Quote:
Originally Posted by tschock
Personally, I'm more sincerely interested in the source of this stat.
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Of course:
It looks like there may have been over 100,000 in Baltimore alone since 2011:
DOJ Investigation of Baltimore PD
Sections 3: BPD Makes Unconstitutional Arrests (page 34):
10,163 arrests were made that were immediately rejected at the station because they were made without merit.
Section 3, part C: BPD Unlawfully Detains Individuals (page 39)
"Local prosecutors described this practice to Justice Department officials as BPD officers making arrests without probable cause on the street, then hours later deciding to “unarrest” when detention and questioning failed to uncover additional evidence. Our review of BPD documents confirmed that BPD uses these unlawful detentions."
They do not have an official count of instances this happens (since not documented), but the DOJ estimates there were approximately 420,000 stops per year, compared to the actually reported BPD figure of 124,000. (Page 25) The DOJ (reasonably) believes that the unrecorded 300,000 stops (in 2014 alone) went unrecorded because they would not have met the constitutional requirement of reasonable suspicion (or charges would've been filed or the stop would've been recorded). Many (if not most) would fall under this unlawful detainment.
Keep in mind that this is just Baltimore.
There have been formal investigations into almost every major police department - I used Baltimore as an example because it is the most recent.
A summary of the number of times the DOJ has investigated police departments:
Link
These aren't criminals committing crimes and getting arrested, these are innocent American citizens who are getting detained and formally arrested without cause. The DOJ also discusses unreasonable force on innocent civilians (page 74) and even gets into the BPD practice of "rough riding" (page 112).
I think every American can agree that unlawful arrests and beatings of hundreds of thousands of American citizens is a cause worth protesting.