Human Rights Watch is
an international organization dedicated to protecting human rights.
It pursues this objective by investigating human rights abuses
in some seventy countries around the world. Its basic goal is
to hold governments accountable if they transgress the rights
of people. In mid-1995, Human Rights Watch launched a systematic
study of police brutality in the United States and the related
question of how effectively all levels of government were working
to combat this problem. The report was written by Allyson Collins,
a senior researcher in the organization's Washington office, after
visits to fourteen cities in the United States. Although the basic
responsibility for dealing with police abuses properly lies with
the individual police departments, the federal government has
long accepted its role as a court of last resort. To explore how
well or poorly the Justice Department handled this responsibility
from 1989 to 1996, Human Rights Watch hired TRAC to provide it
data. The specific mission: what was the record of the FBI and
the offices of the 90 U.S. Attorneys in processing matters brought
under two statutes outlawing the police abuses. The data showed
that the vast majority of all such matters recommended for prosecution
by the FBI are rejected by prosecutions. In June of 1998, Human
Rights Watch published Shielded from Justice, a 440-page
report on police brutality and accountability in the United States.
One section of the report concluded that the widespread reluctance
of the federal government to take on these matters was a factor
in making police brutality "one of the most serious, enduring,
and divisive human rights violations in the United States."
