Civil rights abuses by police officers have been a nagging problem in many communities of the United States. One such troubled community has been Prince George's County, a suburb of Washington, D.C. An investigation by the Washington Post discovered that in recent years county police in this jurisdiction had shot and killed people at rates exceeding nearly any other large force in the nation. As a follow-up, Washington Post reporters Craig Whitlock and David S. Fallis examined the performance of the federal government in handling the investigation and prosecution of brutal police officers. On the basis of Justice Department data obtained by TRAC and numerous interviews, the two reporters found that from 1991 to 1998 there had been more than 200 federal investigations of police abuses in Maryland but only two prosecutions. The reporters further discovered that same pattern--many investigations and very few prosecutions--existed for the nation as a whole.
