How many police officers are bigots who patrol their beats, guns on their hips, with animus toward blacks, Hispanics, and other disproportionately abused groups, even as prosecutors, judges, and juries assign unusual credibility to their claims?
San Francisco officials were forced to ponder that question last year when an investigation revealed that five veteran cops were texting virulently racist messages to each other. “My office is conducting an immediate assessment of every prosecution within the past ten years where these officers were involved,” San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon said. Beyond that, much of the response was typical.
Police officials declared that the behavior, while abhorrent, was confined to a very few officers, an “old guard” that did not represent the general culture in the department.
[For more of this story, written by Conor Friedersdorf, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...otry-problem/476457/]
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