Severe abuses persist because overwhelming barriers to accountability make it all too likely that officers who commit human rights violations escape due punishment to continue their abusive conduct. This report is based on research conducted in fourteen U.S. cities over two and a half years. Rather than focusing on one city and its police department's problem with abuse, as most studies of police abuse have done, we examined large cities representing most regions of the nation to find common obstacles to accountability. D.C. In researching this report, Human Rights Watch interviewed and corresponded with attorneys representing victims alleging ill-treatment by police, representatives of police department internal affairs units, police officers, citizen review agency staff, city officials, Justice Department officials, representatives of federal U.S. attorneys' offices, local prosecutors' office representatives, experts on police abuse, and victims of abuse. Human Rights Watch recognizes that police officers, like all human beings, are fallible, and that the situations they confront are often dangerous and require quick decisions.
Race continues to play a central role in police brutality in the United States.
Indeed, despite gains in many areas since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, one area that has been stubbornly resistant to change has been the treatment afforded racial minorities by police. In the cities we have examined where such data are available, minorities have alleged human rights violations by police more frequently than white residents and far out of proportion to their representation in those cities. Police have subjected minorities to apparently discriminatory treatment and have physically abused minorities while using racial epithets. If the barriers to accountability described in this report were removed, the number and severity of abuses that officers commit would no doubt be greatly reduced. Yet the administrative and legal procedures that should guarantee accountability are seriously flawed and have been extremely resistant to change.