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EDIT: Having nerve damage in my right hand, forcing me to dictate on my iPhone using Siri. I’m sure there are some syntax errors I missed so please excuse that. I browsed through it looking for errors, but I’m sure I must’ve missed some. Feel free to correct any mistakes.I could not disagree more with the two people who answered so far, not surprisingly who work in law-enforcement. I have been and attorney for 17 years, working countless pro bono cases and also working in New York City for the civilian complaint review board, which is the body that handles complaints against the NYPD. I can’t tell you how many cases that I saw brought before the board that were so clear cut incidence of police brutality or police misconduct, and yet we could not get the district attorneys office in the appropriate borough To prosecute, even after the internal affairs Bureau found reasonable suspicion that the complaint was valid. At most we would usually be happy if we could get the department to at least discipline and/or dismiss the officer or officers involved. Getting a criminal conviction was extremely rare color even though if a regular civilian had done the same things they would have been arrested and prosecuted.Politics also plays a big role in this as police unions, especially the PBA of the NYPD Headed for years by the revolting Patrick Lynch, is a huge lobbying and campaigning force for the district attorneys in the city, and the DAs do not want to alienate them.I wrote about this in a previous question about police brutality where I grew up in a affluent neighborhood on Long Island, with our own private police department. My parents did not have much money, but why my mother was pregnant with me, put together every cent they could find a house in the best school district in Long Island, and actually one of the best in the country. We got along famously with the local police department in our small village of only about 2000 people. From the day I got my drivers license, I can’t even count how many times I was pulled over by the department, but as there were about 30 officers, way more than we needed for a department that had less than 3 arrests/year and I got to know them over the years, as soon as they saw who I was, or they saw my drivers license and where I lived, they immediately just said to drive safely and Never once issued a summons to my parents or me. Even a couple of times where I probably should have been arrested I drove so recklessly.Sometime when I was about 18 or 19, we used to have regular parties at the house, especially during the summer, inviting a lot of friends and family, particularly on July 4, which was right around my birthday. That was when guests of ours started to tell us how incredibly rude and brutal our Police Department was. We were very surprised because as I said we had always had a very amicable relationship with them. But this was told to us several times by people we trust very much, and at first it was hard to figure out the disconnect.We would be paying their salaries and pensions with our local property taxes that were directly determined by the small board of supervisors that we elected. And every year The overwhelming majority of the village would vote to increase their compensation. It was an extremely safe and quiet neighborhood and even though they did not have a very difficult job, they would be constantly patrolling the streets and we would leave our doors unlocked as we felt that safe, so even when they had annual raffles to add more to the coffers of their PBA, we would always buy a lot of tickets (Although I’m kind of pissed that we never won anything after 44 years).Technically there was no parking allowed on any of the streets at any time, as you were supposed to park in your driveway. But whatever we had people over, or for whatever reason we needed to park in the street, we would just call the department and tell them that there would be cars in front of our house and give them the license plate numbers, and they would just ignore the law preventing parking. If I had left my car out on the street, they would just ignore it, even during the middle of the night, which was the time that the law was ever really enforced. Eventually one time I had left my car out at night on the street for about six straight weeks, and after the first four weeks, I would start to get warning tags left on my windshield, and after another two weeks, I finally got a parking ticket. The ticket was supposed to be for $100, but the officer crossed that amount out and wrote in $25. The car was on the street because I was having engine problems, but I had let the inspection expire. That was actually what I was given the ticket for. Expiration of inspection. I so for the first time in my life, I was actually going down to the courthouse to traffic court. I was completely shocked at the number of people that were in the quart room to answer tickets. And 99% of these were moving violations. And coincidentally, none of them were residence like me, but all were from people who did not live in the village.You see, the entire situation was far too incestuous. We had such a small and direct effect on their salaries and pensions, these sworn officers did not want to alienate us, hence the reason why we were never given a moving violation or always just given a warning if there was some complaint about something that we might have done that was technically Illegal, but now I saw what our friends and family were telling us when we saw this courthouse packed with hundreds of people with speeding tickets in a village that was actually pretty hard to speed in. And while watching some of the officers take the stand, officers that I had been friendly with, they had a very rude and annoyed attitude when testify. A belligerent side of them that I had never seen before, in nearly 20 years.As a sidenote, those people probably would not have even bothered to fight a $25 ticket that was not going to put points on their license, but I read the vehicle and traffic Law which in New York State said that your inspection only had to be valid when the car was being operated, so I showed the VTL book to the judge, and he dismissed the ticket as the car was not running or being driven.So this was kind of a backwards situation of reverse police impropriety, and according to one incident relayed to us by our family that had been pulled over, they were also verbally brutalized. For no apparent reason. Meanwhile, I was getting away with traffic “murder”, simply because I lived there, which was not only unfair to the people who were just driving through, but also dangerous. All because the police cared That they did not upset the residence hall light then vote not to increase their yearly salaries.But as far as real police brutality, there are many answers other than political, although I think that is the biggest one. All you have to do is search on YouTube for police misconduct or police on video where there are countless vehicle and body cams showing blatant police violence and shootings that are absolutely abhorrent and time after time, when these cases are actually Prosecuted, the cops more often than not, go free. When recently a Chicago police officer was convicted on a murder charge for shooting a suspect it was the first time in 40 years that a member of the Chicago Police Department was convicted while on the job of homicide. Do you really believe that in 40 years, there was no other Chicago officer that had committed murder? Or do you think That there were other forces in effect?Working on peoples cases of alleged police brutality, I thought that with the advent of body cams and with social media like YouTube, cops would get smarter and realize that they were being filmed and staff brutalizing people, particularly minorities. But again, you can spend days watching videos of cops brutalizing people, just on YouTube, 99% of which were never even disciplined by their department, let alone prosecuted by the county.In New York City in the 1990s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani famously took credit for the drop in crime throughout the city. I guess it was just a coincidence that there was a massive drop in crime in every major city in the country during the 1990s. There were two heinous Incidents that got national attention in New York City in the bed 90s, the first when Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, was taken to the bathroom of a pre-Saint after being arrested for some trumped up charge, and three officers brutalized him while one stuck a plunger up his rectum So far that it went into his intestines. And then shortly after that, another black man, and immigrant, Amadou Diallo, Was shot 41 times and killed, while simply reaching for his wallet. The officers allegedly in the first case said to Louima, “ it’s Giuliani time, “when torturing him. Giuliani had instituted upon the direction to his police commissioner that he enforce something called the broken windows program, which basically means that the police should arrest people for even the most trivial of crimes, that in the past they would have gotten a warning or a summons for, such as jumping the subway toll turnstile, panhandling, using squeegees to wash peoples cars windows hoping to get money, etc., with the ridiculous theory that arresting people and putting them in jail for these incredibly low level violations would lower crime, more serious crime, overall. Even though every study that has been done on the broken windows theory has been shown to be completely in effective in preventing serious crime.My father voluntarily enlisted in Vietnam as he was a pilot, right after he graduated high school. When he came back, the city was very lenient in hiring vets as Officers, even if they had not graduated high school. So my father had a lot of friends who were NYPD officers in the 1970s, and even though before he passed away recently, he was certainly on the liberal side of the political spectrum, he had more sympathy for a police officer‘s then I did as he knew a lot of them, And I don’t doubt that the ones that he was friends with were probably good and law abiding cops. It sounds strange to have to preface the word carbs, with the phrase “law abiding “but they are like anyone else and certainly capable of breaking the law. In fact there are numerous statistics that show that the average cop is far more likely to commit a crime than the average civilian during their lifetime.So when I was dealing with a lot of these cases of clear police brutality that were not getting prosecuted, are used to give him the example of the fact that even if you assume that 95% of the carbs are not openly corrupt or committing brutality or killing people, because I have seen firsthand and from friends who are in the department and a very good friend who is a detective first grade, that the blue wall of silence is as thick and strong as you can possibly imagine, The fact that the 95% might not be actively taking money from gun runners or bribes from other criminals, don’t you think that the vast majority of that 95% Would look the other way if they saw a fellow cop committing an illegality?Even on the very few videos that you can find on YouTube showing cops arresting other cops, it’s incredible to hear the dialogue about how they would love to not arrest them and they feel terrible about having to arrest them, usually dealing with DUIs, but because it was already called in to their station, or something like that, they were forced to arrest them. It’s sickening to hear how they are so apologetic and they are so careful to not hurt them when handcuffing them and to deal with them like they had just committed some active bravery instead of committing a crime that could have killed someone.I can certainly answer your question with great specificity at least to the state of Washington that has an absurd archaic law.Obviously that is one state, but there are many other states that have laws that allow a cop to use deadly force if they simply can convince a jury that they feared for their safety. That is a very high bar to overcome and find a lack of reasonable doubt for. And again, that’s if the cops are ever prosecuted, Which if you look at the statistics in the country, getting to that point is very difficult even with overwhelming evidence.I’ll give you a situation where I was falsely arrested by an incredibly and notoriously corrupt police department on Long Island, as there are two departments in to incorporated cities in Nassau County, that not all we have their own police departments, like where I grew up, but their own court system where they prosecute traffic violations and misdemeanors. I will go into the details of the absurdity of my arrest for a DUI where my BAC was .00 and they gave me five SFST‘s until I finally screwed up on the fifth one, and put me in handcuffs. According to my very good friend, the detective in the NYPD, they are supposed to give you one standard field sobriety test, and if there is no alcohol in your system, that is supposed to be the end of it. You can actually laugh at me as to how ridiculously honest I was as I voluntarily went into the police station to report a tiny dent I put in one of there on marked cars as I was backing out, right after I had just been in the police station and had taken my father there to file a police report for something that was stolen when my parents were living in this city on Long Island just for a winter when their new house was being finished. I had spoken to three officers over this stupid report on behalf of my father, and nobody said a word about my speech being slurred or how I was walking or acting, which as Public Safety officers, you would think that if they suspected that I might be under the influence, that they would warn me not to drive. Of course that did not happen because I was completely sober. But after the tiny accident, even though there were no officers outside and I could have just driven away, I decided to do the right thing, went back inside and filed a accident report with the desk sergeant who seemed pissed that he had to deal with this. But his mood changed when I told him that I thought it was one of their cars that I hit. He went to the back and like storm troopers, 2 x 2, eight cops come out to the parking lot and they demand for me to show them where I hit their car. As soon as they saw that it was one of their cars, one of the officers I had just been speaking to started to say that I was slurring my speech and that I wasn’t walking steadily, and that’s when they brought the entire corrupt department out of the parking lot and even after the breathalyzer showed nothing, and I could not have been more coherent or cognitive and certainly was not under the influence of drugs, they kept giving me SFST after SFST, until with the entire department watching me, and just a little bit of anxiety, I made a mistake walking the line for the fifth time.In any of the other 62 counties in New York State, someone arrested for the first time, particularly a lawyer, and for a misdemeanor DUI, would have been offered a plea to a moving violation. I did not want to plead guilty to jaywalking, as I absolutely did nothing illegal, But our TA at the time who is now in Congress where she belongs, ran on a zero tolerance policy of all DUI arrests, and never in her 11 years and over 10,000 DUI arrests, Had she ever offered this plea deal to anyone, even people who were actually guilty who were just over the limit, let alone me, who had a BAC of .00.Since a lawyer who defends himself has an idiot for a client, I actually hired a lawyer to defend me over this insanity. My lawyer said that even though this would have been an open and shut case anywhere else on the planet, since this area was run like a police state, where are you could not drive more than a block or two without seeing flashing lights, the citizens there had such a regular contact with the police, that if I went to trial, it would be very possible that the six jurors would completely believe me and my overwhelming evidence of my innocence, but be afraid to quit me because they would have contact with the officers who lied on the stand during the trial and they would get payback for that. I then came up with the idea of a motion to dismiss for lack of probable cause. Apparently somehow this copy of my motion which had to be argued in court reached the desk of the district attorney and in the only time in her 11 year tenure, she offered to knock it down to a violation. Ordinarily, just out of pride, there was no way I was going to plead guilty to this insanity, for anything , no matter how much they reduced the charge, but given that this had gone on for 14 months at this point with the prosecution desperately trying to find something in my blood test that was taken over a year ago, and my father feeling responsible for causing the whole thing because he distracted me when he was gagging when I was backing out which is what caused the tiny accident, I decided to just cut my losses and take the violation, which would not be a crime/misdemeanor, but just like a speeding ticket, and would not affect my bar license. So just another or example of how a completely corrupt arrest wound up costing me tons of money, tons of time, and absolutely nothing happened to the officers and I had to pay a $500 fine.I actually have a very good pensions for having firsthand examples to this question. In 1995, I was driving back from Oneonta, New York to Long Island, from visiting my girlfriend in college, about a 5 Hour Dr. that I had done many times. I was in Kingston, New York, about 2 1/2 hours from New York City when I was driving on this one lane road that I had driven on many times before, that was pitch black with no lights at around midnight, about 1 mile from the New York State Thruway, when I felt a kidney stone attack coming on. I wanted to take my painkillers that I always kept with me but I couldn’t take them and continue driving so I wanted to just get to the Thruway entrance which was well lit, then I could pull over and park, take the drugs, and then when they knocked me out, I would not be driving. For those of you who have not had a kidney stone attack, I won’t even try to explain the pain to you.I was about a mile away when I started going a little faster, 65 mph in a 45 mph zone. Right after that I saw lights behind me, and it was a New York State trooper. New York State troopers are usually very matter of fact. They tend to be very businesslike, not giving breaks to even cops that flash badges but at the same time you can usually count on them, while usually always giving you the summons, to be completely professional. Before the cop even got close to my car, I did some thing which could’ve gotten me shot today, which was getting out of the car immediately after I pulled over and walking up to him and explaining to him the situation. He was exactly the personality I expected, and he listened to my story, asked if I wanted an ambulance which I declined it because I knew it would take forever to go to the hospital and have them evaluate me and everything they would have to do before giving me the pain medication which I had in my hand. I told him to give me as many tickets as he wanted but to please do it as quickly as possible as I needed to get to the Thruway. He went back to his cruiser, while I was just walking around, we are at one point the pain was so bad I vomited on the roof of my car. I kept looking back at his car to see if he would finish, but his light was still on and it looked like he was writing. Finally he came out of the car and walked towards me with my license and paperwork in his hand. I could see the standard yellow New York State moving violation in his hand, which at the time I could care less about. I stuck my hand out to take everything from me when with his hand that was holding everything he formed a fist and slugged me in the gut. I also don’t know how many of you have been really swamped in the got a hard, but when it knocks the wind out of you, you also feel like you wanna die for about five minutes. Between that and the kidney stone I don’t know how I did not pass out from the pain. When I finally got to my feet, and I was only able to halfway stand up, he then went on a two minute garage like a drill sergeant with him literally nose to nose with me, screaming the F word about 60 times in two minutes before he threatened to kill me if he ever saw me in Kingston again. He then began to reach for his revolver at which point I ran towards my car, started it, and forward it. I got to the Thruway where there was a place to park, and I took about four or five Percocets, and thankfully within 15 minutes I was starting to doze off. With this trooper, it was the absolute ultimate definition of Jekyll and Hyde.Obviously I was going to file a complaint about what happened. New York State trooper cruisers did not have cameras at that time, so it was my word against his. There were no real marks on my stomach from his punch. I drove up to Kingston from Long Island, three separate times to give videotaped sworn testimony as to what happened. I was not thinking of suing the state or the trooper or doing anything but other than to try to get this lunatic with a gun and a badge and a police uniform off the horse before he killed someone, literally. I was beginning my work in politics at the time, but I never tried to use my political connections for any special treatment so I did not tell much of the details to my closest friends in the state legislature. About a week after the third deposition, I received a boilerplate two sentence letter from the commissioner of the New York State police in Albany, New York, saying that they had investigated my complaint and founded had no merit. The matter was now considered closed. I was infuriated.At this point, purely out of Public Safety, I decided to tell assemblyman that I had done a tremendous amount of work for, and worked for him, the details of everything that happened, and he was chairman of the committee on corrections and knew the commissioner of the New York State police as he had also been in the legislature for 18 years, and to this day has authored and passed more laws than anyone in New York State history. I was shocked, not really, when about a week later I received a certified letter from the same commissioner, this time completely handwritten, saying that he was deeply sorry that they had overlooked certain things during their investigation. The trooper had been terminated and they were filing charges with the Kingston County district Attorney. He was given some misdemeanor assault charge that he plug down to and probation, but the main thing was that he was off the streets. But this was another perfect example of where if I did not happen to know someone in politics, not only would he not have been prosecuted, he would still have been out there with his gun and his badge and who knows how long it would have taken him before he actually fired it?The traffic court case for my speeding ticket had come up before I had told my political friend what happened, so I fought the ticket on the grounds of necessity because of my medical situation. It was a very small town with a small courthouse, but it was packed with probably 300 people as they only met once a month. Just to show you how petty they can be over even the smallest things, they made sure I was literally the last person called to make my case. There was absolutely no one left in the quart room other than the parties involved in my case, including this trooper, whose name I am not going to put here for fear of retribution, over 24 years later. While waiting for my case to be called, although I was getting the impression about halfway through this five hour marathon, that the trooper made sure my case was the last one called, I was sitting next to a black man who told me that he was there for a speeding ticket and coincidently the trooper that gave him the ticket was the same trooper I had the incident with. He told me that when he was pulled over, the trooper approached his window, and when he did not lower the window quickly enough the trooper took out his night stick and smashed and broke the drivers window. He told me he was scared to death of him. But obviously nothing happened to him for doing that and this guy had to pay to fix his window.That case in Chicago where that officer was finally convicted of murder after I think putting a dozen bullets in the back of a guy running away from him, was also politically covered up as Mayor Rahm Emanuel head the video footage of the incident for over one year, as he did not want it to reflect badly upon him. Only after a freedom of information lawsuit was filed, was the video finally released, which led to the prosecution and his conviction.Going back to what I wrote earlier, including the two officers who answered this question very differently from me, would you not give a fellow copped the benefit of the doubt if you pulled one over? Would you turn a colleague in if you saw him planting evidence? If you saw a colleague committing even a very minor crime, would you arrest them? If you answered incorrectly to any of those questions, you would be breaking the law. A civilian is not required to report a crime if they see one, while a police officer is sworn by law to do so.Of the days it would take you to go through and watch all of the YouTube videos, videos that just happened to get recorded, and it’s only been a few years where many jurisdictions have been wearing body cameras, you would come across so many cases of police police brutality and blatant murder. But to police officers out there, in The very high profile cases like in Ferguson and with Eric Garner and with so many hundreds of other mostly black people, are you telling me that these cases of brutality were really adjudicated fairly?When I worked on the CCRB at the NYPD, we were absolutely deluge with the allegations of police Brutality. It is kind of strange, because the rank and file NYPD is usually very disparaging and very hesitant in having to deal with the New York police department internal affairs Bureau. But when we had rocksolid cases of brutality, where the person arrested was in handcuffs immediately as told by multiple witnesses, which takes away the common defense that cops are use when a suspect has been beaten, by saying that the officers were simply using self-defense, which is obviously not necessary if the suspect is not able to hurt them. But we would find a lot of red tape in the internal affairs Bureau as far as taking these cases from us. New York city Council established the CCRB for the very purpose of having a legitimate and empowered agency to investigate the validity of police brutality complaints. Obviously not every complaint was legitimate, and those were pretty easy to weed out. But I would say that I good 30 to 40% of allegations of brutality or very legitimate, possibly higher than that. Yet even getting these officers disciplined, with a great deal of evidence, before we had video footage that was common, Let alone prosecuted, took an enormous amount of effort and preservation, and fighting to make sure that something was done in each of these cases.As I said before, one of my very best friends is a detective first grade with the NYPD for the last 20 years. He said to me something a long time ago that I still remember verbatim. “Mike I don’t trust cops that I don’t know very well, so I can’t imagine what it’s like for the average citizen. “ I also had several friends from law school who went into federal law enforcement. It is interesting that you almost never hear about me possible wrongful shooting involving a federal officer. With the exception of ICE, It seems quite clear that the more educated, better trained, and better screened Federal agents, may not be saints, but they certainly have discipline when it comes to the use of violence. I saw a film showing real life situations that were very similar to each other. You had a situation in Canada for example with someone wielding a knife and a bunch of cops surrounding him, and the same situation in the United States. In Canada the situation was able to be resolved without any violence or certainly any shots fired. In the United States, the suspect wound up dead from gunfire from the cops. This happened over and over and over in different police departments, usually in Europe where nobody was hurt Compared to almost identical situations in the United States where the suspects wound up dead.So as far as why there are not more prosecutions of police brutality, as I had said there are many things in play. Politics is almost always an answer to any question regarding something like this, and definitely is a big part of the puzzle when it comes to this question. There is also always The fact that cops back each other up, so if someone complains that they were a victim of brutality, and there were two cops at the scene, and one lies and says that he was attacked by the victim even though he wasn’t, his partner is almost always going to back him up, and now you have two sworn officers, who by law have to tell the truth, Against the word of a suspected criminal. With that kind of evidence, even if we can get the district attorney to impanel a grand jury, it’s likely that they won’t indict under those circumstances, which is very common with Police for Brutality complaints. There are usually two or more officers who will all say the same thing against one person, who is accused of committing a crime so their credibility is already tainted even though it’s very possible they didn’t commit a crime at all, and even being arrested by the police only requires probable cause, which is the lowest threshold of guilt in the criminal justice system. Light-years away from beyond a reasonable doubt. But whether it is a grand jury, or a trial jury, or even the victim making their case directly to the district attorney, they are hesitant to believe their story and proceed with the prosecution, again partly because the District Attorney’s Office works hand-in-hand with the police department in the jurisdiction. They need their help to make their cases. So if they alienate the police department, they will not have an easy time prosecuting their cases when they need the testimony of the police officers to make their case.In New York City, when officers have been prosecuted and convicted in the past, the NYPD pulls this despicable “protest “where they have these “sickouts” we are hundreds or thousands of cops will call in sick and not show up for work when they are scheduled to testify before the grand jury or add a trial for the city, to purposely screw up the ADA’s case. So hundreds of actual criminals have gone free because the arresting Officer, in an attempt to show solidarity with their breatheren, don’t show up to testify even though the case can be made without them, and the possible criminal goes free. So again, another reason that more cases are not prosecuted, is because the DAs office wants to make nice with the police department in their jurisdiction. New York City has the largest police force in the country with about 35,000 officers, so because of its size, it’s kind of a unique situation. But, on the other hand, it’s not that much different from any local county district attorney who has to rely on their local law-enforcement to testify about arrests they were involved in an able to be able To make a proper and fruitful prosecution.It’s ironic that it was over 25 years ago that the Rodney King tape came out, which eventually led to the acquittal of the officers involved, which led to the riots in Los Angeles. Somebody just happen to have a camcorder videotaping what was happening and it was all over the world. The body camera experiment is still in its infancy, and I would love to see Congress immediately find every police department in the country so that they are all wearing body cams 24/7, while on duty. Also it should not take a court order for the footage from these cameras or the dash cam cameras to be immediately released to the public.I hope that more officers realize that even if they don’t have a body cam on, there are such a plethora of video cameras from every store and every angle, that there have been cases made against cops who thought they were not being recorded, but they actually were, But a third camera unrelated to the police department.There is so much more I could write about this and my experiences with cases I handled that got totally white washed by the NYPD, but I’ve already written quite a bit. If anyone wants some hard examples of cases I was involved in with clear police for Tallardy but for one reason or another were never prosecuted, leave me a comment. Thank you.