Group also wants access to departments’ excessive force data
Illinois’ attorney general asked Congress last Thursday (June 4) to grant his office the power to investigate “practices of unconstitutional policing.”
After Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, federal lawmakers established the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and 17 other attorneys general who signed on to the letter requested that authority as well due to the federal government’s “refusal to confront the problem of police misconduct.”
But in a 2018 memo, former U.S. attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote state and local governments have the “responsibility” to hold their law enforcement departments accountable, not the federal government.
Allowing their offices to undertake such analyses as well as to access statistics about police departments’ use of excessive force would allow “much more” to be done to combat an issue thousands of Americans are protesting across the country.
