Here is the press release from the Center for Constitutional Rights.

McManus was also involved in the death of David Woodman. David Woodman was a twenty-two-year-old man who was walking home from the Fenway Park area after the Boston Celtics won the NBA championship in 2008. As David passed a group of police officers, including McManus, he was arrested for carrying an open container of beer. Witnesses reported that police officers slammed David to the ground.

Kayemm’s article compares the stop-and-frisk tactic to the police tactic favored in the 1990’s: aggressively policing minor crimes such as breaking windows, in the hopes that there would be a consequential decline in serious crimes. The “broken windows” tactic was, for a time, credited with the significant reduction in crime in New York City. However, as Kayemm explains, the reduction in crime was seen across the country, not just in New York City, and data shows that the “broken windows” tactic was not actually effective.

Likewise, NYPD data now shows that the stop-and-frisk tactic is not only ineffective, but in practice embraces racial profiling. As the NYACLU summarizes, the vast majority of stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers are non-white, even in primarily white neighborhoods. While violent crime has decreased in New York City, other cities without an intrusive stop-and-frisk policy experienced even larger reductions in crime. You can help learn more about the NYPD’s discriminatory practice on the NYACLU website. People in New York can use the stop-and-frisk app to record and report stop-and-frisks.

Understanding the monetary motivation behind police officers’ lies is important because people often assume that officers have no reason to lie. Many people, including judges and juries, trust officers to tell the truth because it’s hard to believe that officers could benefit from lying. However, Michelle Alexander’s article makes it clear officers actually have a strong incentive to lie. This results in innocent people being arrested without probable cause.

Police officers are rarely disciplined for lying. However, in two of our cases in 2012, police officers were fired for their lies and other misconduct. Boston police officer David Williams was fired for using unreasonable force on our client, and for lying about his use of excessive force. And Somerville Police Officer Marcos Freitas was terminated because he had lied repeatedly, including some lies at a deposition taken in our case against him. Additionally, in 2004, after we filed a case against Boston police sergeant Joseph LeMoure, he was convicted of perjury for lying at his deposition and encouraging witnesses to lie. While these police officers were punished for their harmful lies and other misconduct, police officers routinely get away with lying under oath. This isn’t going to change until the judges in criminal cases stop tolerating testimony by untruthful police officers and federal grant programs stop rewarding high arrest rates.

Ms. Wernikoff is a transgender woman. (She was assigned male gender at birth, but she identifies as a woman and is legally female.) Boston ordinance 12-9.7 makes it illegal to discriminate against a transgender woman like Ms. Wernikoff from using women’s bathrooms. (Read the ordinance here.) On May 19, 2010, Ms. Wernikoff was using a stall in the women’s bathroom at the Woods Mullen Shelter. When Ms. Wernikoff emerged from her stall, BPD officer Loletha Graham-Smith arrested her for using the women’s bathroom. At the police station, male police officers degraded Ms. Wernikoff by ordering her to remove her top and jump up and down, causing her bare breasts to jiggle for the officers’ own amusement.

Since 2005, the Boston Police have failed to implement a system to monitor officers who are prone to misconduct. These systems, often called Early Intervention Systems (EIS), are used in police departments across the country to detect and assist police officers who may be abusing their power or experiencing a personal difficulty that is hindering their job performance. Once officers are flagged by EIS, they could receive additional training or resources, and closer supervision. Although all professions should monitor the performance of their employees, oversight is particularly important in police culture, where officers rarely report the misconduct others and complaints against police are investigated by fellow officers.