Unaccountable Police Units Are Wrong for Safety
Last week, the National Policing Institute, in cooperation with the Department of Justice division on Community Oriented Policing Services, to state and local law enforcement agencies on specialized units. NPI’s first recommendation is for law enforcement agencies to question whether they should create specialized units, and there’s an easy answer: no.
Specialized units vary but, as relevant here, they are sub-divisions of police departments tasked with enforcement related to specific conditions in an aggressive manner. The NPI guidance begins with a recognition that specialized units “are often subject to relatively limited supervision and afforded immense discretion when carrying out their duties.” This combination can lead to “tragic consequences.”
Indeed, the guidance was animated in part by the killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis by officers from the Scorpion Unit — a specialized unit focused on crimes related to theft, gangs, and drugs. The Scorpion Unit stopped Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, for a traffic infraction. They then pepper sprayed him and shot him with a stun gun despite his offering no apparent resistance. After yelling for help, Nichols ran toward his mother’s house. It wasn’t far from there that the officers — who had gone after him — beat him for several minutes while he was on the ground. He died days later from blunt force trauma to the head. Nichols’s family got the Scorpion Unit disbanded, with help from civil rights lawyer Ben Crump.
The Scorpion Unit was no aberration. In introductory remarks to its guidelines, NPI mentions in Los Angeles in the 1990s, during which a specialized unit tasked with addressing gang activity was found to be engaged in criminal conduct. The unit had repeatedly used excessive and at times lethal force without provocation. Another high-profile example is from New York City in 1999, when a specialized unit of the NYPD killed , a 23-year-old Black man. The unit — tasked with addressing gun violence — shot Diallo 41 times when he reached for his pocket to provide identification.
State and Local Governments Must Take Responsibility for Police Violence
It shouldn’t take a federal investigation to address violent and harmful practices.
Source: American Civil Liberties Union
Disbanding these units does not necessarily end the misconduct. In response to community outcry over the Diallo killing, the NYPD dismantled the responsible unit and created a new one — the Anti-Crime Unit — that supposedly had better training and oversight. The ACU went on to be a primary driver of unlawful stops in the early 2000s and, more recently, was found disproportionately responsible for shootings. Following the George Floyd protests in 2020, the ACU was disbanded only to be reconstituted in 2023 — again, with allegedly better training and oversight. Just a few months after the new rollout, however, ACU to be unlawfully stopping Black and Latine people.
How, then, should police departments and communities decide whether forming a specialized unit is worth the risk? NPI recommends that law enforcement should consider a series of critical questions before deciding to create or continue a specialized unit. That’s the right starting point. And it’s also good that NPI’s list of key considerations includes whether the affected community prefers non-law enforcement alternatives. Yet this question is only meaningful if communities are given real alternatives, and they rarely are.
Asking communities to choose between a specialized unit or nothing is a false choice, and alternatives might not be viable without additional investments. Police departments often have a heavily resourced infrastructure with round-the-clock staffing. As NPI points out, this sometimes makes police a default candidate for addressing problems they are not suited to solve. While creating alternatives might require more time and money, we must build solutions that reduce mismatched reliance on police. Otherwise, we’re not actually improving safety in the long run.
Notably, determining community preferences should be a thoughtful and deliberate process that reflects an understanding that communities are not monolithic. We emphasize the need to seek input from people who have experienced police misconduct through forums police do not attend, which NPI also recommends. People who have been subjected to unfair policing — directly or as witnesses — have important insight into its manifestations and harms, and this insight is critical to designing effective solutions. Police attendance at forums soliciting input from this population might undermine participation, given mistrust and fear that result from oppressive policing.
We’re skeptical of specialized units because of their history of violence and abuse — a problem that has shown to persist despite improvements in training and oversight. Their vast discretion and the realistic limits of internal accountability mechanisms inures specialized units with too much power, which has proven too much risk to impacted communities. NPI’s guidelines offer important suggestions for limiting the harms caused by specialized units, and these recommendations should be followed if specialized units are to continue. If we want to keep people safe from both crime and police violence, though, we need to build something better.
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
Prisoners' Rights
Criminal Law Reform
ACLU Sues Bureau of Prisons for Keeping People in Prison Longer Than the Law AllowsACLU Sues Bureau of Prisons for Keeping People in Prison Longer Than the Law Allows
WASHINGTON – A federal lawsuit brought today by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of D.C., and Jenner & Block LLP challenges the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for unlawfully incarcerating people longer than the law allows under the First Step Act. The lawsuit contends that the BOP’s failure to implement the First Step Act according to its plain language violates the rights of thousands of people who should be returning to their communities and rebuilding their lives but instead remain incarcerated. Signed into law in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump, the bipartisan First Step Act was designed to reduce the population in federal prisons, reform extreme sentencing laws, and provide programming and reentry transition services to people in prison. Central to the First Step Act is a system of earned time credits, which allows people in prison to earn time off their sentences and time out of prison by participating in rehabilitation programs. Through the First Step Act, Congress unambiguously ordered BOP to move people out of prison when they meet certain requirements to use their earned time credits. Instead of faithfully following the mandatory law, BOP adopted a regulation treating the law as optional. As a result, thousands of people, who should already be back in their communities and with their families, remain in prison. “Every extra unlawful day our clients spend in prison is a serious injustice,” said Emma Andersson, deputy director of the Criminal Law Reform Project at the ACLU. “It is egregious that the Bureau of Prisons is imprisoning people for months longer than the law allows. The government must follow through on its legal obligation to get people out of prison on time and back into their communities, where they belong.” Additional comments below from: Vanessa Crowe, plaintiff: “Time is what I owed for my wrongdoing, and I have paid my time. But I should not have to spend more time in prison than the law allows. I often reflect on what I will miss during the months after when I should be out of prison. I will miss work and lose out on wages that would help me get back on my feet. I could be a tax paying citizen instead of a burden on society. But most of all, I will miss more precious time with my family. My family and I are ready to tum the page on this period in our lives — we are all ready to start a new life, a life with purpose, hope, and healing together. I want to start that life when I am legally entitled to start it-not five months later.” Arthur Spitzer, senior counsel at ACLU of D.C.: “There’s no excuse for the Bureau of Prisons to pretend not to understand Congress’s clear command that people who have earned the right to early release must be released. This law has been on the books for six years. The Bureau of Prisons has had plenty of time to understand it. Law enforcers should obey the law.” Betsy Henthorne, partner at Jenner & Block: “It has been six years since the First Step Act was signed, but despite Congress’s clear directives, the Bureau of Prisons continues to hold thousands of people in prison longer than the law allows. We should and do expect better—it’s past time for the BOP to ensure that those who have earned their release are able to return home to their families and communities according to the law Congress passed.” -
Maryland Supreme CourtDec 2024
Criminal Law Reform
Roland Branch v. State of MarylandRoland Branch v. State of Maryland
This petition to the Supreme Court of Maryland asked the court to reconsider its adherence to Whren v. U.S., 517 U.S. 806 (1996), which declared that a traffic stop undertaken for pretextual reasons does not violate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution so long as the police have probable cause to believe that a traffic violation occurred. The ACLU, alongside the ACLU of Maryland, filed an amicus brief in support of the defendant’s petition, in which the ACLU argued that the court should take up the question of whether pretextual stops violate the Maryland Constitution. In September 2024, the Court denied the petition. -
North Carolina Supreme CourtDec 2024
Criminal Law Reform
State v. WrightState v. Wright
This case in the North Carolina Supreme Court involves the question of whether the police violated the U.S. Constitution when they searched the defendant, Mr. Wright’s, backpack even after he repeatedly said no to the search requests. The ACLU alongside the ACLU of North Carolina filed an amicus brief arguing that the search was unconstitutional because Mr. Wright’s eventual “consent” was the result of police coercion. Our brief urges the court to consider the totality of the circumstances that make one more susceptible to coercion, including race and poverty. -
News & CommentaryDec 2024
Criminal Law Reform
Disability Rights
Incarceration Should Not be a Death Sentence for Individuals Who Use OpioidsIncarceration Should Not be a Death Sentence for Individuals Who Use Opioids
New litigation centered on increasing access to substance-use disorder treatment in jails and prisons is helping to reduce mortality rates among incarcerated individuals.