US police escape 96% of civil rights charges: Report
US government prosecutors have declined to bring charges against police officers facing allegations of civil rights violations in 96 percent of such cases during the past 10 years, according to a new report.
Federal prosecutors turned down 12,703 potential civil rights violations out of 13,233 total complaints between 1995 and 2015, according to an investigation by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper.
The newspaper examined nearly 3 million US Justice Department records related to how the department’s 94 US attorney’s offices across the country handled civil rights cases against police.
The most common reasons that prosecutors cited for declining to bring civil rights cases against officers were weak or insufficient evidence, lack of criminal intent and orders from the Justice Department, the newspaper said.
The findings could bolster arguments by African American civil rights activists who claim white police officers who kill black people are rarely held criminally responsible for their violence.
The report comes just days after the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York City announced he would not press charges against a white officer who killed an unarmed black teenager inside his own apartment in 2012.
The standard for bringing a federal civil rights charge against an officer is much more rigorous than that of a typical police misconduct case brought at the state level.
Federal prosecutors must prove that an officer acted “willfully” in depriving someone of his or her rights, rather than simply negligently or recklessly.
The report comes as law enforcement departments across the United States face increased scrutiny over allegations of excessive force against black people and other minority groups.
Police in the United States killed over 1,150 people in 2015, with the largest police departments disproportionately killing at least 321 African Americans, according to data compiled by an activist group that runs the Mapping Police Violence project.
The report also said charges against police officers who do use deadly force are very rare and that police use of lethal force is not correlated to violent crime rates.
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