How can you prevent police brutality

Evaluating residency requirements as a strategy to improve racial diversity of police departments. How black representation on the police force reduces police killings of black people. While they are not a cure-all, body cameras and cell phone video have illuminated cases of police violence and have shown to be important tools for holding officers accountable.

Nearly every case where a police officer was charged with a crime for killing a civilian in relied on video evidence showing the officer's actions. Ex: Baltimore PD Body Cam Policy update privacy laws to protect civilians from having video or audio recordings released publicly that do not contain potential evidence in a use-of-force incident, misconduct incident, discharge of a weapon or death.

The Right to Record Police Ban police officers from taking cell phones or other recording devices without a person's consent or warrant and give people the right to sue police departments if they take or destroy these devices. How to implement body cams in a way that promotes accountability and protects privacy. Considerations for implementing body cams.

Study finds body cams don't reduce use of force, but also don't increase criminalization of communities. Data showing when and how often body cam video gets released. How body cams impacted use of force in San Diego. The dangers of body cams being misused as a tool for surveillance.

Why body cams need the right policies to be effective. Considerations for making body cam footage accessible. Why police shouldn't get to review body camera footage before they report. How body cameras only reduce use of force with good policies. The current training regime for police officers fails to effectively teach them how to interact with our communities in a way that protects and preserves life. For example, police recruits spend 58 hours learning how to shoot firearms and only 8 hours learning how to de-escalate situations.

An intensive training regime is needed to help police officers learn the behaviors and skills to interact appropriately with communities. Rather, existing training programs should be replaced with programs that de-emphasize firearms and use of force and that empower communities to design and implement new training paradigms for first responders including, but not limited to, the following topics: Procedural justice Relationship-based policing Crisis intervention, mediation, and conflict resolution Appropriate engagement with youth Appropriate engagement with LGBTQ, transgender and gender nonconforming individuals Appropriate engagement with individuals who are english language learners Appropriate engagement with individuals from different religious affiliations Appropriate engagement with individuals who are differently abled De-escalation and minimizing the use of force.

Experiment shows officers trained in Procedural Justice less likely to make arrests or use force. Study finds Procedural Justice training reduces police use of force and complaints. Study: Mental Health Training did not reduce police violence. How racial bias informs police officers' decisions to shoot. Characteristics of officers that predict violence against black people. The problem with how police are trained.

How the way police are currently trainined is ineffective. How police training in the US falls short compared to other countries. How procedural justice and fairness training impact perceptions of police.

Recommendations for Improving Police Training. End For-Profit Policing. Police should be working to keep people safe, not contributing to a system that profits from stopping, searching, ticketing, arresting and incarcerating people.

End police department quotas for tickets and arrests Ban police departments from using ticket or arrest quotas to evaluate the performance of police officers Ex: Illinois law. Prevent police from taking the money or property of innocent people Prohibit police from: seizing property of civilians i.

Require police departments to bear the cost of misconduct Require the cost of misconduct settlements to be paid out of the police department budget instead of the City's general fund Restrict police departments from receiving more money from the general fund when they go over-budget on lawsuit payments. How police and the courts profit from low-income residents in St.

Louis County. How profit incentives influence policing in Ferguson. How to reform municipal courts in St. Louis to stop profiting off of low-income, black residents. How to structure fines based on a person's ability to pay. How police use civil asset forfeiture as a tool to increase revenue. How Philadelphia police seize cash from poor, black people.

Analysis of Civil Forfeiture Cash Seizures. The events in Ferguson have introduced the nation to the ways that local police departments can misuse military weaponry to intimidate and repress communities.

In , militarized SWAT teams killed at least 38 people and studies show that more militarized police departments are significantly more likely to kill civilians.

The following policies limit police departments from obtaining or using these weapons on our streets. End the Federal Government's Program Providing Military Weaponry to Local Police Departments End the supply of federal military weaponry to local police departments under the program. Establish Local Restrictions to Prevent Police Departments from Purchasing or Using Military Weaponry Restrict police departments from: using federal grant money to purchase military equipment Ex: Montana law deploying armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft, drones, Stingray surveillance equipment, camouflage uniforms, and grenade launchers using SWAT teams unless there is an emergency situation or imminent threat to life and high-ranking officers have given approval Ex: Cincinnati PD Policy conducting no-knock raids Ex: Oregon law bans all no-knock raids accessing federal grant money or purchasing military equipment if the department has been recently found to demonstrate a "pattern or practice" of discriminatory policing in addition to these restrictions, wherever possible agencies should seek to return to the federal government the military equipment that has already been received Ex: San Jose.

The origins of police militarization. See the military equipment the federal government has given to police departments. A police officer's perspective on militarization. How police receive military weapons to combat drugs, not terrorism. Key challenges in reversing police militarization.

Best practices and models for demilitarizing police departments. How SWAT raids have increased since the 's. Study shows more militarized police are more likely to kill people. Instead of being someone who makes a lot of arrests, a good cop is one who wants to make the community they serve safer and better for the people who live there. It is not someone who aspires to "kick ass and take names," as the expression goes.

Hiring and retaining cops who can easily discern a situation that can be de-escalated from one that requires force will require major changes to police departments. It will also require taking on the law enforcement belief that no one understands the challenges they face. Second, written, video and in-person tests should be used to determine the level of threat that triggers an applicant's aggression.

Third, applicants should be assessed for empathy, impulse control, paranoia and independent thinking. Departments in Baltimore and Washington, D. To make sure nothing was missed in testing, background investigations can help surface any risk an applicant presents that may not be revealed by testing. Officers necessarily change after time on the streets, and not all cope well with the stresses of police work. The changes they undergo can be highly negative and create risks to communities and departments that were not present at the beginning of their tenures.

For example, the Minnesota police officer accused of killing George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, was on the beat for 19 years. Because changes will happen, officers need to be tested regularly in a way that encourages them to provide candid answers and helps them understand biases they may have developed against the community they serve. Routine testing of officers can also serve to alert departments to cops who may have changed in ways that might now threaten the community.

Departments get this gear in a variety of ways, but one common route is the program , which provides free surplus military gear to departments for the cost of shipping.

Some of this gear is innocuous, Delahanty told Live Science — filing cabinets, gloves, binoculars and other run-of-the-mill supplies that departments would otherwise have to buy on their own.

But departments have also received equipment such as grenade launchers, bayonets and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles MRAPS , which are military trucks designed to take blows from improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq. Related: 13 Significant protests that changed the course of history.

Both Delehanty and Lawson have found that police departments with more military equipment from the program kill more people. In a paper published in Political Research Quarterly in , Lawson and his colleagues found that in all 50 states between and , the number of police-involved deaths rose with militarization, as measured by the value of the equipment sent to a department via the program, even after controlling for factors such as population numbers, poverty, race and violent crime.

In a given year, a department with no requisitions could expect 0. It's likely that departments with a militaristic, us-versus-them mindset seek out more military equipment, Lawson said.

But Delehanty's findings hint that the cycle can feed on itself, with more military equipment encouraging a more violent force. By comparing departments over time, he and his colleagues found that the annual change in military equipment could predict a department's suspect deaths in the next year. A department with no new equipment in a year could expect 0.

A department with the most new requisitions could expect 0. The researchers even found a similar increase in police killings of dogs, suggesting that cops weren't necessarily gearing up for big, casualty-heavy raids with their requisitions. They were simply becoming more violent in general.

The protests have led to renewed calls to end or restrict the program. In , President Barack Obama put some limits on the program via executive order. President Donald Trump repealed that executive order in Training is often cited as a way to reduce racial biases among police officers and encourage de-escalation.

Some training methods have evidence to back them up. But training is a nebulous concept with little oversight, and departments don't necessarily turn to evidence-based programs. In , for example, Fox 9 reported that the St. Paul Police Department's "main attraction" in its annual equity training was watching the children's movie "Zootopia. There are regulatory ways to change police culture. A report by Sinyangwe released in for the Use of Force Project found that in departments that adopt more of eight policies that limit how police can use force the police kill fewer civilians.

For the report, Sinyangwe looked at records from 94 of the nation's largest municipal police departments. Requiring officers to de-escalate before using force; 2. Using guidelines defining the types of force that can be used to respond to specific situations; 3. In response, Democrats have proposed legislation to address inequities and reduce deaths in custody, including measures that would require police to wear body cameras, ban chokeholds and make it easier to prosecute officers.

Here's a look at some of these proposed solutions, and other potential ways to reform policing. Most police departments have a "use of force" policy which dictates how and when officers can use force.

These policies vary substantially from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. After high-profile police killings, many departments are forced to re-examine and rewrite their use of force policies by federal consent decrees.

The city of Baltimore revamped its policy in as a part of its consent decree with the US Department of Justice after the death of Freddie Gray. The new version requires officers to report use of force incidents and compels them to intervene if they see another officer improperly using force. After Floyd's death, the Minneapolis city council forced the police department's hand by banning chokeholds and making it mandatory for officers to intervene if their colleagues are using improper force.

Advocates acknowledge that simply rewriting these policies would not effectively prevent deaths like Floyd's, and that force is still disproportionately used against communities of colour. A New York Times analysis showed that the Minneapolis police use force against black residents seven times more often than white residents. Protesters believe that cities and states spend far too much money on their police departments without sufficiently funding education, mental health, housing and other community-based social services.

A growing demand is for political leaders to "defund" the police - that usually means reducing funding not cutting it altogether. On Sunday, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council signed a pledge in front of a crowd of demonstrators promising to "begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department". They vowed to create a "new, transformative model for cultivating safety". Earlier in the week, two council members used the word "dismantle" to describe their plans for the department, as did Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar.

The statement did not make it clear if the council is merely pledging to remake the department, or if they were heeding some demonstrators' calls to "abolish the police," which would obviously be the most radical course of action. The council president said she could imagine a scenario where the department enters state receivership, and a team of medics and health care professionals respond to calls instead of police.

A group called MPD is calling for a "police-free future" in Minneapolis, in which mental health professionals, social workers, religious leaders and other community-based advocates would do the work of police. There is some historical precedent for a wholesale dismantling of a department. In , the Camden, New Jersey, police department was fully disbanded and all of its officers lost their jobs.

However, it was certainly not abolition - a new, countywide police force was formed in its place, and about former Camden officers applied for and regained their jobs.