A Bunch of the Country's Top Cops Want to Stop Locking Everybody Up

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/bunch-countrys-top-cops-want-stop-locking-everybody


A Bunch of the Country's Top Cops Want to Stop Locking Everybody Up
As they head into a meeting with President Obama, these law enforcement officials say the justice system needs a major overhaul.

—By AJ Vicens
| Thu Oct. 22, 2015 6:00 AM EDT



The United States has way too many people in jail. Our incarceration rate of about 500 prisoners per 100,000 people is the highest in the world, and those who are locked up are disproportionately people of color. A new group, including some of the law enforcement heads from some of the biggest cities in the country, will urge President Barack Obama on Thursday to help them to lower those rates, while also increasing public safety.

"We're incarcerating the wrong people, and we're measuring the wrong things," said Garry F. McCarthy, superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, during a question-and-answer session with reporters in Washington on Wednesday. He was in the capital for the meeting with Obama and the public launch of a new organization of law enforcement officials that is calling for massive changes to the criminal justice system. "Ten years ago, if you heard a police chief say that arrests were down, people would be criticizing, 'Why are your arrests down? You're not doing your job,'" McCarthy said. "Today it's something that we take pride in."

Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration is made up of some of the most powerful police and prosecutors in the country. It includes McCarthy, but also the heads of the Los Angeles Police Department and the New York City Police Department, among others. In total, about 130 members from all 50 states are pushing for four broad policy goals: alternatives to incarceration, balance in the application of laws, mandatory-minimum sentence reform, and stronger ties with the communities they serve.

The group's launch, and its goals for incarceration reform, comes amid a nationwide conversation about policing in the United States, a conversation that took on a heightened focus after the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in August 2014. The resulting protests shed new light on the militarization of the police, police killings (especially the deaths of people of color), and the lack of reliable use-of-force data. The report from Obama's task force on policing in the United States, which was released in March in response to Ferguson and other police protests, called for changes such as independent police prosecutions and more trust between police officers and the communities they serve.

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"The criminal justice system is not really broken," he told reporters. "It's producing the results that it was designed to produce, and those are the wrong results. We have to change the way that we think about crime. We're producing generations of individuals, through incarceration… who are going to fail unless we do something about it."