From the Washington Post news section:

Phoenix tangles with Justice Dept. over police misconduct investigation

City officials have mounted a campaign to counter the federal findings before a report on the 2½-year probe is released to the public

By David Nakamura
January 11, 2024 at 12:00 p.m. EST

The Justice Department’s misconduct investigation into the Phoenix Police Department is growing increasingly contentious after nearly 2½ years, with city officials saying they are unwilling to cede control to federal authorities. …

Attorney General Merrick Garland launched the wide-ranging “pattern or practice” probe in August 2021, as the Biden administration sought to bring greater accountability to law enforcement after the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville sparked a national outcry in 2020.

Since then, leaders in Minneapolis and Louisville have accepted reports of systemic misconduct and agreed to negotiate a plan for federal oversight expected to last years. They are the only two of the Justice Department’s 11 police misconduct investigations started under Garland that have been completed. Such probes typically take up to two years.

In Phoenix, the escalating standoff demonstrates the Justice Department’s ongoing challenges in compelling local law enforcement agencies to make sweeping changes more than three years after tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the country demanding action to rein in abusive policing against Black and Brown communities.

Not to mention Black and Brown bodies.

… Interim police chief Michael Sullivan, who took over in September 2022, said in an interview last week that “the city has been invested in reform well before I got here.”

Sullivan spent two years as a high-ranking official in the Baltimore Police Department, which has been under a consent decree since 2017.

“I was brought here to be a reform chief. That can happen in a lot of ways,” he said. “I don’t want to say there is one cookie-cutter approach that is necessarily the best.”

“Through years of practice, technical assistance letters are almost always entirely ineffective,” said former Justice official Christy Lopez, who was involved in the federal lawsuit that forced the Ferguson, Mo., police department to agree to a consent decree in 2016. “When an investigation is closed out with a technical assistance letter, it can embolden police abuse and police violence.”

… The Justice Department has investigated dozens of local and state police departments since Congress granted it the authority in 1994 after public outcry over the Los Angeles police beating of motorist Rodney King, a Black man, in 1991.

… Phoenix, with a population of about 1.6 million, had the deadliest police force in the nation’s 10 most populous cities from 2013 through 2021, according to a study by Mapping Police Violence. The organization found that the Phoenix police had 131 deadly encounters, a rate of 75 people killed per million, far more than San Antonio, which ranked second with a rate of 42, and more than twice the rates in the other eight cities.

Phoenix officers have fatally shot at least 111 people since the beginning of 2015, according to The Washington Post’s database that tracks deadly shootings by police. That number outpaces the number of fatal shootings over that same period by police in Chicago and New York, both of which have much larger populations.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer got himself in big trouble with Claudine Gay in 2017 by pointing out that there were two quite different types of scandals involving police violence that involved the federal Justice Department. Fryer cited (IIRC) 17 statistical examples of when the Justice Department intervened because there was long term statistical evidence that the local police departments shot more people than they absolutely needed to.

For example, the Albuquerque PD tended to shoot a lot of whites, Mexicans, and American Indians because the Albuquerque PD tended to be fairly incompetent. But nobody in the national media much cared because the shootees weren’t very black.

When the federal Justice Department intervened because of good statistical evidence of police incompetence, it didn’t do much bad. Crime didn’t soar. Granted, it didn’t do much good either, but, Fryer documented, it wasn’t the huge disaster that was seen in the five cases when the Justice Department got politically obsessed over a single case involving a black person whose name became famous.

For example, the Obama Administration getting obsessed over persecuting the Ferguson Police Department because 290-pound black teen Michael Brown tried to murder police officer Darren Wilson with his own gun, despite the Obama Administration utterly failing to discover evidence of racism in the Ferguson PD, led to the catastrophic Ferguson Effect that got huge numbers of black lives murdered.

Similarly, the national media, such as the Washington Post, obsessing over Rodney King, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, turned out to be a national catastrophe.

In contrast, Phoenix is only 7% black. I can’t call to mind an example of a Phoenix cop killing a famous black victim.

My vague impression is that several highly Hispanic cities (such as Albuquerque, Phoenix, Bakersfield, and Fresno) have major problems with their police forces, while several (such as El Paso and San Diego) do not. For instance, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department appears to have several gangs within its department who all have matching tattoos.

My impression is that Latinos can or cannot avoid having vicious law enforcement agencies. On the other hand, nobody much cares.