Police Misconduct Blog

In the early hours of December 18, Irene Chavez was arrested at a gay bar on the South Side of Chicago. Before noon, she was pronounced dead after police found her hanging by her shirt in her cell.
The 33-year-old Chavez had been arrested for an alleged misdemeanor of simple battery. She...

On December 23, former Minneapolis police officer Kimberly Potter was found guilty of first and second-degree manslaughter in the April death of a 20-year-old unarmed Black man, Daunte Wright.
Potter claimed she meant to shoot Wright with a Taser when an altercation broke out but mistakenly...

All Casey Goodson Jr. was doing was carrying a bag containing sandwiches from Subway into his grandmother’s house last December 4. The Columbus man, 23, was shot six times by Franklin County Sheriff’s deputy Jason Meade in an incident unrecorded by body camera or dashboard footage. He...

On December 30, 2020, Pennsylvania State Troopers near Stroudsburg shot and killed 19-year-old Christian Hall after a nearly two-hour standoff. Almost one year after his death, police body camera footage revealed the Chinese-American youth, who was in the midst of a mental health crisis, had his...

Antonio May (32) died on September 11, 2018, the same day he entered Atlanta's Fulton County Jail. More than three years later, on November 16, 2021, a grand jury has indicted six deputies on charges of felony murder, battery, aggravated assault, and violation of oath of office.
According to...

Two former Oklahoma police officers were convicted on November 5 of the murder of Jared Lakey, 28, in 2019. The two former officers, Brandon Dingman, 35, and Joshua Taylor, 27, were convicted of second-degree murder in Lakey’s death, the result of them tasering him more than 50 times....

In August 2016, Jamarion Robinson, 26, was killed in a hail of gunfire by two Atlanta-area law enforcement officers as they tried to arrest him. His family has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Marshals Service and several of those involved in the shooting.
Five years later,...

In November 2018, Laudemer Arboleda, 33, was shot nine times by a police officer in Danville, a wealthy San Francisco suburb. Three years later, the town of Danville, along with Contra Costa County, agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by his family for $4.9 million. The announcement of the settlement...

It’s been termed the “hidden epidemic.” People held in jail have generally not been convicted of a crime, yet they die there in substantial numbers. It is a growing problem nationally, and one city newspaper’s investigative reporting examines the issue in...