Tag: Policy

External Assessment of Police Policies and Practices Now Available – Official Website of Arlington County Virginia Government

County Manager letter to the community on results of external assessment. Final report by Hilliard Heintze on ACPD administrative policies and practices, and ACPD response to the findings.
— Read on www.arlingtonva.us/About-Arlington/News/Articles/2022/External-Assessment-of-Police-Policies-and-Practices-Now-Available

Chicago’s “Race-Neutral” Traffic Cameras Ticket Black and Latino Drivers the Most — ProPublica

A ProPublica analysis found that traffic cameras in Chicago disproportionately ticket Black and Latino motorists. But city officials plan to stick with them — and other cities may adopt them too.
— Read on www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most

Law Enforcement Training: Identifying What Works for Officers and Communities

California must assess and improve training for its nearly 700 law enforcement agencies and more than 87,000 full-time sworn and reserve peace officers. Such action would be an essential step toward meaningful law enforcement reform. In the wake of deadly police encounters involving Black Americans and excessive use of force, lawmakers have looked to police training as one means to implement reform. In Fall 2020, the Little Hoover Commission launched a study to examine the role of the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) in shaping law enforcement training standards for California’s peace officers.  As part of its review, the Commission issued a series of Issue Briefs that provide critical context and insight into law enforcement training in California without making policy recommendations. The first, California Law Enforcement Survey, details findings from the Commission’s anonymous survey of active-duty California peace officers about the training they receive. The second, Comparing Law Enforcement Basic Training Academies, reviews various models for law enforcement basic training academies across the nation and within California. In this report, the Commission identifies ways in which the state can address current training deficiencies and enhance the training that officers receive.

Access the report 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