DOJ names six cities for program to reduce police, community tension

Calling the “heinous attacks” on two Ferguson police officers “repugnant,” Attorney General Eric Holder announced on Thursday that six cities were selected for a new program designed to resolve the kind of long-standing tensions between law enforcement officers and their communities that contributed to unrest in Missouri and New York after police killings of unarmed black men.

“Incidents like the one we have witnessed throw into sharp relief why conversations like the one we convened today—to build trust between law enforcement and community members—are so important,” Holder said at a press conference in New York City.

The program, the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, is an outgrowth of an Obama administration effort, My Brother’s Keeper, aimed at helping minority men overcome barriers and have a fair shot at success.

A task force affiliated with My Brother’s Keeper “recommended that the Justice Department establish a program to help resolve long-standing tensions between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve,” Holder said.  

Experts from various law enforcement institutes and universities will be meeting with the police departments of Stockton, California; Birmingham, Alabama; Gary, Indiana; Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Fort Worth, Texas in the coming months to outline a plan that will address the objectives of the three-year long program: to enhance procedural justice, reduce implicit bias and promote racial reconciliation.

The cities were chosen for the pilot program based on a combination of jurisdiction size, ethnic and religious composition. Also considered were each city’s “history of social tensions, level of violence, economic conditions, police department size, and historical strategies for addressing procedural fairness, implicit bias, and reconciliation at the local level," according to a statement on its website.

Stockton Chief of Police Eric Jones said, “We didn’t even know we were selected until this week. Now the real work begins.”

Stockton, about a 90-minute drive from San Francisco, filed for bankruptcy in June 2012, after the housing crash and years of fiscal mismanagement. Forbes declared it one of the 10 most dangerous cities in the United States that year, saying “It’s hard to control crime when your city is broke.” But the city exited bankruptcy in 2014, and its economy has started to improve.

The initiative also selected cities with “special subpopulations,” including “LGBTQI, youth, victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, Latino, and one neighborhood per site that will implement targeted youth violence and/or gang reduction strategies.”

An hour after Holder’s announcement, members of the Progressive Caucus of the New York City Council and activists from the Justice Committee held a rally at City Hall demanding that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo appoint special prosecutors in police killings such as those of Staten Islander Eric Garner, Bronx resident Ramarley Graham and Brooklyn resident Akai Gurley, all unarmed black men killed by police.

They were echoing a request made after Garner’s death by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who wrote Cuomo asking him to sign an executive order granting the attorney general's office temporary authority “to investigate the circumstances surrounding the use of force by law enforcement officers that result in the death of unarmed civilians.”