The report also presses prosecutors and judges not to demand or accept plea deals where defendants waive essential legal rights

But most stark in the report is research that cites innocent defendants who agree to falsely plead guilty, sometimes on the advice of their own lawyers. An Innocence Project database of exonerations includes dozens of people who falsely pleaded guilty.

The prevalence of plea bargaining exploded in the last several decades as a way to save money and time and to promote more certainty in outcomes. But the practice comes with "a very high cost,"

"Trials have become rare legal artifacts in most U.S. jurisdictions, and even nonexistent in others,"

Murder rates flare, in short, when legal legitimacy falters in a community--when justice is corrupted, when power is in dispute, when authorities ignore violent injury and death. Isolation and segregation magnify the effects.

but police seem to have a very strong interest in maintaining the policy.

Over 80 percent of Americans oppose erasing historical records of officer misconduct.

Our main themes include accountability, training, and culture.

Research documents that after controlling for segregation and disadvantage, predominately Black and white neighborhoods differ little in violent crime rates.

This is a historical pattern

To others, they are examples of a system imbued with institutional and cultural failures that expose civilians and police officers to harm.

Incarceration, meanwhile, was reserved for white citizens, while the white majority in turn viewed enslaved Black people as lacking souls that could be improved through such punishment. Instead, enslaved people accused of criminal violations were tortured, mutilated or killed, with few escaping the whip.

“We're not asking police officers to become psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists — we can get those who are experts in those areas to address those issues. When mental and behavioral health is needed, we now have another vehicle that we can use.”

police, as generalists, are not trained to respond to every type of domestic or mental health crisis.

The program, known as Support Team Assisted Response, or STAR, began with a two-person team traveling the city in a white van. They have responded to 2,700 calls without once requiring police backup.

A report from the center-left think tank Third Way found that Trump states had a 40 percent higher per capita murder rate in 2020 than Biden states.

San Francisco has also suffered from large numbers of auto thefts and high-profile incidents of vandalism and retail theft.

“Not only have the police been defunded in some places, they've been demonized and face a more difficult environment to do their jobs,”

Americans bought 4.3 million more guns than usual during the first five months of the pandemic alone, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

“It's not that the whole society fell apart,” he says, “It's just that there are enough people who were already living on the edge, and this pushed them off of it.”

“The answer is to fund the police … with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”

“In 2022, we're seeing an uptick of crime that's going to be reflected in the electoral cycle.”

At the same time, distrust between police and these communities has grown, due in part to high-profile events such as the 2020 killings of African Americans George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police officers in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky.

mass shootings — generally defined as four or more people being shot or killed

But the Safety Alliance has been thriving amid a positive trend in the 73rd Precinct, Gonzalez said. In the first half of this year, homicides fell 50%, shootings fell 25% and the rate of grand larcenies of automobiles also fell even as it rose in other neighborhoods, he said.

Similar programs are underway in Eugene, Oregon; Denver; Rochester, New York; and other places, according to the Center for American Progress

“This is someone who is like me, who understands me and is calling me out on the fact that I’m out of pocket a little bit,” Coots said.

Residents had complained that officers had become aggressive, grabbing men off the street to arrest them for minor offenses.

Over the next three years, the city will provide $2.1 million to help link the local organizations that participate most frequently in the Safety Alliance so that they can work cohesively throughout the year.

Brownsville Safety Alliance, a group of neighborhood and city groups, police officers and members of the Kings County District Attorney’s office that is trying to ensure that fewer people are arrested and entangled in the criminal justice system.

The civilians have no arrest powers. But they have persuaded people to turn in illegal guns, prevented shoplifting, kept a man from robbing a bodega and stopped a pregnant woman from hitting a boyfriend who had not bought a car seat and a stroller as he had promised.

Police channel all 911 calls from that area to the civilians. Unless there is a major incident or a victim demands an arrest, officers, always in plainclothes, shadow the workers.

The brief encounter encapsulated a simple yet unorthodox concept that is at the heart of a bold experiment organizers believe could redefine law-enforcement in New York: letting neighbors, not the police, respond to low-level street crime.