By Runnymede Trust

Summary ● New Home Office data and a government consultation has enabled the Runnymede Trust to explore the use of strip search by the police, and its impact on people of colour in the UK. ● Black people are subject to disproportionate rates of strip search across all police forces in England and Wales: ○ Black children are 6.5 times more likely than white children, and Black adults 4.7 times more likely than white adults, to be strip searched by police. ○ In London, Black children are 5.3 times more likely than white children, and Black adults 3.5 times more likely than white adults, to be strip searched by police. ○ Nearly half (47.7 per cent) of strip searches carried out on children in London are on Black children. ● The Metropolitan Police conducted around a third of strip searches in England and Wales in the year to March 2023. ● Evidence illustrates the disproportionate, racialised harm caused by strip searches. ● Instead of using heavy police powers such as strip search, and in the context of wider punitive policing and curtailment of rights, the Runnymede Trust calls for a societal reorientation to address the root causes of criminalised behaviour, to actually prevent harm.

London: The Runnymede Trust, 2024. 10p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

By Guy Ben-Porat and Fany Yuval

What does police violence against minorities, or violent clashes between minorities and the police tell us about citizenship and its internal hierarchies? Indicative of deep-seated tensions and negative perceptions; incidents such as these suggest how minorities are vulnerable, suffer from or are subject to police abuse and neglect in Israel. Marked by skin colour, negatively stigmatized or rendered security threats, their encounters with police provide a daily reminder of their defunct citizenship. Taking as case studies the experiences and perceptions of four minority groups within Israel including Palestinian/Arab citizens, ultra-Orthodox Jews and Ethiopian and Russian immigrants, Ben-Porat and Yuval are able to explore different paths of citizenship and the stratification of the citizenship regime through relations with and perceptions of the police in Israel. Touching on issues such as racial profiling, police brutality and neighbourhood neglect, their study questions the notions of citizenship and belonging, shedding light on minority relationships with the state and its institutions.

CAMBRIDGE. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 2019. 251p.

By Michael German and Kaylana Mueller-Hsia

The failure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement agencies to anticipate and prepare for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by far-right insurrectionists has elicited proposals to expand the bureau’s authority to investigate domestic terrorism.

The FBI already received expansive new powers after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and its current guidelines place few limits on agents’ ability to search broadly for potential threats. Confusion about the current scope of the bureau’s powers is understandable, however, as FBI leaders have regularly misstated their authorities in public testimony.

These misstatements deflect FBI accountability by focusing overseers on filling perceived gaps in its authority rather than examining how the bureau uses, misuses, or fails to use the tools it already has.

The real problem is not that the FBI’s authorities are too narrow, but rather that they are overbroad and untethered to evidence of wrongdoing. After 9/11, the Department of Justice (DOJ) reduced or eliminated reasonable evidentiary predicates to justify broader collection and sharing of Americans’ personal information. This new domestic intelligence process replaced evidence-driven investigations of suspected criminal activities with mass data collection and untriaged reporting of speculative harms unsupported by facts. The sheer volume of threat reporting resulting from this system suffocates effective intelligence analysis, flooding law enforcement leaders with thousands of specious threat warnings a day. In addition to unjustified invasions of privacy, the high rate of false alarms that this process produces naturally dulls the response, and the disconnect from evidence of criminality opens the door to bias-driven law enforcement responses. As they have in the past, the FBI’s unbridled authorities have resulted in abuses of civil rights and civil liberties without improving its ability to identify and mitigate real threats.

Misinformation from FBI officials has confused the policy debate. When senators investigating the January 6 attack asked Jill Sanborn, then the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, whether FBI agents monitored the multitude of threats made in public forums prior to the attack, Sanborn replied, “It’s not within our authorities.”

Sanborn claimed that the FBI cannot collect information involving First Amendment–protected activities without a predicated investigation or a tip from a community member or law enforcement officer. These statements are inaccurate, yet they featured prominently in the Senate’s report on the security, planning, and response failures regarding the attack on the Capitol.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2022. 21p.

By P.A.J. Waddington

This analysis of policing throughout the modern world demonstrates how many of the contentious issues surrounding the police in recent years - from paramilitarism to community policing - have their origins in the fundamentals of the police role. The author argues that this results from a fundamental tension within this role. In liberal democratic societies, police are custodians of the state's monopoly of legitimate force, yet they also wield authority over citizens who have their own set of rights.

London; Philadelphia: UCL Press, 1999. 312p.

By Vanda Felbab-Brown

Even as the administration of Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto has scored important reform successes in the economic sphere, its security and law enforcement policy toward organized crime remains incomplete and ill-defined. Preoccupied with the fighting among vicious drug trafficking groups and the rise of anti-crime vigilante militias in the center of Mexico, the administration has for the most part averted its eyes from the previously highly-violent criminal hotspots in the north where major law enforcement challenges remain. • The Peña Nieto administration thus mostly continues to put out immediate security fires—such as in Michoacán and Tamaulipas—but the overall deterrence capacity of Mexico’s military and law enforcement forces and justice sector continue to be very limited and largely unable to deter violence escalation and reescalation.

Washington DC: Latin America Initiative, Foreign Policy at Brookings, 2016. 48p.

By Zoorob, Michael

Under what conditions can citizens hold government officials accountable for their behavior? I examine accountability over the police, a pervasive face of the state as experienced by most people. Like elected politicians, police enjoy significant discretion, limited oversight, power, and corruptibility. Continued problems of police violence and disparate treatment, especially against Black Americans, have shown the importance of accountable policing.

Using calls for service records, election returns, survey data, and case studies, I explore challenges of political accountability across the highly varied 18,000 police department in the United States. The police are both a nationally salient social group – evaluated differently by partisans in a national media environment – as well as a locally-provided government function that tens of millions of Americans encounter regularly. This decentralization complicates improvements to policing policies by limiting the impacts of reform activism to particular cities and by misaligning activism with local conditions.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2021. 207p.

By William I. Tchakirides

This dissertation uncovers the roots of discriminatory police power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and traces Black-led efforts to make the city’s police bureaucracy more accountable to all citizens. It analyzes the politics of police reform in the century spanning the passage of two state laws that reconfigured Milwaukee’s law enforcement arrangements. The first (1885) removed City Hall’s managerial control over the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD). Corporate elites and social reformers fearful of rising working-class power and moral degeneration in the immigrant-industrial city lobbied for the statute’s enactment. The second (1984) reversed course, re-empowering nonpolice officials after decades of Black-led campaigns for diverse input, representation, and oversight within Milwaukee’s white-controlled police bureaucracy. While the 1885 law created a civil service commission to regulate public safety hiring free of political machine influence, it also gave exclusive accountability to property-holders and shielded department heads from external supervision— provisions later targeted by activists. A revision (1911) clarified the power of the city’s public safety chiefs, granting them indefinite tenure, policymaking authority, and institutional autonomy. In turn, the MPD fostered an outwardly exceptional status at the height of policing’s “reform era” (1920s-1950s). This apparent exceptionalism, marked by a value-neutral self-image, was established around administrative innovations and crime control efficiencies heralded by national policing experts. It was a dynamic that broadly served white middle-class and corporate interests, as...

Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 2020. 517p.

Edited by: Emmanuel Onyeozili, Biko Agozino, Augustine Agu, and Patrick Ibe.

One result of the Black Lives Matter movement has been to focus attention on police brutality in all its forms around the globe. Nowhere is the situation more dire than in Nigeria where the now infamous SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squads) have, for years, inflicted excessive abuses on Nigeria’s citizenry. In response, many young people have taken to the streets to demand an end to the brutality in the now historic #ENDSARS nationwide protest. Community Policing in Nigeria is a timely and much-needed intervention into the policing problems in Nigeria. Written collaboratively by four authors with deep knowledge of Nigerian policy and of criminal justice more broadly, the book examines models of community policing around the world and points out best practices and flawed practices that may serve as guides for Nigeria and the rest of Africa.

Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech Publishing, 2021. 182p.