The Phoenix police department routinely discriminates against people of color and kills civilians without justification, the US Department of Justice announced in an investigative report on Thursday.
The government found a “pattern or practice” of the police department using excessive force and violating the civil rights of Black, Hispanic and Native American people. In a first finding of its kind against any US police department, the justice department also concluded that Phoenix police unlawfully detain unhoused people and dispose of their belongings. The justice department further uncovered police discrimination against people with behavioral health disabilities when officers are dispatched to help with people in crisis, and found that police had violated the rights of people engaged in protected speech.
The sweeping three-year-investigation into the department’s “pervasive failings” follows a steady stream of scandals surrounding police brutality and extraordinarily high rates of killings by officers in the Arizona city. In recent years, the Guardian revealed cases of Phoenix officers attacking and injuring a young woman during a minor traffic stop; burning a teenager on hot pavement while restraining her; and facing accusations of sexual assault on the job.
The justice department said certain laws, including drug and low-level offenses, were enforced more severely by Phoenix officers against Black, Hispanic and Native American people than against white residents who engaged in the same conduct.
Investigators found that Phoenix police use “dangerous tactics that lead to force that is unnecessary and unreasonable”.
A Phoenix police spokesperson declined to comment. The department had pre-emptively pushed back against the investigation before its release, arguing it did not need oversight to implement reforms. The Phoenix mayor, Kate Gallego, said in a statement that the city received the report on Thursday, and the city council would meet to discuss it: “I will carefully and thoroughly review the findings before making further comment.”
Kristen Clarke, who heads the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a press conference that Phoenix police’s own efforts had been inadequate: “Many reforms have not yet been implemented. Other reforms exist on paper, but not in practice. In total, these efforts are simply not enough to address the full scope of our findings.”
The report found that the “practice of stopping, citing and arresting unhoused people was so widespread” that 37% of all arrests in the city between 2016 and 2022 were of people experiencing homelessness. It also found that police have violated the rights of people sleeping outside by forcing them to move to a concentrated area where they are more vulnerable, saying: “While city officials recognize that being homeless is not a crime, officers nevertheless roused people sleeping in public to send them to a small and dangerous part of Phoenix known as the Zone.”
“A person’s constitutional rights do not diminish when they lack shelter,” the report continued.
The justice department also zeroed on the city’s 911 operations. Even though the city has invested $15m to send non-police responders to mental health calls, the city has not given the 911 call-takers and dispatchers necessary training.
“Too frequently, they dispatch police alone when it would be appropriate to send behavioral health responders,” the justice department said. Officers assume people with disabilities are dangerous and resort to force rather than de-escalation tactics, leading to force and criminal consequences for those with behavioral health disabilities, rather than finding them care, the justice department said.
The justice department also found that police use unjustified force against people who are handcuffed and accused of low-level crimes.
“Officers rely on less-lethal force to attempt to resolve situations quickly, often when no force is necessary and without any meaningful attempt to de-escalate,” the report said.
Police shoot projectiles at people without evidence a person is an immediate threat, the report went on, citing the case of a man who was accused of taking his mother’s car without permission.
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“The man was leaving a laundromat when an officer immediately fired Pepperballs at him, and continued to fire after the man was on his knees and had curled his body onto the sidewalk,” the report said.
Police have also delayed providing medical aid and “used significant force on people who were incapacitated after being critically wounded”, the justice department wrote. It cited an example of officers shooting a man and then subsequently firing multiple projector rounds and sending a police dog to bite and drag him.
Officers in that instance continued using force despite the man making no movement toward the object that had been in his hand. Officers waited nine minutes to render aid, and the victim did not survive.
The report cited another case of what appeared to be deliberate delay in rendering aid. After police shot an armed man in the chest, a supervisor said to officers on the scene: “If you’re not seeing any signs of life, we’re going to move up with less-lethal and give him a couple pops before we approach.” Officers continued to fire “stunbag rounds” even though there was no evidence of a threat, and when an officer said he needed to put gloves on to start CPR, the supervisor said: “No rush, guys, no rush.”
Police also “routinely use neck and compression restraints that put people at risk of serious injury or suffocation”, the report said, citing one case of an officer pressing his knee into the head of a teenage boy accused of entering an empty warehouse for a party. When the boy objected to this tactic, the officer explicitly defended it, saying: “I know I am, purposefully.” In a separate incident involving a man accused of using drugs at a bus stop, an officer defended this use of force by saying: “I put my knee on his skull to protect his head.”
Finally, the report criticized police for shooting people “when [the officers’] own actions have created or greatly magnified the risk they face”. The justice department said: “We identified unconstitutional shootings that likely could have been avoided absent officers’ reckless tactics.”
Steve Benedetto, a local civil rights lawyer, said the report offered a powerful rebuttal to police officials’ claim that it is a “self-assessing” agency that properly addresses abuse and needs no oversight: “What the DoJ report says is exactly what the community has been trying to highlight for years – that this department is not remotely ‘self-correcting’. They often fail to conduct meaningful investigations of officers and routinely clear officers in cases of significant misconduct.”
The findings also validated the stories of police harassment from his clients in historically Black and brown neighborhoods, he said: “The way they describe their experience of police is like an occupying army. For teenagers, they feel like the cops are out to get them, instead of protect them.”