Testimony of Washington National Office Director Laura Murphy on Police Abuse Before a Congressional Black Caucus Hearing

May 10, 1999

Testimony of Laura Murphy, Director, Washington National Office of the American Civil Liberties Union

Congressional Black Caucus
Hearing on Police Abuse

May 10, 1999

"For too many people, especially in minority communities, the trust that is essential to effective policing does not exist because residents believe that police have used excessive force, that law enforcement is too aggressive, that law enforcement is biased, disrespectful, and unfair ? When minority communities, in the wake of a shooting, immediately assume the police officer, not the suspect, is at fault, we have a problem. And the tensions that arise between the police and minority residents have serious consequences both in terms of effective policing and community unrest."

These are the words of Attorney General Janet Reno at the National Press Club on April 15, 1999.

My name is Laura Murphy and I am Director of the Washington National Office of the American Civil Liberties Union. I have been invited here today to address the issue of police brutality in minority communities.

The ACLU has been a leader in working to end police abuse. We brought the Williams v. City of Pittsburgh class action suit on behalf of 25 named plaintiffs, 17 of whom were people of color. This suit eventually led to the Justice Department investigation of Pittsburgh and subsequent consent decree.

The ACLU has been a long time promoter of civilian review boards -- an important tool used to investigate and discipline police abuse. We are also actively working for positive legislative change at both the national and state levels and training and policy reform at the local level.

Other people today, have or will describe instances of police abuse. I am not going to spend my brief time discussing instances of abuse, but rather offer some recommendations which could easily be implemented by the Administration without passing any new laws.

Since the passage of the 1994 crime bill, the Clinton administration has been armed with a powerful club against police misconduct - the legal authority to investigate and remedy "pattern and practices" by law enforcement agencies. However, almost five years later, Pittsburgh remains the only major city under a "pattern and practice" consent decree.

Part of the '94 crime bill required the collection and production of meaningful data on excessive force by police. The Administration's failure to fulfill this very basic legislative mandate is a sign of the low priority the administration has attached to this problem.

The federal government has been quite willing to fund programs designed to get officers on the street. It has been considerably less willing to ensure that the officers' conduct is appropriate once they are on the street.

In response to a national crisis in confidence in law enforcement in communities of color the President has proposed a timid and wholly inadequate approach.

The President proposes to spend $48 million in new spending. Of that total, $20 million is aimed at police training, $20 million will enhance educational opportunities for officers, $5 million will support local so-called "citizen police academies," $2 million will support improved minority recruitment and only $1 million is aimed at enhanced accountability enforcement by the Civil Rights Division. These funding priorities are skewed tragically in the wrong direction. Ninety-five percent of the President's proposed funding is for programs he knows the anti-reform police special interest lobby will support. The funding priorities are not only inadequate, they are insulting to the civil rights groups that they are apparently aimed to placate.

We call upon the Attorney General and the Administration to implement the following changes:

Allocate at least $5 million, instead of $1 million for stepped up accountability in the form of resources targeted to the Civil Rights Division's work on police misconduct. This work is at least as important as citizen police academies and is still only a drop in the bucket of what is needed to have a meaningful impact nationwide.
Allocate at least $5 million as opposed to $2 million for improved minority and female recruitment into law enforcement. Again, this is at least as important as citizen police academies. Recruitment in communities of color is necessary to ease some of the current tensions. Also, studies suggest that women officers use force and generate complaints and lawsuits less frequently than their male counterparts.
Implement a workable strategy for fulfilling the 1994 law requiring the collection of excessive force data. Without this data, we cannot adequately assess or address the problem of excessive force.
Institute police training programs aimed at "breaking the code of silence." Law enforcement officers should be required to actually practice what to do if they see their partner engaged in brutality or an act of blatant racism. No department does this type of role-play training on this crucial part of every officer's responsibilites.
Include in the federally funded Integrity Training program model whistle blower procedures to protect officers who report misconduct.
Urge passage of the Traffic Stops Statistics Act of 1999. Many troubling interactions between police and citizens evolve from traffic stops which are often targeted at the minority community. The administration should be willing to say that the slight burden on law enforcement to collect the data is heavily outweighed by the need for effective, proactive legislation.
Conduct a systematic review of all Operation Pipeline drug interdiction training for any explicit or implicit racial references.
Establish national standards for traffic stops. These standards should include at least the following points:

A ban on deception in highway drug interdiction stops. If the actual motivation for a traffic stop was a desire to find drugs, people should be immediately informed that they are being stopped as part of a drug interdiction program instead of being given a phony pre textual excuse as to why they are being stopped.
The driver should be clearly informed of his or her right to refuse to consent to a search, preferably in writing.
There should be a ban on extending non-consensual stops which allows officers time to bring drug sniffing dogs to the scene. This practice unnecessarily detains motorists and usually does not result in finding any drugs.
Drivers should be affirmatively informed that they are "free to go" as soon as the alleged purpose of the stop, for example issuing the minor traffic ticket, has been completed.

Lastly, Attorney General Reno announced during her Press Club speech that she will be holding a "Summit on Police Abuse" on June 9 and 10th. We hope to see as a result of this summit an increased emphasis on police accountability instead of merely more talk about training.

Training and education, while important, will never be enough by themselves to end police abuse. Overemphasis on training reflects a failure to recognize or confront that a significant portion of the police misconduct problem is not related in any way to inadequate training.

Some misconduct occurs not because the officers didn't know they were doing something wrong but, instead, because they knew -- based on their own experience -- that they would almost certainly "get away with it." This attitude will not change until these officers learn to expect the opposite. Perhaps the most famous police whistle blower Frank Serpico recently said that we need to create an atmosphere where the bad officers have more to fear than the good officers rather than the other way around. That atmosphere will not be created until we place a high priority on police accountability.