Grants Incentivize Police Departments

Over the past several months, protesters alleging police misconduct have pummeled  Durham, N.C. police headquarters with rocks. Lawyers at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice requested public records to try to find why there was such divisiveness. Their findings revealed that a federal grant subsidizing drug enforcement operations at the department had a key “performance measure” emphasizing that police report their sheer volume of arrests. This appeared to be incentivizing the department to raise its overall number of drug arrests, which overwhelmingly affect the city’s black community. 

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