Law and disorder: Police oversight and training confront a changing landscape
The Marshall Project reports on the future of police accountability, which remains uncertain as misconduct persists and focus shifts from reforms.
Law and disorder: Police oversight and training confront a changing landscape
A community in Alabama may soon be forced to close its local police department. At the end of February, a grand jury recommended disbanding the Hanceville Police Department, concluding that it "recently operated as more of a criminal enterprise than a law enforcement agency." City officials have said they are considering the recommendation, but for now, the department is, in effect, shuttered. Five officers have been arrested, and the entire force has been placed on leave.
One state away, a former Rankin County sheriff's deputy came clean to Mississippi Today in early March about his role in a two-decade reign of terror by the department's "Goon Squad." The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, said that he and his colleagues regularly brutalized and humiliated suspects, lied in official reports, and frequently seized and destroyed evidence without a warrant during drug raids. Dedmon, like several former deputies from Rankin County, is serving prison time after being convicted last year in the brutal assault and torture of two Black men.
Neither case will be shocking to regular readers of The Marshall Project. Previous editions have highlighted similarly extreme—even cartoonish—instances of police misconduct, corruption and brutality. We have also covered how some of those cases have triggered efforts at reform and accountability. But as the federal government, and to a lesser extent, public opinion, increasingly turns away from concerns over policing—more than four years since protests over police violence overtook the national discourse—the future of police accountability looks uncertain.
Deadly police violence has increased slightly since 2020. Statistics on police killings per capita show a slight but durable increase since the pandemic and George Floyd protests, according to a The Marshall Project analysis of the Mapping Police Database. Numbers released at the beginning of March suggest this trend continued through 2024, even as violent crime rates have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels.
No more police accountability norms
Under the Trump administration, the Department of Justice has insinuated that it will no longer pursue the kinds of federal investigations that regularly followed high profile acts of police violence during the Obama and Biden era. President Trump also rescinded an executive order signed by former President Biden in 2022 that established use-of-force restrictions for federal law enforcement and created a national database for tracking misconduct, which all federal law enforcement agencies were required to submit to.
In February, the Trump administration took that database offline, The Washington Post reported. Because of its short lifespan, it's difficult to assess how effective the database was, or could have been, at its stated goal: preventing officers with a history of serious misconduct from finding new jobs in law enforcement. The single report released about the database in December 2024 found that despite nearly 10,000 queries run by officials in the first eight months of 2024, only 25 searches were made by agencies seeking information on an officer from outside their own department.
The vast majority of misconduct incidents captured in the database were generated by border enforcement agents and corrections officers in federal prisons, The Appeal reported in February.
The executive branch isn't the only part of the federal government to sidestep a role in police accountability. In early March, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case that could have increased the legal responsibility police have to ensure they have the correct address when conducting raids on the homes of crime suspects. These "wrong home" raids can create lasting trauma for the people they ensnare. A lawsuit filed on Feb. 25 in Denver, for example, alleged that police looking for a man in apartment 307, instead raided apartment 306, and wound up locking a mother and her 5-year-old and 6-year-old daughters in a police car for an hour.
In March, Anjanette Young marked the six-year anniversary of a wrong-home raid that made national news in Chicago. Young was handcuffed and left naked despite explaining to officers that they were in the wrong place. She has since become an advocate for changing the way police approach these kinds of arrests. "Six years since I stood before officers—crying, pleading, afraid—only to be ignored," Young said at a news conference outside City Hall at the end of February, WBEZ Chicago reported. "And yet I stand here again, afraid and demanding for justice, accountability, still demanding that those in power would keep their promise."
Beyond changes in how law enforcement is (and isn't) subject to oversight and accountability, developments in late February have also raised some questions about who enters the profession and how they are trained.
In New York City, the NYPD announced that it's lowering its educational hiring standards in response to what officials describe as a recruitment crisis. With new applications down by more than half since 2017, the department is reducing its college credit requirements from 60 to 24 credits—while also reinstating a timed 1.5-mile run requirement that the department dropped in 2023, partly based on the belief it would help more women meet the qualifications.
The return of that requirement comes just days after The Associated Press published an investigation which found that at least 29 police recruits have died in training over the past decade, often from heatstroke, excessive physical stress, or underlying medical conditions that were exacerbated by training activities. A disproportionate number of the deaths occurred in Black trainees with the sickle cell trait, a genetic condition which can cause fatal complications under high physical stress in otherwise healthy people.
This story was produced by The Marshall Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Police say that the practice “for years” has been to send youth to restorative justice options rather than cite them for ordinance violations.
Officials at the University of Chicago Crime Lab's Policing Leadership Academy brought in members of storied improv theater The Second City to teach police leaders the skills found in improv.
Police say that the practice “for years” has been to send youth to restorative justice options rather than cite them for ordinance violations.
