Police supervision, accountability is exposed to changing perspectives

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A municipality in Alabama could soon be forced to close its local police department. Last week, a Grand jury recommended that Hanceville police department be resolved, and came to the conclusion that it was “recently operated as a criminal company as a law enforcement agency”. City officials have announced that they are considering the recommendation, but the department is closed. Five officials were arrested and the entire group was put on vacation.

A state removed, a former deputy of the Sheriff by Rankin County, came to Mississippi this week about his role in a terrorist rule of the “Goon squad” of the department in two decades. The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, said that he and his colleagues brutally brutalized and humiliated suspects, lied in official reports and often confiscated and destroy evidence without arrest in the event of drug attacks. Dedmon served like several former MPs from Rankin County, time after he was convicted last year for the brutal attack and torture between two black men.

None the case will be shocking for regular readers of this newsletter. Earlier editions have highlighted similar extremes – even cartoons – cases of police control, corruption and brutality. We also treated how some of these cases triggered efforts to reform and accountability. But when the Federal Government and to a lesser extent, public opinion increasingly turn away from concerns regarding police work – more than four years since protests against police violence – the future of the police accountability looks uncertain.

The fatal police force has increased slightly since 2020. Statistics on police murders per capita show a slight but permanent increase since pandemic and George Floyd protested according to a Marshall project analysis of the database of the mapping police. The figures published this week indicate that this trend continued until 2024, even if the violent criminal rates have largely returned to the pre-Pandemic level.

Under the Trump government, the Ministry of Justice assumed that it will no longer carry out the types of federal investigations that have regularly followed top -class laws of police violence during the Obama and bidges. President Trump also raised an executive regulation signed by the former President Biden in 2022, in which the restrictions on the law enforcement of the federal government were established, and a national database for the persecution of misconduct, to which all law enforcement agencies had to subject.

At the beginning of this month, the Trump administration lost this database offline, reported Washington Post. Due to its short lifespan, it is difficult to assess how effective the database was or could have been to prevent the goal: civil servants with serious misconduct to find new jobs in law enforcement. The individual report on the database published in December last year showed that despite almost 10,000 queries, which were conducted by civil servants in the first eight months of 2024, only 25 searches by agencies who were looking for information about an official from outside their own department.

The vast majority of the incidents of misconduct recorded in the database were generated by border employment agents and correction officials in federal prisons, reported the appeal on Thursday.

The executive is not the only part of the federal government that implements a role in the police responsibility. This week, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case that could have enlarged legal responsibility to ensure that they have the right address if they carry out the houses of suspicious raids. These “wrong” raids can create permanent trauma for people who enlarge them. A lawsuit submitted in Denver on Tuesday claimed, for example, that the police who are looking for a man in apartment 307 fell through the apartment 306 instead and that a mother and her 5- and 6-year-old daughters locked up in a police car for an hour.

In Chicago this month, Anjanette Young celebrates the sixth anniversary of a false home raid that has made national news. Young was tied up with handcuffs and remained naked, although she explained to the officials that they were in the wrong place. Since then she has become a lawyer to change the way the police are approaching this type of arrest. “Six years, since I stood before officers – crying, pleading, anxious – only to be ignored,” said Young last week at a press conference outside the Council Hall, WBEZ Chicago reported. “And yet I am back here, anxious and demanding for justice, accountability and demanded that the rulers would keep their promise.”

Apart from changes in the way, law enforcement authorities are subject to supervision and accountability, developments have also raised some questions in recent weeks about who has entered the job and how they are trained.

In New York City, the NYPD announced that they reduce their attitude standards for educational attitudes as a response to what civil servants describe as a recruitment crisis. With new applications by more than half since 2017, the department has reduced its college credit requirements from 60 to 24 credits and at the same time reinsert a time-controlled 1.5 mile running requirement that the department fell in 2023, partly on the conviction that it would help more women to meet the qualifications.

The return of this requirement takes place only a few days after the Associated Press has published an investigation, which has been found that at least 29 recruits of the police died in training in the past decade, often from heat stroke, excessive physical stress or underlying diseases that were tightened by training activities. A disproportionate number of deaths occurred in black trainees with the sickle cell characteristic, a genetic disease that can cause fatal complications in otherwise healthy people with high physical stress.