Tag: Criminal Justice System

Advancing Racial Equity: Shrinking Misdemeanor Prosecution in New York

Misdemeanors are under attack. Misdemeanors are what drives the criminal justice system at least at the local criminal court level. Misdemeanors are the crimes that directly and most often impact day to day life. This has led to a shift of the criminal justice system from being victim focused to offender focused. This has created drastic changes.

The link below has several reports on its webpage and there are also links to several additional articles.

Findings and policy recommendations from a comprehensive analysis of misdemeanor cases in NYC.
— Read on www.courtinnovation.org/publications/misdemeanor-race-NYC

Law Enforcement Statutory Database

This website is part of the National Conference of State Legislators.

This section has legislative changes for police reform. Not all legislation becomes law. This website might me the best place to search for legislative changes constituting police reform. There is a search section to search different State Laws.

Law Enforcement Statutory Database
— Read on www.ncsl.org/research/civil-and-criminal-justice/law-enforcement-statutory-database.aspx

National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and goals 1973 – Police

This is an excellent police resource.  I think this reads like a huge policy book. It links standards to the best research from the day.  This was probably the first attempt at accreditation before the Sate DCJS and Organizations like POST and CALEA took over.

If anyone has a better format please share. This is an underutilized resource. I’m also looking to purchase a hard copy version of this.

This is a viewable and downloadable option from Google Books.  A .PDF can easily be downloaded.
This is BEST:
CLICK HERE: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Police/UFKC5yICgTgC?hl=en&gbpv=0

Here is a second option:
#4 – Police; [a report. – Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library
— Read on babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt

Reimagining Public Safety | AustinTexas.gov

What’s New
January 2022
Report offers ‘Roadmap’ to addressing inequities in Austin Policing

This is the MAIN website to access all of the public safety initiatives. It looks like they do a very good job continuously updating what has been achieved, what they are working on, and what is future projects. From here or you can go to the different topics at the top of the page and search for what interests you. There are two other posts that pertain for lawn Forssman so if you search my blog page for Austin Police you’ll get the other two posts that are specific to policing.
— Read on www.austintexas.gov/publicsafety

Thoughts on New York’s Manhattan’s District Attorney’s Day One Memo

Alvin Bragg the Manhattan DA is not the first DA to make a policy manifesto on how their office will run. His is one of the most resent. Bragg is part of a Progressive Prosecutor movement that is moving through some of the most crime ridden cities. Manhattan joins Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles with their progressive movement.

District Attorneys are supposed to be the leading “Law Enforcement Official” in their County. That would put them in the Executive Branch of government. Prosecutors enforce the law they don’t interpret the law and they don’t create the law. If Prosecutors want to change the law there is a process for doing so, it isn’t by improperly charging crimes that are robbery (with a weapon) as simple petit larceny. As a Prosecutor if you don’t like the fact that when someone robs another person by displaying a gun (§ 160.10(2b)) and can get sentenced up to 15 years in jail. It’s not the Prosecutors choice to establish the penalty for the crime, the legislators did that. Again there is a process to change the severity of the penalty through petitioning the legislator, it is not by artificially improperly charging a serious felony robbery to a petit larceny.

For the record petit larceny is a theft of $1 to under $1000 and is a misdemeanor with a penalty of up to 1 year in jail. This compared to a robbery where a the offender brought a gun to aid in the completion of the robbery with a threat of harm if you don’t give up the money. Crazy.

Mare sure to check out DA Bragg’s Police Memo there is much more than what was covered here so far.
See DA Bragg’s Police Memo HERE

Concerns with DA Bragg’s Policy Memo

The Commissioner of NYPD has issue with the policies of the Manhattan DA.
See HERE

The Union for NYPD also see issue with the DA’s policy. See HERE

Here is a link to the New York Constitution and the role and function of District Attorneys in New York – access it HERE

2 Articles from the Manhattan Institute

Looking Beyond Day One

Three steps to minimize the impact of the new Manhattan DA’s soft-on-crime policies.
See HERE

How Much Leniency with Criminals Can We Afford?

Progressive prosecutors claim that a soft-on-crime approach will make us safer, but the evidence tells a different story.
See HERE

Reimagining Judging

My focus in this short essay is only on sentencing. A judge’s role is different at sentencing than her role at other points in a criminal trial, or in other contexts.

The stakes are the highest; it is when state power confronts a person’s liberty. And I write for the most part about what I know best, which is federal sentencing. Federal sentencing has changed over the past forty years and with it the judge’s role. It has seesawed from a period when the purpose of sentencing was rehabilitation, and a judge had virtually unlimited discretion to sentence (Gertner 2010). It then moved to a more recent period when a judge’s power was more strictly cabined by mandatory minimum sentences, and mandatory Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Finally, it has shifted to the present which is—at least on the surface—some combination of both. Today, there is space for more judicial discretion. On the surface, that change—increasing judicial discretion—looks promising.

More judicial discretion might well be an antidote to treating people as Guideline categories or cogs in a three-strikes machine. Reformers sometimes assume that when judges focus on an individual, they will necessarily consider their humanity and the social context of the crime, all factors that have largely been ignored during the past thirty years. But there are reasons to be skeptical.

Access the article at the link below:

squareonejustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/CJLJ9284-Reimagining-Judging-report-211215-WEB.pdf

2022 RIPA Board Report

The California Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board (Board) is pleased to release its fifth annual Report. The Report contains an analysis of the millions of police and pedestrian stops conducted in 2020 under the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (“RIPA”) by 18 law enforcement agencies, including the 15 largest agencies, in California. The Report closely examines a wide range of issue areas related to racial and identity profiling, providing context and research to deepen stakeholders’ understanding of the stop data collected under the RIPA. In the Executive Summary, the Board provides an overview of the Report. For ease of reference, there is a separate Recommendations and Best Practices section pulling out the Board’s recommendations in 2022. The Board encourages law enforcement agencies, policymakers, the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST), community advocates, and individuals to use these recommendations and best practices as a platform for discussion and implementation of reforms that will improve public safety in California. The Board especially recognizes that the community is essential to any police reform and that agencies and government should include diverse community members to work in close partnership with them to improve police services in their communities and across California.


Download the full 2022 Report

The California State Attorney General Office can be found HERE

Past RIPA reports are available HERE