Calling for Change
Protests erupted following policing incidents in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015. More protests occurred elsewhere—all were reported widely on national media. People were angered by what they saw as the unjustified deaths of unarmed people at the hands of police. They were also frustrated with the ongoing, unfair treatment of people of color by police across America. The protesters called for change in the ways in which many officers carried out their duties; the news media picked up their message.
The U.S. Department of Justice has the authority to investigate repeated complaints of police misconduct. Investigation findings can force police departments to reform—that is, to change their policies and procedures to better respect citizens’ constitutional rights.
In this lesson, you will get a firsthand look at policing in Newark, New Jersey, as reported by investigative journalist Jelani Cobb for FRONTLINE's broadcast, Policing the Police.
Read about Cobb (on the right). Then watch this video excerpt, in which Cobb learns what the U.S. Department of Justice discovered about police practices in Newark and what it recommended as a result.
One of the country’s foremost journalists on race and politics, FRONTLINE correspondent Jelani Cobb is a historian and professor at Columbia University. His memories of encounters with police while growing up mirror those of many racial minority groups in America: he felt unfairly targeted. In the fall of 2015, Cobb began reporting on the situation in Newark, where the police department was being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department. To cover the story, he interviewed police, city and federal officials, and community members; rode with the police in patrol cars; and attended public meetings.
| Keyboard Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Space | Pause/Play video playback |
| Enter | Pause/Play video playback |
| m | Mute/Unmute video volume |
| Up and Down arrows | Increase and decrease volume by 10% |
| Right and Left arrows | Seek forward or backward by 5 seconds |
| 0-9 | Fast seek to x% of the video. |
| f | Enter or exit fullscreen. (Note: To exit fullscreen in flash press the Esc key. |
| c | Press c to toggle captions on or off |
PROTESTERS: Stop police brutality! Stop police brutality! In the black community!
JELANI COBB, Correspondent: The investigation here began after years of complaints about police misconduct from local activists and the ACLU. The Justice Department issued a 49-page report.
PAUL FISHMAN, U.S. Attorney: What we found was that there were far too many uses of force that were excessive, they weren’t appropriately documented, and then they certainly weren’t investigated well at the end of the day.
As a result of the many, many, many complaints that we saw over a six-year period, there was only one complaint of unjustified use of force that was sustained by the police department.
And so one of the things that we’re going to do now is retrain the police entirely, getting training on force, getting training on—on stops and arrests, having the police department in Newark think differently about how it does its job and how it relates to the people that it serves.
Note that throughout this lesson, you can highlight any text onscreen and add your own comments. You can refer back to your comments on each page when you eventually review the lesson.
