ACLU Responds to Guilty Verdict for Former Police Officer Michael Slager in Killing of Walter Scott

NEW YORK — One year after the Trump administration abandoned federal police oversight across the , the American Civil Liberties Union released a report raising concerns that the patterns of excessive force and racial discrimination identified by the prior Department of Justice (DOJ) were ongoing when this administration withdrew from oversight. The report, Regressive Policing Under President Trump, provides a one-year update on the ACLU's Seven States Safety Campaign, launched shortly after the DOJ’s announcement that it was abandoning police reform across the country. The campaign focused on law enforcement agencies in seven states where federal civil rights investigations and reports confirmed widespread patterns of police abuse. These included municipal police departments and county sheriff departments in Tennessee, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, Mississippi, Minnesota, and Kentucky. Through coordinated public records requests and advocacy, the campaign sought to uncover whether the constitutional violations identified by the DOJ continued despite the Trump administration's decision to walk away. “The Trump administration abandoned oversight based on the false claim that the alarming problems uncovered in the DOJ’s investigations were either untrue or had already been addressed,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy director of policing at the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project. “Our preliminary review of these records suggests that many of the same problems identified by the DOJ persisted at the exact moment the federal government was using those claims to justify walking away. Since then, this administration has been actively encouraging the same types of aggressive policing tactics that the DOJ has found to be dangerous and unconstitutional. If the federal government refuses to protect people’s constitutional rights, we deserve transparency about whether the known police misconduct in our communities is being taken seriously.” Last May, the ACLU and local partners submitted coordinated public records requests to police departments in seven states, seeking use-of-force reports and other records that could shed light on policing practices and patterns of misconduct. The ACLU received more than 600 use-of-force reports and additional records, though many agencies delayed or continue to withhold responsive documents in violation of state public records laws. “In Memphis, we've seen firsthand what happens when there are questions about police conduct but not enough transparency and accountability to answer them,” said Cardell Orrin, executive director of Stand for Children Tennessee. “At a time when increased state and federal law enforcement activity is raising new concerns about people's rights and safety, public access to local police records is more important than ever. The records obtained through the Seven States Safety Campaign reinforce why independent oversight and public accountability remain essential. People deserve to know whether the misconduct identified by the DOJ is continuing and whether law enforcement agencies are taking meaningful steps to change their practices and protect the rights of the communities they serve.” The ACLU’s preliminary review of the records suggests that excessive force continues to be a problem across multiple agencies, including improper escalation of force against people experiencing mental health crises, misuse of Tasers, and problematic internal review processes that may fail to identify or address improper use of force. The ACLU’s initial assessment also raises concerns that the racial discrimination identified in DOJ investigations has persisted. Many agencies resisted providing records they are legally required to share. One year later, records from numerous departments are still outstanding. The full report is available here: https://www.aclu.org/publications/regressive-policing-under-president-trump

What are the implications of having for-profit companies at the heart of American police departments?

WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a new report today about the increasingly central role that surveillance and tech companies are playing in US police departments and how that threatens to give private companies unfettered access to Americans’ sensitive data. The report examines the major companies involved, the potential ways this information could be abused or exploited, and the history of close ties between corporations and police. Every day, police across the country use body cameras, drones, dash cams, and fixed surveillance cameras gathering hours upon hours of footage of people going about their daily lives. And now, some of the biggest surveillance tech companies, including Axon, Flock, and Motorola, want to gather, analyze, and control this data by providing “operating systems” for police departments that, like operating systems on computers and phones, can see and control all the data in the system. This will threaten the civil rights and civil liberties of everyone who interacts with one of these cameras — knowingly or not. Part of this trend is the movement towards police cloud services, which facilitates the consolidation of data from thousands of U.S. police departments within corporate servers and gives these private actors live remote control over the surveillance tech even after it’s deployed in communities. Or as Axon puts it on their website, “integrating hardware devices and cloud software solutions” in “the Axon ecosystem” and connecting “every officer, responder and agency.” “Putting private, for-profit companies at the heart of modern police departments — what could go wrong? The answer is: plenty, and that’s what this paper outlines” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.“Policymakers, the public, and the policing profession need to grapple with the implications of this corporatization of police departments — especially for people’s civil rights and liberties — and address it before this becomes normalized and leads to new forms of abuse we’ve never seen before.” These new corporate efforts to expand their work with police are especially worrying given how quickly surveillance technology is proliferating across the country — and how few places have strong guardrails or oversight in place. As the report details, there are many ways providers could exploit their insider access to this data, including using it to go after critics, journalists, labor unions, regulators, and competitors, or to try and fend off investigations into their products. The lack of safeguards also means that company employees could use this data to target exes, manipulate prediction markets, or even alter evidence. Unfortunately, it’s not just the companies selling these products that the public needs to be worried about. According to the report, there is another set of players that raise many of the same concerns about private companies’ access to police data and the corporate role in policing: cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, which currently also have access to the growing mountain of data generated by surveillance-based policing. The report lays out six recommendations that policymakers could implement to protect their constituents. Recommendations include contract requirements restricting private vendors’ access to law enforcement data, mandating the use of local rather than cloud services, and passing both the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act and Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) laws.

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held today in US v. Hemani that the government cannot prosecute someone as a felon simply for using marijuana and owning a gun that is securely stored. In 2023, the federal government charged Ali Hemani under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), which makes it a felony for someone who is an “unlawful user of” or “addicted to” a controlled substance to possess a firearm. Hemani was charged under this statute as an “unlawful user” based on his use of marijuana and the fact that he owned a firearm that was safely secured in his home. The court held that the government’s prosecution of Mr. Hemani under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) based on his marijuana use violates the Second Amendment. “Today’s unanimous 9-0 decision makes it clear that the government cannot make it crime for people to own a gun, which the Supreme Court has held is a fundamental constitutional right, simply because they use marijuana,” said Cecillia Wang, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union. “With nearly half of Americans reporting marijuana use at some point in their lives, this ruling protects the rights of millions and curbs the government’s ability to impose arbitrary and discriminatory penalties. The court has sent a strong message that the government cannot criminalize the conduct of large numbers of people by making categorical and unfounded assumptions about whether they are dangerous.” At the Supreme Court, Mr. Hemani’s defense team raised two constitutional arguments. First, that the statute is unconstitutionally vague because its plain text does not provide the degree of clarity required of criminal statutes and, therefore, invites overbroad and discriminatory enforcement. Second, that the law violates the Second Amendment when applied to individuals like Mr. Hemani because, applying the Supreme Court’s test, there is no historical tradition of imposing substantial criminal penalties on users of intoxicants like alcohol or marijuana. Ali Hemani is represented by the ACLU, the CLEAR clinic at the CUNY School of Law, Clement & Murphy, and Newland Legal. Organizations and individuals across the ideological spectrum joined as amici, including the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), the Cato Institute, the National Rifle Association (NRA), criminal defense lawyers, and constitutional law scholars.