Police Brutality

Law Enforcement Agency Policies and Procedures

Policy and procedural responses to police brutality include reviews of and changes in the selection and hiring process for entry level police officers. An increase in accountability for police supervisors and management, more stringent reporting requirements for officers involved in any use of force, and a rigorous review of their actions are also used to address the problem. Additional controls include drug testing of officers after any serious incident involving the use of force and the use of computerized tracking systems to maintain and analyze information on the use of force by officers and citizen complaint data. In California, all nonfederal [Page 360]agencies employing law enforcement officers are legally required to make information about the complaint (for misconduct) process readily available to the public, to facilitate the reporting of such incidents.

Federal Response to Problems with Police Brutality

In Section 210402 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, also known as the “Crime Bill,” the U.S. Congress required the Department of Justice to gather information on the excessive use of force by police. To accomplish this task, additional questions in the form of a self-report survey were added to the 1999 National Crime Victimization Surveys, to gather data on the prevalence of problems during traffic- and nontraffic-related contact between the public and police. Projecting the results of this survey to the entire U.S. population, less than 1% of the estimated 44 million people reporting personal face-to-face contact with police were subjected to some kind of force or threat of force. Of those, however, the majority felt that the police had acted improperly.

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