Police brutality, rogue cops costing cities millions

By Charlene Muhammad
Special to the NNPA
from the Final Call
Part 2 of 2

Editor’s note: The following is the concluding piece of a two-part series on the high cost of police brutality in American supplied to NNPA newspapers around the country by the Final Call.

The ease or difficulty of getting records of payments in police misconduct cases depends on the particular state and state law, according to Brigitt Keller, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project. For example, Keller said, in Massachusetts, settlements paid out of the city’s budget are public record and the terms can be made available with a public records request. Settlements paid through insurance companies, however, might be confidential.

According to civil rights attorneys, since many abuse cases never make it to trial, the real costs of these settlements are unknown.

“Many civil rights cases are dismissed on summary judgment, a method that individual judges use to dismiss or get rid of cases. Many are dismissed by white judges, often in federal court, and there’s no recognition by the judge of the racial issues in the case,” said civil rights attorney Christopher Cooper, of Merrillville, Ind., outside of Chicago.

Lawyers’ best advice to plaintiffs, especially if they are black, is for them to take the settlement or risk having their case tossed out, he said.

Attorney Michael Haddad, who has been fighting civil rights cases for 17 years, said the settlements are only the tip of the iceberg because attorneys probably talk to 100 people who say police abused them before they can take one case.

“It’s so hard to prove these cases because the juries like to give police the benefit of the doubt… so the high cost is high but the human cost is much higher because the vast majority of victims never get compensated,” said the Oaklandbased lawyer.

Unfortunately, Haddad added, the settlements create budgetary problems because most cities don’t plan for it, but some cities have insurance that kicks in after so many millions. They could save so much more if they spent money to prevent the misconduct in the first place, he said.

Haddad said that in a 2004 lawsuit he filed in Oakland, the police chief acknowledged a longstanding pattern of improper strip searches of people on the street. After four years, his firm uncovered some 40 victims of the strip searches. In 2008, although a federal judge ruled that the policies were unconstitutional, the city has not revised the policy and continues to use it.

“Now they’re facing a very big case with these 40 plaintiffs and probably will end up having to pay a significant amount of money to these victims,” Attorney Haddad said.

Kenavon “KC” Carter, an Austin, Texas-based criminal defense attorney, said it is important to understand that the battle against police brutality will not be won with lawsuits alone.

“It’s going to take community organizing, public education and a legislative strategy to put pressure on police departments and city councils to hold their officers accountable,” he said.

According to Carter, it takes at least $50,000 to even bring a civil rights lawsuit alleging police brutality. Such cases are difficult to win because police officers are protected by the principle of qualified immunity, he said.

“All an officer has to say when they’ve shot some brother down in the street, in the back, is that they had to make a split second decision, and that decision was to use deadly force. The courts allow them to get a pass,” he said.

“A lot of civil rights organizations, ACLU, NAACP and others are really picking and choosing cases to litigate on because they’re so expensive. They’re not successful and really not an effective strategy on holding police accountable for the conduct of their officers.”

Attorney Carter established Hip Hop Against Police Brutality Project under the sponsorship of the Texas ACLU’s Police Accountability Office. What he has found throughout his legal career is that along with city councils, the real power brokers for police misconduct are district attorneys and police chiefs from civil settlements to criminal prosecutions.

District attorneys are elected officials, so if communities are dissatisfied with their performances, one option is to vote them out, Attorney Carter said. The problem is, however, police officers have strong police unions that put a great deal of pressure on police chiefs, district attorneys and whoever they feel is a threat to cops who step out of line.

On the other hand, Carter added, citizens have to give good D.A.s political cover when they try to do the right thing.

“D.A. Craig Watkins in Dallas, Texas, who is black, has reopened and overturned 20 wrongful convictions placed on the books by the former D.A. because he saw a pattern of wrongdoing, but now he’s under pressure by the rest of his class of prosecutors to ease up. He’s going to be in trouble in the next election if people don’t stand up and when we finally have somebody really about justice, doing the right thing, we can’t afford to leave him out to dry,” he said.

In its 1999 report entitled, “Shielded From Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States,” Human Rights Watch indicated that race has played a central role in police brutality in the United States. “In the cities we have examined where such data are available, minorities have alleged human rights violations by police more frequently than white residents and far out of proportion to their representation in those cities. Police have subjected minorities to apparently discriminatory treatment and have physically abused minorities while using racial epithets,” the document read.

Human Rights Watch hasn’t followed up on that major report made a decade ago because of money problems and has discontinued domestic monitoring of police misconduct.

This is part of the March 18, 2009 online edition of Frost Illustrated.

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