Panel Releases Findings on Police Abuses

Police misconduct remains an “incessant” problem in the United States, and the failure to wipe out abuse and brutality requires wholesale changes, such as giving citizens the right to sue renegade departments, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded Friday.

The commission, reviewing the progress and setbacks in police reforms of the last two decades, found that better policing often has come “at a terrible price” for minority communities, “which seem to bear the brunt of the abuse.”

Los Angeles and New York were singled out as two major examples of cities that have “made great strides in lowering crime rates,” the commission said.

“These departments have not developed into ‘world-class’ forces, however, due to lingering concerns over the number and type of police misconduct charges they must address,” the report’s executive summary said.

The commission, appointed by President Clinton and Congress, approved its report Friday on a 5-1 vote. It is an update of the commission’s seminal 1981 study on police abuse, titled, “Who Is Guarding the Guardians?” The full report will be released publicly in a few weeks.

In the last several years, the commission has held hearings in numerous cities to probe the issue of police misconduct, delivering reports on specific cities where it found problems.

In Los Angeles, for instance, the commission 18 months ago cited civil rights abuses at the Police Department and the Sheriff’s Department--months before the Rampart scandal shook the LAPD with evidence of police corruption. That scandal triggered an agreement this week between the city and the Justice Department that gives the federal government unprecedented oversight powers in forcing reforms at the Police Department.

“We’ve made a lot of progress” since the commission’s initial report in 1981, commission chairwoman Mary Frances Berry said in an interview.

Citing Boston and San Diego as “major success stories,” Berry said that “there are places where crime has been reduced and controlled, and civil rights problems have not emerged at all. Unfortunately, this progress has been uneven and is not evident in some of the major metropolitan areas,” such as Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

Civil rights groups Friday applauded many of the commission’s latest findings, but police groups questioned the report’s conclusions--and the timing.

“I’d question the motivation of the civil rights commission in putting out their summary four days before a presidential election,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union. He predicted that liberal groups will use the report’s “inflammatory” language to portray Democratic nominee Vice President Al Gore as a guardian of civil rights because of the Clinton administration’s efforts in taking on police abuses.

“What the civil rights community has done is to make people believe that there’s an epidemic of police brutality and shootings and so forth, when exactly the opposite is true. The numbers are at historic lows,” Pasco said.

The civil rights commission’s findings are advisory in nature, but they carry the weight of a high-ranking panel and have a long history of championing civil rights reforms. Among the commission’s recommendations:

* Combating racial profiling should be given the “highest priority,” with departments urged to collect data about race and ethnicity concerning stops to document the extent of the problem. While some departments have begun collecting such data, others have resisted.

* Congress should change the law on prosecuting police in federal court so that prosecutors no longer have to show “specific intent” by an officer to violate someone’s civil rights. That standard has made it nearly impossible to win convictions, the report found.

* Civilian oversight panels should be given expanded powers to investigate abuses, and special prosecutors should be used more often because state prosecutions in such cases often are ineffective.

* Police departments should work to develop “creative methods” to attract more minority officers. Despite significant attention to diversity problems in police staffing, at many departments “recruitment efforts do not specifically target women and people of color,” and as a result many minorities distrust the police, the report found.