Portside

One of the problems that remain with campus police is that there is so little information about what they do and how they do it, particularly for those employed by private universities. A bill introduced in the Illinois House would have improved that by making private university police subject to public records laws, but the bill died in a Senate Committee in May.

Last Sunday’s broad daylight shoot-out between rival biker gangs in Waco, Texas left nine dead and eighteen others hospitalized, and shocked the nation. However, the Waco shootout also served to graphically underscore how drastically different the police and media treatment of violent incidents is when those involved are white. This racial disparity was intensely explored on Twitter this week by commentators and critics on hashtag#WacoThugs.

Whatever the explanation, there is a bewildering disconnect between white tolerance of police misconduct—including homicides—and the call for “personal accountability” that has long permeated our national policy discussions.

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At a time when police departments around the country are being criticized for a lack of a transparency, the arrival of Legal Aid’s "cop accountability" database represents a bold attempt to systematically track officers with a history of civil rights violations and other kinds of misbehavior, and thereby force judges, prosecutors, and juries to take the officers’ past actions into consideration when adjudicating cases.