DOJ: Phoenix PD Officers Routinely Violated Rights, Deployed Unjustified Deadly Force

Every report delivered by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division can be described as “scathing” or “damning.” There are simply no exceptions to this rule. It’s not like the Civil Rights unit picks a US law enforcement agency out of the hat and then initiates an investigation. (Maybe it should? I mean, I’m sure there’s plenty of police misconduct flying under the radar at any given moment.)

No, if the DOJ opens an investigation into a local law enforcement agency it’s because that law enforcement agency has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons for months or years. And such is the case with the Phoenix, Arizona police department.

The investigation was announced in 2021, with the DOJ noting the PD routinely violated a decision delivered by the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court forbidding governments in the jurisdiction from arresting or fining homeless people for the “crime” of being homeless. It also noted there was more than a hint of a deep-rooted misconduct problem — one that definitely wasn’t made any better by the PD’s mass purge of internal investigation records back in 2019.

The DOJ’s report [PDF] goes further than these initial hints that something’s rotten in Phoenix. It says officers routinely deploy excessive and unreasonable force. It arrived at this conclusion despite the PD’s lack of up-to-date use of force records.

Officers use unreasonable force to rapidly dominate encounters, often within the first few moments of an encounter. Officers fail to employ basic strategies to avoid force, like verbal de-escalation or using time or distance to slow things down. PhxPD’s training has encouraged officers to use force when it is not lawful to do so, and to use serious force to respond to hypothetical, not actual, danger. P

More specifically, officers fire weapons at people who pose no immediate threat. Then they continue to shoot at people long after they’ve been rendered unable to pose a threat. Officers escalate situations seemingly for the sole purpose of deploying deadly force. And when they’re finally out of bullets, they delay rendering aid to those they’ve wounded. Two cases detailed in the report involve officers shooting suicidal people who only posed a threat to themselves. In another incident, officers shot a woman 10 times and did not render any medical aid until more than nine minutes after they had shot her. In another case, they waited fifteen minutes to provide any aid to a person they had shot.

If officers aren’t shooting people, they’re Tasing them, beating them, choking them, or firing non-lethal munitions at them from close range. And just because it’s less-than-lethal doesn’t mean its a reasonable use of force.

In one incident, a group of officers shot 40mm foam rounds, a Taser, and over 20 Pepperballs at an unarmed man within 20 seconds of announcing their presence. The officers planned to take the man into custody for two open felony warrants related to probation violations. They surrounded a storage facility where he stood outside a unit repairing a bicycle. One officer yelled, “Hands!” seconds before firing Pepperballs and yelling, “Get on the ground!” While the officer continued to pelt him with Pepperballs, another officer struck the man with a 40mm impact round. The man turned away, screaming. Then, a third officer advanced and fired a Taser, incapacitating the man. As he fell—nearly hitting his head on the wall of the storage unit—an officer fired another 40mm round.

Officers routinely engaged in violence against people who were never given enough time to comply with shouted, sometimes-contradictory orders from officers. In some cases, the order given to the person was immediately followed by an act of violence. Just as routinely, officers’ reports portrayed their use of force as “justified” due to the person’s supposed “refusal” to comply with their orders.

Then there’s stuff like this, which covers multiple areas of the DOJ’s damning report, all in a single anecdote:

In one example, two officers used excessive force after stopping a bicyclist who ran a red light. The man allowed the officers to search him. As one officer checked the man’s pockets, the man appeared to move something from one hand to the other. The officers grabbed him, told him to put his hands behind his back, and then pulled him to the ground. The man asked, “What am I under arrest for?” An officer said, “For not obeying a police officer.” The officers appeared to recognize they lacked a lawful basis for arresting the man, and one said, “We need to develop PC [probable cause].” Both officers then muted their body-worn cameras. PhxPD arrested him for resisting arrest and possession of marijuana. County and city prosecutors declined to pursue the charges.

There’s a lot more along these lines if you’ve got the stomach for it. Officers routinely violating protocol and internal policy to hogtie people in positions that increased their chance of death. Officers siccing dogs on cooperative arrestees and letting the dogs chew on them while they placed them in handcuffs. Officers continuing to punch, kick, or otherwise physically harm people who were already handcuffed.

Part of this is due to training. Too much of it, surprisingly. As the DOJ notes, Phoenix PD training materials actually encourage this sort of behavior. The chaser is everything else: a systemic failure to discipline officers and officers’ refusal to report force deployment.

There’s also a long section about the PD’s tactics when dealing with the city’s homeless population — efforts that directly contradicted a precedential court ruling by the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court. And, like far too many law enforcement agencies in the United States, minorities are the most frequent targets for police harassment and violence.

PhxPD uses race or national origin as a factor when enforcing traffic laws. Officers cite a disproportionate number of Black and Hispanic drivers when compared to violations recorded by neutral traffic cameras in thesame locations. PhxPD also enforces traffic laws more severely against Black and Hispanic driver than it does against white drivers engaged in the same behaviors.

PhxPD enforces alcohol use offenses and low-level drug offenses more severely against Black, Hispanic, and Native American people than against white people engaged in the same behaviors.

PhxPD enforces quality-of-life laws, like loitering and trespassing, more severely against Black, Hispanic, and Native American people than it does against white people engaged in the same behaviors.

Another 20 pages or so is given over to discussing the Phoenix PD’s retaliatory actions against anti-police violence protesters and others engaged in protected First Amendment activities the officers didn’t care for.

Sadly, this is par for the course for DOJ investigations. Every law enforcement agency investigated by the DOJ has pretty much the same list of problems. This clearly shows there’s something wrong with cop culture in general. It’s not a byproduct of the environment these officers work in. No matter where the agency is located, the same sort of violence, abuse, and frequent rights violations are uncovered.

This will start the long, expensive, and pretty much ineffectual process of reforming the Phoenix Police Department. A federal monitor with be put in place and the city will agree to a consent decree. It will make things better in the short term, but very slowly and incrementally. And the most likely outcome will be a lot of nothing. Once the decree is lifted, most agencies tend to go back to doing what they’ve always done: pretend they’re a law unto themselves until the next round of investigations begin.