Decriminalize the possession of drugs for personal use and sex work, and stop enforcing laws in ways that effectively criminalize people for their poverty or lack of housing.ģ. Reject overly aggressive policing tactics, like “stop and frisk” or those typically employed by police anti-gang units, that involve contacting, stopping, searching, and surveilling large numbers of people.Ģ. Reducing the Role of Police in Addressing Societal Problemsġ. Human Rights Watch makes the following 14 recommendations for police reform: Authorities at all levels in the United States should adopt prompt and focused measures to understand and combat systemic racism in government, the economy, the health system, employment, housing and others, including, of course, the criminal legal system and policing. Policing reflects and contributes to structural and other forms of racism. Reforming policing, even by reducing its scope and ensuring accountability, will not alone eradicate racially disparate results.
Making this shift, along with establishing effective and independent oversight bodies and the necessary legal tools to ensure accountability, is essential to limiting the police violence that has caused so much harm. Instead of asking police to address societal problems, authorities should invest in services that directly address underlying issues such as mental health care and support, substance use disorder, and poverty. Developing independent accountability and oversight mechanisms.Investing in communities to advance public safety and equal rights and.Reducing the role of police in addressing societal problems.Human Rights Watch urges that United States police reform initiatives address three critical issues: Reform efforts need to address these fundamental problems to be effective.Ī Roadmap for Re-imagining Public Safety in the United States: 14 Recommendations on Policing, Community Investment, and Accountability They are also the result of an approach to policing in the United States that has too often relied on coercion and force and failed to ensure accountability for abuse. These patterns are themselves a product of generations-old systemic racial inequalities, laws, and policies that have prioritized policing and criminalization as the primary state response to a range of societal problems. Such interactions result in high rates of arrest and criminalization, again disproportionately impacting people from these communities, contributing to mass incarceration and devastating long-term consequences for those convicted and those close to them. Killings are only the tip of an iceberg of much more common daily interactions between police and Black, Latino, Native American, poorer people, and people with disabilities, that are coercive and often violent, even if they do not result in death or serious injury. Too often police reform discussions in the United States focus on tactics that contribute to killings. For reform efforts to be meaningful and effective, they need to address those societal conditions. As recent research by Human Rights Watch has shown, it is inextricably linked to deep and persisting racial inequities and economic class divisions.
Police violence has a long history in the United States and remains a pervasive problem to this day. Police officers wait while people experiencing homelessness collect their belongings during a sweep of their encampment under a San Francisco, California freeway, March 1, 2016.
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