3 proposals to prevent police violence and build accountability

This month marks 24 years since the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) Street Crimes Unit killed 23-year-old Amadou Diallo, a Black man, in a hail of 41 bullets. The police unit was a specialized police squad charged with getting guns off the street.

This horrifying tragedy sparked massive protests throughout New York City and drove my personal involvement in the movement against police brutality. The Street Crimes Unit was eventually disbanded, only to be resurrected last year by a new mayor, Eric Adams. 

Decades after NYPD killed Diallo, Memphis, Tennessee, disbanded the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods unit, or the SCORPION unit, and charged five of its members with the murder of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols. 

Since the police killing of Diallo, I have worked on issues of police violence across the nation, including for 20 years as a lawyer at the ACLU and now as a professor at Princeton University. In the past two decades, I’ve seen nowhere near enough change to overcome the magnitude of the problem.

What I have seen is that in the decades between the killings of Diallo and Nichols, the police have killed thousands of people — disproportionately in Black and low-income communities — during interactions that whiter, wealthier communities are less likely to experience. Too frequently, there is very little public discourse and minimal information released publicly about these killings. 

I’ve also seen during this period many cities pass reforms: requirements for more police trainings and body cameras, stricter and clearer rules on police use of force, and more. But by-and-large, substantial change has been rare, and tough-on-crime politics continue to prevail, as witnessed during this past midterm elections. It’s time to go beyond the reforms of recent years, and finally take more appropriate steps to prevent future police killings like the ones of Nichols and Diallo. 

Policymakers should begin with these three proposals.

1) Police must stop relying on the types of specialized units that fatally beat Nichols and killed Diallo. These police squads aggressively patrol areas considered to be high-crime, often in plainclothes and in unmarked cars, and aim to prevent serious crimes from occurring by stopping, frisking and arresting people for low-level offenses. They often engage in pretextual stops, sanctioned by the Supreme Court in 1996, that sweep people into the system for any minor reason, in the hope of finding guns. It’s these units that most aggressively implemented New York City’s notorious stop-and-frisk program, which a federal judge later declared unconstitutional and a form of racial profiling. The success of these units in lowering crime rates is mixed at best and does not justify the harm caused to the communities they patrol.

Every city that has these units should move toward disbanding them while simultaneously increasing their investments in other strategies proven to reduce violence, like investments in summer jobs and afterschool programs, violence intervention programs, access to mental health care, as well as other proven investments in neighborhood improvements that help reduce violence.

2) Cities should revisit the role that police play in enforcing low-level offenses, which too often serve as a flashpoint of confrontation between police and civilians. According to researchers, most police killings begin with traffic stops, mental health checks or responses to other types of nonviolent offenses. What’s more, police make about 50,000 traffic stops a day, yet many of these stops do not need police involvement. There is strong evidence that police involvement in many of these types of offenses does little to nothing to reduce crime, while reducing these interactions can result in fewer police shootings and prevent community resentment. 

The last year of reliable FBI data, from 2019, indicates that of the 10 million arrests made annually by police, only about 5 percent were for serious violent offenses, like homicide or aggravated assault. The majority were for low-level misbehavior. While there were 1.35 million arrests for drug possession, there were only 495,871 arrests for all serious violent offenses combined, as defined by the FBI.

Policymakers should take at least two steps to begin to sever the reliance on police for these low-level offenses. First, remove from police the authority to arrest people for drug possession for personal use, like Oregon did in 2020. And second, restrict police enforcement of traffic, which too often leads to deadly confrontations, like in the cases of Philando Castile and Samuel DuBose. 

3) We need to strengthen our systems of accountability. Even with the above reforms in place, police abuse will continue, so officers must be held accountable for their actions. Part of the solution is to elect reform-oriented prosecutors, like Memphis did last year. But other reforms must also finally take hold, like removing the judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity and treating police officers like all other public servants, as well as building independent and strong civilian complaint review boards that can robustly investigate and discipline police officers engaged in wrongdoing. The money for these boards should come out of the police budget.

This year, as I do every Feb. 4 — the day police killed him — I took time to think of Amadou Diallo. His mother, Kadiatou Diallo, continues to be a force for change in New York City, advocating for genuine reforms. Unfortunately, she is part of a long line of mothers and fathers who have lost their children to police violence. Let’s finally take the steps needed to end the violence.

Udi Ofer is the founding director of the Princeton Policy Advocacy Clinic at Princeton University and former deputy national political director of the nonprofit American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).