Such illegal searches (rousts) for guns or contraband drugs in high-crime areas generate the daily statistics that make both the squad and the precinct look good under the comstat computer-based police accountability programs that structure police management in New York and many other cities. Most chilling to Harring is that although most New York political forces bemoan these deaths as tragic, they consider the violent practices leading to them to be acceptable policing. In contrast, these forces distanced themselves from the officers involved in the police torture of Abner Louima, and even most New York police officers abandoned their support for them. The Rampart scandal in Los Angeles, generally depicted as the worst police corruption scandal in city's history and the work of rogue cops, also entails massive violations of citizens' constitutional and civil rights. A Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation, which began in 1996 but accelerated with the Rampart revelations, concerns itself with allegations that officers from the LAPD's Rampart Division were involved in unjustified police shootings, beatings, evidence planting, false arrests, witness intimidation, and perjury. The probe seeks to determine whether incidents involving excessive force fell into a recognizable pattern and whether the department discriminates on the basis of race or national origin in its law enforcement activities. After the Rodney King beating, Congress in 1994 granted the Justice Department authority to examine broad patterns of misconduct by municipal police agencies and to seek court-ordered reforms if needed to force reforms. This marks the first time federal officials have used the law in such a big city police department. The federal suit alleges that the LAPD is engaged in a pattern and practice of constitutional violations through excessive force, false arrests, conducting police stops not based on reasonable suspicion, and improper searches and seizures, and that management deficiencies (failure to supervise officers properly or identify and respond to patterns of at-risk officer behavior) have allowed this misconduct to occur. If enacted, a consent decree could strip final authority over many matters relating to the Police Department from the mayor, the Police Commission, and the City Council and place it under the jurisdiction of a federal judge. In response to local initiatives, at least 31 officers, including three sergeants, have already been suspended or fired or have quit in the wake of the scandal. More than 70 officers are under investigation for committing crimes or misconduct or for knowing about such activities and helping to cover them up. According to Public Defender Michael Judge, cases dating to 1991 involve officers at six of the LAPD's 18 divisions. Of the 99 felony convictions identified as being tainted by alleged police misconduct, 73 have been thrown out of court; 71 misdemeanor cases may have to be overturned -- many of them involving drug and gun arrests -- because they involved officers caught up in the scandal. …
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