DOJ Civil Rights Official: Investigating Policing ‘A Top Priority’
(CNSNews.com) - The head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said on Tuesday that investigating “policing work” is a “top priority.”
“The policing work that we are doing at the Civil Rights Division has been a top priority,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta said during a panel discussion at the Anti-Defamation League conference in Washington, D.C.
Gupta, who noted she was appointed in October 2014 by President Barack Obama shortly after the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., following the death of a black man in police custody, said the division investigates both individual officers who may have violated the law and entire police departments.
“At the Civil Rights Division we have two different tools that we use,” Gupta said. “One is, we have criminal prosecution of individual officers who violate the law.”
She said the division also has a “civil pattern and practice arm” for department-wide investigations.
“You know that’s the arm that we use to investigate police departments; to engage in systemic reform looking at discriminatory policing, excessive use of force and other kinds of issues,” Gupta said.
Gupta said the Obama administration has opened up 22 such investigations, including in the cities of Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, and Cleveland. Gupta noted that there are approximately 15,000 police jurisdictions in the United States.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics [1], there were more than 12,000 local police departments operating in the United States in 2013.
Source URL:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/doj-civil-rights-official-investigating-policing-top-priority 
