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ZERO of the top 15 police departments with the highest rates of police violence have been investigated by the US Department of Justice. DOJ needs a system that flags every city with high rates of police violence and automatically launches investigations into these departments.
DOJ investigations and the resulting consent decrees significantly reduce police violence. Why is this tool used so haphazardly (if it’s used at all)? Why is the DOJ only intervening when there’s a crisis or uprising and not proactively addressing places with the worst outcomes?
A Vice News investigation found departments that had DOJ intervention reduced police shootings by 25-30%. But, even under Obama, the DOJ only received the resources ($17M) to investigate 3 of the nation’s 18,000 police departments each year. vice.com/amp/en_us/arti… 
So far the proposals from Democratic candidates have either been too vague or, where they’ve been specific have not gone nearly far enough in utilizing this approach to holding police accountable.
Bernie and Biden’s platforms are extremely vague. They don’t specify how much they’d expand DOJ Civil Rights investigations into police depts. Warren says she’d expand them 3x (that’s 9 of 18,000 police depts/yes). Kamala Harris would only expand 2x. Not transformational change.
We have to do better to create a meaningful nationwide accountability system for police - especially since prosecutions of individual officers almost always fail to indict. Pattern/practice investigations into *police departments* are one of the only approaches proven effective.
For example, why not create a system where any department above the top 10% in police violence in a given year gets automatically investigated. Could start with larger agencies, where there’s better data/more observations. Create a threshold/standard and enforce rigorously.
You could use the data on police shootings + other force causing death or serious injury being collected by the FBI Use of Force Data Collection program (and strengthen its enforcement), combined with info from local media/communities to evaluate which depts cross this threshold.
