No one actually knows how many people police, in the US, kill. The 1994 crime bill made reporting all police related killings, to outside agency, mandatory. However, the DOJ has declined to ever enforce it. We know we are missing a large portion of the killings just from people manually mining through ME reports. How much? No clue. Why would they do this if they felt they could continue to justify the situation with the “small amount only” claim? This also goes for misconduct. The same organization you cite below has also said that they regularly see incidences of police violations get out, often due to BWC, or personal recordings from the public, and the police had written it off as justified, until the public got to see that wasn’t the case. Almost all of these include false reports. They also have noted that they are seeing a rapidly growing number of policies, and local laws, that make it hard, if not impossible, to get BWC recordings. When interviewed by and industry rag, the previous head of the largest police union in the US, Patrick Lynch, was asked about this, and further asked how many go unreported. His answer was “most”. What’s with all the secrecy if it would just continue to show that these are, statistically, small problems?

The previously mention organization, as-well-as FIRE, have began working with rights activists, pledging to give them representation, when arrested for doing things that are protected rights. The most well known of these is a man named Jeff Grey. Jeff goes around holding a sign saying “god bless the homeless veterans” and saying it to people as they walk by. He picks locations specifically recognized as traditional fora of free speech. He rarely goes a week without getting arrested for doing something that is, unarguably, a protected activity. You should see what the cops, and the local governments they work for say. He has been told that they don’t give a fuck about his rights so many times that it is now a cliche for his videos. He has been subjected to violence by police for doing this. They falsely claim it is illegal to panhandle, which it isn’t, and try to trespass him. I think he is working through 5 cases as we speak. Most of the time, when his rights aren’t violated, the cops argue with him until they tire, and leave. They don’t carry through, but they demonstrate that they have no idea what most of our rights are. It is a rare instance where they ask what he is doing, then leave when they don’t see him doing anything illegal. Let me repeat that, the times when the police recognize he is not breaking the law are the minority. And no, he doesn’t hide the “good” interaction. If someone, backed by multiple legal orgs, has this much trouble, can you imagine how often actual homeless people have their rights violated?

Then I have the, nearly, 10 years of working with/around police, I have experienced. As part of a project, tacked onto my job doing data analysis for the corrections system, we had to train police, COs, etc on a pilot program to homogenize the terminology used for data entry. The first 4 years doing this we went around, to different departments, and did the training, the last ~5 they came to us. We saw a group for 1-3 days. I never once ended one of those periods of time without hearing police say, or do, illegal, often heinous, shit. Discussing where the night shift will be when the bars get out, so the day shift can drive home, drunk, without being stopped. Bragging about breaking multiple bones in an 80 year old dementia patient because he wouldn’t answer their questions, and “resisted” being cuffed. I can’t tell you how man times I have heard police say they wish they could just arrive at a mental health call and just shoot the person, problem solved. So many times I have listened to cops discuss how someone had a smart mouth, and how “20 years ago he would just have disappeared”. The number of times have I heard them discuss going to court to “testilie”, and the general mannerisms while doing so, made it clear that lying to the court is just the status quo. One of the more common sentiments I heard passed around was that if they could just kill, or imprison, every mentally ill person, ND person, etc. they would just be making the world a better place. I could fill a book on this. All the while all the “good” cops sat around doing nothing. Not that they would be police much longer if they started intervening on what they fellow blue line gang members did. One of the things they made very clear was if you were snitch, you wouldn’t be around long. Not gang behavior at all.