The amounts cities pay out in civil settlements for police brutality cases tell part of the story: $521 million in Chicago since 2004; $6 million in Baltimore, where payments are capped at $200,000 per person and $500,000 per incident, since 2011; $420 million in New York since 2009. Those numbers tell the story of all-too-common abuses, but they have to be viewed alongside the incredible rarity of meaningful punishment for the officers committing the abuses. Take the killing of Eric Garner: New York City paid a $5.9 million settlement to Garner's family, but the officer who killed him, Daniel Pantaleo, was not indicted and kept his job.

Again, Pantaleo is not a special case. According to Matt Taibbi:



A grotesque example is Chicago, where statistics about police abuse leaked out via a civil lawsuit called Bond v. Utreras. In that case, it was revealed that in a two-year period between 2002 and 2004, Chicago police received 10,149 complaints of misconduct, which resulted in only 19 total acts of meaningful discipline (defined as a suspension of seven days or more). A similar statistical pattern emerged in New York, where after last year's Eric Garner case, the NYPD's Inspector General's office and its Civilian Complaint Review Board both conducted evaluations of chokehold incidents. The upshot of the reports is that between 2009 and the first half of 2014, New Yorkers complained of 1,048 incidents involving chokeholds, which had been banned by the NYPD for more than a decade. Of those complaints, the CCRB "substantiated" only 10. And none of those offending officers saw significant repercussions.

You can walk into any public defender's office in the country and find stacks of arrest reports in which police say they saw something that common sense tells you almost certainly couldn't be. There is even a name for it: "test-a-lying." One lawyer tells a story of police smelling weed in a closed Ziploc bag from some 150 feet away. Another is representing the estate of a man, ultimately shot by police, who authorities said marched into a state police barracks reeking of marijuana ("Because everybody smokes a huge joint before they go to the police station," the attorney says, noting that no marijuana was found in the victim's system at autopsy). A third has a handful of clients who all apparently made furtive motions in the direction of an officer's gun. "It must be epidemic in New York, these furtive movements for police guns," he says. Against the Fieldses of the world, the lies of police officers generally work as intended: as effective pretexts to get people searched or fingerprinted and create real criminal records. But the lies almost never cut the other way. In city after city, the laws are set up to make police misconduct of any kind, from a lie in an arrest report all the way up to outright brutality, disappear down a variety of bureaucratic rabbit holes.

Partly as a consequence of City and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue. This culture within FPD influences officer activities in all areas of policing, beyond just ticketing. Officers expect and demand compliance even when they lack legal authority. They are inclined to interpret the exercise of free-speech rights as unlawful disobedience, innocent movements as physical threats, indications of mental or physical illness as belligerence. Police supervisors and leadership do too little to ensure that officers act in accordance with law and policy, and rarely respond meaningfully to civilian complaints of officer misconduct. The result is a pattern of stops without reasonable suspicion and arrests without probable cause in violation of the Fourth Amendment; infringement on free expression, as well as retaliation for protected expression, in violation of the First Amendment; and excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In 2011, in Philadelphia alone, courts sent bills on unpaid debts dating back to the 1970s to more than 320,000 people — roughly 1 in 5 city residents. The median debt was around $4,500. And in New York City, there are 1.2 million outstanding warrants, many for unpaid court fines and fees. The growth in the number of people who owe court-imposed monetary sanctions shows up in surveys by the U.S. Department of Justice, too: In 1991, 25 percent of prison inmates said they owed court-imposed costs, restitution, fines and fees. By 2004, the last time the Justice Department did the survey, that number climbed to about 66 percent.

Every time a police officer brutalizes someone and isn't disciplined, unless the police department comes out and says "department policy is that brutality okay," that police department is probably lying about something. If a city is paying out again and again because it's clear that police are hurting people, but no action is being taken to make it stop, then we either can't believe them when they say any given officer doesn't deserve discipline or we can't believe them when they say the department doesn't condone that brutality. Police lying isn't only about violence, either:In some cases—like, notoriously, Ferguson, Missouri—police are actively looking to charge people with questionable offenses in order to raise revenue through fines. According to the Justice Department's report on Ferguson , the drive for revenue was a top police department priority, handed down from the top, and:While Ferguson has drawn the most attention for these practices—and seems to have raised it to an art form—a report from ArchCity Defenders found that around half of the municipal courts in the area engaged in similar abuses. An NPR investigation found that court fines and fees, and interest on them, are a major burden for low-income people across the country:The fines and fees usually start small, but they grow. And of course it's low-income people who couldn't pay the initial small amount who are hit with interest—higher-income people pay it off without much thought and go on their way. So the desire for revenue creates an incentive for police to aggressively seek reasons to charge people with minor offenses that will lead to fines. Naturally police are not going to target people with good lawyers and a sense of entitlement—those people are way more trouble than it's worth—they're going to target people without the resources to fight questionable charges. In Ferguson , that meant that "African Americans are more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops even after controlling for non-race based variables such as the reason the vehicle stop was initiated, but are found in possession of contraband 26% less often than white drivers." But obviously Ferguson police are not admitting to racial bias.

Ferguson isn't nearly a special enough case. Take Cleveland, another police department recently investigated by the Justice Department. Cleveland's police were investigated for excessive use of force; the details of that are staggering, as was the refusal at higher levels to seek out the truth of what Cleveland police were doing:



Supervisors throughout the chain of command endorse questionable and sometimes unlawful conduct by officers. We reviewed supervisory investigations of officers’ use of force that appear to be designed from the outset to justify the officers’ actions. Deeply troubling to us was that some of the specially-trained investigators who are charged with conducting unbiased reviews of officers’ use of deadly force admitted to us that they conduct their investigations with the goal of casting the accused officer in the most positive light possible. [...] ... during the time period we reviewed that officers were only suspended for any period of time on approximately six occasions for using improper force. Discipline is so rare that no more than 51 officers out of a sworn force of 1,500 were disciplined in any fashion in connection with a use of force incident over a three-and-a half-year period. However, when we examined CDP’s discipline numbers further, it was apparent that in most of those 51 cases the actual discipline imposed was for procedural violations such as failing to file a report, charges were dismissed or deemed unfounded, or the disciplinary process was suspended due to pending civil claims. A finding of excessive force by CDP’s internal disciplinary system is exceedingly rare.

Although we did not investigate CDP’s search, seizure, and arrest practices, our force review revealed concerns we would be remiss not to address. The documents we reviewed to determine the lawfulness of CDP’s force practices often described stops, searches, and arrests by officers that appear to have been unsupported. Notwithstanding the limited nature of this review, what we saw suggests that some CDP officers violate individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights by subjecting them to stops, frisks, and full searches without the requisite level of suspicion. Individuals were detained on suspicion of having committed a crime, with no articulation or an inadequate articulation in CDP’s own records of the basis for the officer’s suspicion. Individuals were searched “for officer safety” without any articulation of a reason to fear for officer safety. Where bases for detentions and searches were articulated, officers used canned or boilerplate language. Supervisors routinely approved these inadequate reports without seeking additional information from the officers about the circumstances that justified the encounter that ultimately concluded with a use of force.

... in the summer of 2012, a 32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man’s car, blocking him in, and demanded the man’s Social Security number and identification. Without any cause, the officer accused the man of being a pedophile, referring to the presence of children in the park, and ordered the man out of his car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe the man was armed. The

officer also asked to search the man’s car. The man objected, citing his constitutional rights. In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint, charging him with eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code. One charge, Making a False Declaration, was for initially providing the short form of his first name (e.g., “Mike” instead of “Michael”), and an address which, although legitimate, was different from the one on his driver’s license. Another charge was for not wearing a seat belt, even though he was seated in a parked car. The officer also charged the man both with having an expired operator’s license, and with having no operator’s license in his possession. The man told us that, because of these charges, he lost his job as a contractor with the federal government that he had held for years.

In other words, the Cleveland Division of Police didn't just have a culture of illegal violence, it had a culture of lying about that and covering it up. Perhaps as striking as the violence and lying about violence, though, is something the Justice Departmentlooking for but found anyway:That's a routine—shared with Ferguson—of stopping and arresting people on made-up grounds. Those made-up grounds then translate into real charges that can affect people's lives for years. In Ferguson:Let's be clear: Every time police use force against someone and then fail to report it, every time they use "euphemisms such as 'escorts to the ground' and 'guiding' suspects to the ground," as the Justice Department found in Seattle in 2011, they're lying. Maybe the forcenecessary and justified, but if they didn't report it as required, they lied. If they reported some use of force—using euphemisms or blunt language—and their supervisors didn't investigate it, they lied. When police make up a fake reason to stop someone and then charge that person with a real crime, they're lying. When Ray Tensing says Sam Dubose dragged him with his car, he's lying, and his fellow officers are lying when they back him up. It's not uncommon. So it's time to admit it: Police don't deserve any special benefit of the doubt. Their word doesn't deserve greater weight than the word of civilians. Because they had trust and they abused it. This is why it's important to think seriously about research showing police practices we may not already know about, rather than rushing to discredit it because the police say it isn't so.