The Justice Department reprimanded police in Phoenix on Thursday, finding severe discrimination against blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans, routine violations of the rights of the homeless and excessive use of force.
The review is one of the most difficult to come out of the Biden administration in its efforts to investigate the police department for systemic problems. It was also the first civil rights investigation into police practices that found that the rights of the homeless were being violated.
“Ultimately, our findings reveal evidence that points to long-standing dysfunction,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general who heads the department’s civil rights division, told reporters on Thursday. He added, “The problem at its core reflects a lack of effective oversight, training and accountability.”
City officials said in a statement Thursday that they will take the findings seriously. But he told the Justice Department that the city has made police reforms since the 2021 investigation, and that Phoenix police are now “very different from the department you’re investigating.”
Phoenix has bristled at the prospect of federal involvement in its policing. But the department’s findings were severe, Ms. Clarke said, “this is one example of how the police can’t trust their own police.”
He said the agency has no immediate plans to sue Phoenix and the police force for issuing the order. He indicated that the first step would be to reach an agreement with Phoenix officials to sign a consent decree – a legal improvement plan – or place the department under an independent monitor, as has happened in similar situations.
This could lead to a confrontation between the Biden administration and the largest city in an important swing state. Last month, former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, appeared to have an edge in the state, according to a poll of registered voters. President Biden narrowly won Arizona in the 2020 election.
The findings are contained in a 126-page report, released Thursday, following a 34-month investigation into allegations of abuse at the department between 2016 and 2022. The report also includes cases from 2023 and 2024.
Unlike other federal investigations into city policing, no single incident initiated the review, which focused on 2016 to 2022. But Phoenix had the nation’s highest number of police shootings in 2018, resulting in 23 deaths, and critics mention history. from the persecution of minorities, the disabled and the homeless.
Phoenix reported 12 fatal police shootings in 2023, and has reported eight this year.
The Justice Department under Mr. Biden has moved toward greater oversight of the police department, after four years of little action under the Trump administration. Opened nine investigations and are working on 12 consent decrees. That’s a welcome change, said Hernandez Stroud, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. But an often-overlooked challenge, he said, is “stepping back” when consent decrees or other federal oversight measures end.
Critics of the Phoenix police said the report validated what they called unheeded complaints about police shootings, arrests and traffic stops that disproportionately affected minority communities.
“It’s even worse than we’ve been told,” said Viri Hernandez, executive director of Poder in Action, a community group that has studied policing in working-class Phoenix neighborhoods. “Families whose children have died have paid the price for police brutality, and the council and the mayor have done it for too long.”
Investigators say officers often use unreasonable force as a de-escalation tactic. They say officers shoot, use stun guns or restrain people under mental or emotional stress who pose an immediate threat.
In one example, the officer kneeled on the neck of a suicidal man who had been sitting alone in a car in a parking lot and had injured himself. In another, officers shot a suicidal resident in a group home after he pulled out a “small pocket knife” and disobeyed orders to put it down and stop. Officers also shot the knife-wielding man at his own throat. When they threatened to shoot him, he told officers, “That’s what I want.”
Especially when responding to people with mental health issues, Ms. Clarke said, “the hair-trigger tendency of the Phoenix police to use unnecessary and excessive force is pronounced and dangerous.”
When officers saw someone throw rocks at their vehicle in 2022, they stopped on the road and asked officers to come to the scene with ammunition designed to stop, but not kill. Instead of waiting, the report said, officers returned to the man and asked him to drop the rock. They shot him as he started to throw more. Phoenix settled a wrongful-death lawsuit with the family for $5.5 million last year.
The report also condemned the city for the way police handle Phoenix’s burgeoning homeless population, a troubling problem for cities nationwide. He said officers did not stop and arrest the homeless, sometimes rousing people to sleep outside and sending them to tent camps in the center of the city known as the Zone. (The camp has been cleared.)
Between 2016 and 2022, nearly four in 10 of all arrestees in Phoenix will be homeless, the department found.
Investigators also found that low rates of arrests and traffic violations disproportionately affected Black, Hispanic and Native American residents in Phoenix. Blacks are seven times more likely to be cited for marijuana offenses than whites, and Native Americans are 44 times more likely to be cited for alcohol offenses than whites.
Jared Keenan, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said the report was an account of abuse. The group is suing Phoenix for using force to break up protests and raiding homeless encampments.
“They love violence,” he said. “He despises the people he’s in a relationship with. It’s just hard to read.”
The investigation has exposed deep divisions in Phoenix over policing and the use of force by officers.
Police held several community meetings to update people on the investigation and the department’s policies and changes, where they faced skepticism from family members of those killed by law enforcement. Police reform activists say Phoenix police have failed to make the necessary changes. The director of the city’s new oversight office resigned in January, citing a lack of independence.
At the same time, police supporters have pressured the city to reject the consent decree, advertising on street billboards and launching a website attacking the Justice Department.
Phoenix has grown vocal in his criticism of the Justice Department as the investigation unspooled for nearly three years, costing the city more than $7 million to produce reams of documents and data and comply with investigators’ requests.
Phoenix said it has cooperated throughout the investigation and will “receive additional insight” from investigators. But city officials say they and police don’t want to hand over change and oversight to a “complicated, expensive consent-decision process, and hand over control to the DOJ.”
Phoenix said it has made a “tremendous wave of reforms” in the nearly three years since the Justice Department began its investigation in August 2021, including the use of body cameras, banning chokeholds and shootings in moving cars, and establishing new standards for the use of deadly force. . The new interim chief, Michael Sullivan, also tightened the department’s use-of-force policy so that it applies only when “absolutely necessary, not just when it can be justified.”
City officials have criticized the Justice Department for not explaining exactly why they are investigating the police department and have accused investigators of a lack of transparency.
Ann O’Brien, councilwoman of the city of Phoenix, said she had only received the report there when it was released publicly, and expressed her frustration that the Federal investigators have refused to detail any conclusions with the city earlier.
“It’s incredibly disappointing,” she said. “If we’re violating people’s civil rights, why don’t you show it to the city manager, the police department chief, the City Council so we can make changes?”
Some cities, including Baltimore, Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky., have agreed to accept federal oversight rather than be dragged to court.