The Justice Department issued a sweeping rebuke of policing in Phoenix on Thursday, finding severe discrimination against Black, Hispanic and Native American people, routine violations of the rights of homeless people and excessive use of force.
The review is one of the harshest to come out of the Biden administration in its efforts to investigate police departments for systemic problems. It is also the first time a civil rights investigation into police practices found that the rights of homeless people were violated.
“Ultimately, our findings reveal evidence showing longstanding dysfunction,,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general who leads the department’s civil rights division, told reporters on Thursday. She added, “The problems at their core reflect the lack of effective supervision, training and accountability.”
City officials said in statements Thursday that they would take the findings seriously. But they have told the Justice Department that the city already enacted police reforms since the investigation began in 2021, and the Phoenix police of today “are materially different than the department that you investigated.”
Phoenix has bristled at the prospect of federal involvement in its policing. But the department’s findings were so severe, Ms. Clarke said, that “this is one instance where we can’t count on the police to police themselves.”
She said the agency had no immediate plans to sue Phoenix and its police force to mandate changes. She indicated that a first step would be arriving at an agreement with Phoenix officials to enter into a consent decree — a legally binding improvement plan — or placing the department under an independent monitor, as it has in similar situations.
That could potentially provoke a fraught confrontation between the Biden administration and the largest city in a pivotal swing state. Last month, former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican candidate, appeared to have an edge in the state, according to a poll of registered voters. President Biden narrowly won Arizona in the 2020 election.
The findings came in a 126-page report, released Thursday, after a 34-month investigation into abuse allegations at the department between 2016 and 2022. The report also includes instances from 2023 and 2024.
Unlike in other federal investigations of city police, no single incident kicked off the review, which focused on 2016 through 2022. But Phoenix had the highest number of fatal police shootings in the country in 2018, resulting in 23 deaths, and critics cite a history of mistreatment of minority, disabled and homeless people.
Phoenix reported 12 fatal police shootings in 2023, and has reported eight so far this year.
The Justice Department under Mr. Biden has moved toward greater oversight of police departments, after four years of little action in the Trump administration. It opened nine investigations and is in the process of enforcing 12 consent decrees. That is a welcome change, said Hernandez Stroud, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. But one often overlooked challenge, he said, is the “backslide” when consent decrees or other federal oversight measures end.
Critics of the Phoenix police said the report validated years of what they called unheeded complaints about police shootings, arrests and traffic stops that disproportionately affected minority communities.
“It’s even worse than what we’ve been saying,” said Viri Hernandez, the executive director of Poder in Action, a community group that has studied policing in Phoenix’s working-class neighborhoods. “Families whose children were killed have paid the price of police violence, and council and mayors have allowed this for a long time.”
Investigators said officers regularly used unreasonable force to as a de-escalation tactic. They said officers shot, used stun guns or physically restrained people in mental or emotional distress who posed little immediate threat.
In one instance, officers knelt on the neck of a suicidal man who had been sitting alone in his car in a parking lot and had injured himself. In another, officers fatally shot a suicidal resident at a group home after he pulled out a “small pocketknife” and disobeyed an order to drop it and stop. Officers also shot a man holding a knife to his own throat. When they threatened to shoot him, he told officers, “That’s what I want.”
Particularly when responding to people with mental health issues, Ms. Clarke said, “the hair-trigger tendency of Phoenix police to use indiscriminate, overwhelming force is both pronounced and harmful.”
When officers saw a man throwing rocks at their vehicle in 2022, they stopped down the road and called for an officer to come to the scene with ammunition designed to stop, but not kill. Instead of waiting, the report said, officers drove back to the man and demanded he drop the rock. They fatally shot him as he started to throw another. Phoenix settled a wrongful-death lawsuit with his family for $5.5 million last year.
The report also castigated the city for how the police had dealt with Phoenix’s soaring homeless population, a vexing problem for cities nationwide. It said officers unconstitutionally stopped and arrested homeless people, sometimes rousting people sleeping outdoors and sending them to a sprawling downtown tent camp known as The Zone. (That encampment has since been cleared.)
Between 2016 and 2022, nearly four in 10 of all the people arrested in Phoenix were homeless, the department found.
Investigators also found that low-level arrests and traffic violations disproportionately affected Black, Hispanic and Native American residents in Phoenix. Black people were seven times more likely to be cited for marijuana offenses than white people, and Native Americans were 44 times more likely to be cited for alcohol infractions than white people.
Jared Keenan, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said the report was a damning account of abuses. The group has sued Phoenix over its use of force to disperse protests and raids of homeless camps.
“They’re relishing in the violence,” he said. “They’re degrading the folks they’re interacting with. It’s just difficult to read.”
The investigation has exposed deep divides in Phoenix over policing and the use of force by officers.
The police held a series of community meetings to update people on the investigation and the department’s revised policies and changes, where they faced skepticism from family members of people killed by law enforcement. Police-reform activists say the Phoenix police have failed to vigorously enact needed changes. The director of a new oversight office in the city resigned in January, citing a lack of independence.
At the same time, police supporters have pressured the city to resist a consent decree, advertising on a highway billboard and launching a website that attacks the Justice Department.
Phoenix grew increasingly vocal in its criticism of the Justice Department as the investigation unspooled for nearly three years, costing the city more than $7 million to produce reams of documents and data and comply with investigators’ requests.
Phoenix said it had fully cooperated throughout the investigation and would “welcome the additional insights” from investigators. But city officials said they and the police did not want to hand over their changes and oversight to “a consent decree process that is complicated, expensive, and cedes control to the D.O.J.”
Phoenix argues that it has made an “extraordinary wave of reforms” in the nearly three years since the Justice Department began the investigation in August 2021, including using body cameras, banning chokeholds and shooting at moving cars, and creating new standards for using deadly force. A new interim chief, Michael Sullivan, also tightened the department’s use-of-force policy so that it is applied only when “truly essential, not merely when it was justifiable.”
City officials have criticized the Justice Department for not explaining precisely why it was investigating the police department and accused investigators of a lack of transparency.
Ann O’Brien, a Phoenix city councilwoman, said she had only gotten the report on Thursday when it was released publicly, and expressed frustration that federal investigators had declined to detail any of their conclusions with the city earlier.
“It’s incredibly disappointing,” she said. “If we were violating people’s civil rights, why would you not share that with the city manger, police department leadership, City Council so we could start making changes?”
Several cities, including Baltimore, Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky., have agreed to accept federal oversight rather than be dragged into court.
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