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Utah law enforcement officials are assessing how the incoming Trump administration’s deportation agenda will impact the safety of their communities, reports Deseret News. The new agenda calls for local law enforcement to help identify migrants who could be in the country illegally, “starting with those who committed crimes after entering the United States.” As CPE consultant Chris Burbank points out, such an agenda would lead to racial profiling and even require racially motivated policing actions. An excerpt from the article: “Not only are you going to impact people who might be undocumented, you’re going to absolutely impact people who look, dress, sound, speak, worship, in the same way that you would profile an individual,” said Burbank, who works as an adviser to the Center for Policing Equity, which he helped found. During his nine years as police chief, Burbank gained a national profile for speaking out against a state bill that […]

In 2023, the St. Louis County Police Department saw a surge in police use of force, which commonly includes use of guns, physical restraint, pepper spray, Tasers, and canine bites. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that 2024 numbers are expected to surpass last years, a trend observed since the start of the pandemic. Officers and supervisors cite an increase in the reporting of uses of force, aided by bodycam footage, departmental force policy shifts, and understaffed departments as reasons for this surge in police use of force. Assessing an increase in use of force is complicated by the fact that the FBI does not have established standards for what would be considered use of force. Police departments define uses of force differently, and experts, like CPE’s own Matt Graham, Senior Data Analyst, acknowledge that this complicates comparisons:  “It’s basically impossible to get a comprehensive national accounting of police use of force,” said

For decades, former Kansas City, Kansas detective Roger Golubski committed heinous crimes against members of the community he was sworn to protect, using his status as a police officer “to violate the civil rights of two women by rape, kidnapping and sexual assault.” KCUR 89.3, a NPR-affiliate, interviewed experts, including CPE co-founder Dr. Tracie Keesee, who say federal and departmental inaction in this case is emblematic of a larger problem: a lack of accountability for police officers who harm the most vulnerable in our society. An excerpt from Dr. Keesee’s interview with KCUR: The accusations at the heart of Golubski’s case date back decades, and reflect a culture of system-wide inaction among everyone who knew of his abuses and chose not to do anything until now, said Dr. Tracie Keesee, a former New York Police Department deputy commissioner and co-founder of the Center for Police Equity. “And we wonder why the

Black Enterprise, a magazine publication, reports that the Independent Office for Police Conduct, based in the UK, has called for measures to stop the “adultification” of Black children in England and Wales. The article includes the following excerpt from a 2023 CPE blog post, “The Adultification of Black Children:” “When Black children are held to adult standards, the harm goes far beyond their own lives and that of their families, the trauma affecting whole communities, not least because those responsible are so infrequently held accountable,” the center wrote. “Keith Belcher and his family had to wait nearly 30 years for the Connecticut courts to acknowledge its grotesque sentencing of a 14-year-old boy; the family of 14-year-old Emmett Till, tortured and murdered by a group of white men in 1955, is still waiting for someone to answer for his lynching.” Read the article at Black Enterprise’s website.

Legislation banning masks during protests has gained traction in several states, reports The Marshall Project, which, when paired with law enforcement surveillance technology, puts protestors at an increased risk of being harassed and arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights. Such surveillance technology includes gait analysis technology, geofence warrants, automated license plate reading cameras, and facial recognition tools. Nicole Napolitano, Ph.D., Director of Research Strategy at CPE, explains the pitfalls of facial recognition in particular: “There are lots of different tools that are available to law enforcement. Facial recognition is one of those tools that it’s about expediency,” said Nicole Napolitano, director of research at the Center for Policing Equity. But it’s not without its pitfalls. Like PimEyes, tools like Clearview AI can make mistakes and incorrectly identify people, leading to erroneous arrests. “Police have become increasingly reliant on and then biased by what the model tells them,” said Napolitano. Read

In October, John Sawchak, a White man, shot and nearly killed his Black neighbor, Davis Moturi, over a dispute regarding the trimming of a tree. The incident was a culmination of a long period of harassment inflicted by Sawchak on Moturi and his family. Now, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) has found itself having to explain why they took so long to take action against Sawchak during this period of time, including not arresting Sawchak for days after his attempted murder of Moturi. Dr. Phillip Atiba Solomon, CPE Co-founder and CEO, explains to CNN why the outrage around MPD’s response is justified: But Philip Solomon, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity, said he feels Moturi and the community’s outrage is justified – especially in a city like Minneapolis – because police hesitation led to Moturi being injured, and the police have not historically adopted the same measured, methodical approach to apprehending

Since 2016, the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) has provided reports, based on assessments conducted under a DOJ consent decree, intended to assess bias in their department’s procedures. However, upon a closer look at the data, there appear to be inconsistencies in NOPD’s analyses, verified by several independent experts, including the Gun Violence Data Hub and CPE. More specifically, reports WWNO 89.9, NOPD’s use of force analyses, in which any use of force is justified if it is followed by an arrest, actually hides racial disparities, particularly against Black people. CPE’s Nicole Napolitano, Director of Research Strategy, breaks down the issues with NOPD’s reporting and assessment of their own data: “They seem to assume that the arrest justifies the use of force. But in law enforcement, arrest and use of force are correlated,” said Nicole Napolitano with the Center for Policing Equity, a national nonprofit that gathers and analyzes policing data.

The Federalist Society published a blog post on the certiorari-stage amicus brief filed by The Cato Institute, in collaboration with the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) and CPE, that urges the Supreme Court to review Barnes v. Felix. The case concerns how to evaluate an excessive force claim under the Fourth Amendment. More specifically: Should a court look at the reasonableness of an officer’s actions only in the narrow window when an officer’s safety was threatened, as required by the Fifth Circuit’s “moment of threat” doctrine? Or does the totality of the circumstances matter—including any actions officers took that may have unnecessarily increased the danger they faced? Read the blog post on The Federalist Society’s website.