“Statistical Evidence Not Required” (Heather MacDonald on DOJ and Chicago Police)

city-journal.org ^ | Heather MacDonald

[RoosterRedux]

The most important statement in the Justice Department’s damning report on the Chicago Police Department has nothing to do with police behavior. Released on Friday, the report found the Chicago police guilty of a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional force. But it turns out that the Justice Department has no standard for what constitutes a “pattern or practice” (the phrase comes from a 1994 federal statute) of unconstitutional police conduct. “Statistical evidence is not required” for a “pattern or practice” finding, the DOJ lawyers announce, citing unrelated court precedent. Nor is there “a specific number of incidents” required to constitute a “pattern or practice,” they proclaim.

Having cleared themselves of any obligation to provide “a specific number of [unconstitutional] incidents” or a statistical benchmark for evaluating them, the DOJ attorneys proceed to ignore any further obligation of transparency. The reader never learns how many incidents of allegedly unconstitutional behavior the Justice Department found, nor how those incidents compare with the universe of police-civilian contacts conducted by the Chicago Police Department. No clue is provided regarding why the DOJ lawyers concluded that the alleged abuses reached the mysterious threshold for constituting a pattern or practice. Instead, the report uses waffle words like “several,” “often,” or “many” as a substitute for actual quantification. This vacuum of information hasn’t stopped the mainstream media from trumpeting the report as yet another exposé of abusive, racist policing. Excessive force is rife in chicago, u.s. review finds, read the headline on the New York Times’s front-page story, which went on to note that the excessive force was “chiefly aimed at African-Americans and Latinos.”

[Tilted Irish Kilt]

RoosterRedux :" Released on Friday, the report found the Chicago police guilty of a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional force.
But it turns out that the Justice Department has no standard for what constitutes a “pattern or practice”.

This is the same kind of fuzzy logic used by the EPA over the last decade
and it is the same that has been used to defend the "science" of Global warming, or climate change
and then when there are statistics , they fudge the numbers until it comes out to their preconceived agenda.
It is nothing more than sloppiness to justify and agenda.
Here , the agenda is to locate unconstitutional pattern of behavior where there is none !

[Pining_4_TX]

The ultimate goal of leftists is to eliminate local police and have only a federal police force. Most Americans are unaware of how local police and sheriffs are a bulwark against federal tyranny.

[Oz8509338511]

Great Point... the LEGAL standard MUST remain PROBABLE CAUSE !!.. for so many reasons.. this is a HIGHER standards than Reasonable Cause.. because “reasonable” is far more subjective whereas PROBABLE is far LESS subjective and requires substantive EVIDENCE to reach that standard.

[Patriotic1]

That’s a blog that I check weekly. Very interesting perspectives on it.