By Nancy Lieberman Charities 

  In 2016, the Dallas, Texas, community and its police department faced one of its most brutal days. That summer, a standoff and shooting in downtown Dallas resulted in the deaths of four Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers and a Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer. The lone shooter was motivated by his perceptions of police racism and brutality toward African American people. Barely a week after the shooting, then-chief David Brown called Basketball Hall of Famer Nancy Lieberman to discuss using Dream Courts, a core program of Nancy Lieberman Charities that builds state-of-the-art outdoor basketball courts in underserved areas, as a tool to help heal divisions in the city. The mission of Nancy Lieberman Charities was not originally oriented toward law enforcement. Nancy Lieberman Charities is an education and wellness nonprofit organization focused on assisting underserved youth in the educational field. But as a result of that conversation, we developed our Kids & Cops programming, which has now been deployed in partnership with law enforcement agencies on Dream Courts across the country. The Kids & Cops initiative aims to make basketball more accessible to kids by giving them an inexpensive recreational outlet, a safe place to play, the chance to interact socially, and a path to learning the importance of teamwork and good sportsmanship. It is a sustainable program to help build and strengthen the bond between local officers and their communities. Our goal is for this guide to give law enforcement agencies an alternative perspective on serving the community as a law enforcement agency or agency partner. Nancy Lieberman Charities is not a task force or law enforcement agency—rather, we are an organization with an outside perspective on positive community relationship building.   

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.  2023. 24p.

By: Raymond A. Eve, Daniel G. Rodeheaver, Susan Brown Eve, Maureen Hockenberger, Ramona Perez, Ken Burton, Larry Boyd, Sue Phillips and Sharon L. Walker

For the past several decades, an innovation in policing, often controversial, has been emerging in the US. Specifically, community-oriented policing has been used to supplement more traditional forms of police work in preventing and reducing crime. This paper examines a community-oriented policing programme implemented in Arlington, Texas. A national demonstration grant was awarded by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services (COPS). The purpose of the COPS project reported here was to assess a policing problem that, rather than actual crime, was ultimately about (1) multicultural conflict, (2) fear of crime and (3) the effectiveness of this community policing programme in combating both actual incidences and perceptions of crime. We draw several conclusions about the ability to utilise and apply the community policing model and our research findings in other locations. Furthermore, the findings of this paper should have broad utility of international scope.

International Journal of Police Science & Management Volume 5 Number 4

By the Texas Center for Justice and Equity: Edited by América Malacara, Will Cover, and Jay Jenkins

Since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the death penalty in 1976, Harris County, Texas, has executed more people than any other non-Texas state in the union. 1 In part, this can be atributed to systemic issues with the county’s capital representaton process: despite a dramatc reducton in the number of defendants sentenced to death in the recent past, Harris County’s justice system remains rife with dysfunction in capital cases.

Harris County’s shortcomings were recently detailed in Death by Design, a report by the nonprofit Wren Collective that highlights failures in how the County handles cases where a defendant is accused of a capital crime and faces the death penalty or a sentence of life without parole – effectively death by incarceration. The full Death by Design report is a damning and comprehensive indictment of capital representation in Harris County, based on a detailed analysis of evidence presented in capital cases, attorney caseload numbers, attorney billing records, and case outcomes. Among other things, the report uncovered four cases wherein a defendant facing capital murder charges had no contact with their attorneys outside of court appearances. Not everyone agreed with the conclusions of Death by Design; one local defense attorney (whose law practice has previously represented defendants facing the death penalty) opined that, “Academicians should shut up about something they know nothing about, which is running a small business.” This response is telling, given that community members and advocates have long raised criticisms regarding the financial element of indigent defense in Harris County, largely stemming from the attorney appointment system. While the establishment and slow growth of the Harris County Public Defender’s Office within the last 15 years has been encouraging, the County’s elected criminal court judges retain control as to which attorneys are appointed to represent indigent defendants. Previous research has revealed that defense attorneys from the private bar who donate to judicial election campaigns are often rewarded by those same judges with indigent defense appointments. These attorneys are paid for their services out of the public coffers, but the judge must approve expenses related to their cases, such as hiring experts and investigators, as well as approve the amount of compensation to be paid to lawyers for their work. In years past, several attorneys have regularly received hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars in reimbursement per year in these cases, with one attorney recently topping one million dollars in yearly fees.6 Unfortunately for indigent defendants in Harris County, the Public Defender’s Office does not accept capital cases, leaving those defendants’ attorneys to be chosen by the judge presiding over their case. These attorneys steadfastly maintain that this appointment system in no way affects their representation.

Austin, TX: Texas Center for Justice and Equity, 2024. 6p.

 By The U.S. Department of Justice

On May 24, 2022, a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, shook the nation. In the aftermath of the tragedy, there was significant public criticism of the law enforcement response to the shooting. At the request of the then mayor of Uvalde, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) conducted a Critical Incident Review (CIR) of the law enforcement response to the mass shooting. In providing a detailed accounting and critical assessment of the first responder actions in Uvalde, and the efforts since to ameliorate gaps and deficiencies in that response, this report is intended to build on the knowledge base for responding to incidents of mass violence. It also will identify generally accepted practices for an effective law enforcement response to such incidents. Finally, it is intended to help honor the victims and survivors of the Robb Elementary School tragedy. 

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2024. 610p.