Why do so few police officers face criminal charges for misconduct? Why is there no clear answer to the question? In addition to exculpatory cases, there are several plausible reasons, including the close working relationship between prosecutors and police that may lead to conflicts of interest and the fact that many citizens will He is presumed innocent.
What we do know about the overall landscape of U.S. police prosecutions: The Cato Institute, the most comprehensive study of law enforcement misconduct recently conducted, tracked police prosecutions in April 2009 Reports of police misconduct between December 2010 and December 2010. During this period, 2,716 police officers were involved in incidents where the use of force was questionable, and 426 of these incidents resulted in fatalities.
In fact, these numbers are so far back that reporters who dug into the issue after Brown's killing found little official oversight of law enforcement violence. Although the FBI consistently underreports police killings in its national crime statistics database, its data shows that while violent crime rates are declining and the number of police officers killed in the line of duty is declining, "extenuating circumstances "The number of police killings is increasing.
To fill this information gap, we have launched several crowdsourcing campaigns, including the Fatal Encounters and Lives at the Hands of Police projects. As the data sets from these projects continue to expand, we should be able to learn more about the full picture of police misconduct. But it shouldn't be the responsibility of volunteers to document fatal police mistakes.