Justice Department Finds Massachusetts Police Department Used Excessive Force
A two-year investigation found that narcotics officers in Springfield faced no accountability for violating citizens rights
By Sadie Gurman
July 8, 2020 11:58 pm ET
Officers in the narcotics section of the Springfield, Mass., Police Department routinely violate the constitutional rights of citizens by using excessive force without accountability, the Justice Department said Wednesday in announcing the findings of an investigation into the police department’s practices.
Narcotics officers “repeatedly punch individuals in the face unnecessarily, in part because they escalate encounters with civilians too quickly, and resort to unreasonable takedown maneuvers that, like head strikes, could reasonably be expected to cause head injuries,” officials from the Justice Department’s civil rights investigation wrote in a report of their two-year probe.
Justice Department officials found chronic problems with use of force, poor record keeping and repeated failures to impose discipline for officer misconduct, Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in a statement.
The report notes that city officials cooperated with the probe, have already implemented some remedial measures and have hired an outside consulting firm to help resolve the problems. A police department spokesman didn’t immediately return calls for comment.
“In the coming weeks, we will seek to work with you toward developing an appropriate settlement to ensure that all necessary reforms are implemented efficiently and effectively,” Mr. Lelling and Eric Dreiband, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in a letter to Mayor Domenic Sarno.
As part of the inquiry, known as a pattern-or-practice probe, Justice Department officials said they studied more than 114,000 documents detailing the department’s policies and procedures, internal reports, training manuals, video footage and investigative files. They also interviewed officers and police department command staff, city officials and community members as part of the expansive review, which found officers engaged in patterns of constitutional rights violations.
Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department has scaled back wide-ranging civil-rights investigations into troubled local police departments.
Such wide-ranging civil rights investigations were a hallmark of the Obama administration’s efforts to overhaul troubled local police departments, but the Trump administration has significantly curtailed their use, focusing instead on providing police departments money and resources for fighting violent crime and other administration priorities.
Democrats and at least one powerful Republican, Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, have called on Attorney General William Barr to conduct more pattern-or-practice probes in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis police custody in May, which prompted widespread protests and calls for a transformation of policing in America.
The inquiry into Springfield’s narcotics bureau, opened in April 2018 after several highly publicized controversies involving its officers, is the only pattern-or-practice investigation opened under the Trump administration. The Obama Justice Department, by comparison, launched more than 25 such probes, many of which ended in court-approved agreements giving the Justice Department oversight of the local agency.
Mr. Barr and other Republicans have expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of the wide-ranging probes, saying federal scrutiny hurts police morale and can lead to spikes in crime when officers pull back.
But in announcing the findings of the Springfield probe, Mr. Barr said the Justice Department “is committed to supporting our law enforcement while holding departments accountable that violate this sacred public trust.”
Among other findings, the investigation attributed officers’ excessive force to deficiencies in policies and training. Narcotics officers are able to submit vague and misleading accounts or falsify reports to hide uses of force, an executive summary of the report said.
Whatever reports of force officers do file aren’t thoroughly reviewed by supervisors, and command staff rarely if ever refer to internal affairs investigators questionable uses of force that result in injuries, as they are required, the summary said.
Internal affairs investigations of public complaints of excessive force lack critical details needed to determine whether an allegation should be sustained, the report says, resulting in no sustained findings of excessive force against a narcotics officer in the last six years.
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Against this backdrop, Narcotics Bureau officers engage in uses of excessive force without accountability,” the report said.
It cited examples including a veteran narcotics bureau sergeant who was ultimately indicted for using excessive force during a 2016 arrest of two teens, one of whom the sergeant kicked in the head, spat on and told, “welcome to the white man’s world.”
The department said “there is reasonable cause to believe that officers use excessive force even more often than our investigation uncovered.”
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