An investigation by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed that federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against police in 96 percent of civil rights violation claims.
Between 1995 and 2015, federal prosecutors "did not pursue 12,703 potential civil rights violations out of 13,233 cases," found the paper, after going through 3 million records from the U.S. Department of Justice. That comes out to an average of about 26 cases nationwide each year. From Vice:
The same couldn't be said for other kinds of cases against non-police defendants. The investigation found that federal prosecutors declined to bring charges in only 23 percent of other types of criminal cases.
The stunning findings provide the hard, nationwide data to back up one of the fundamental claims driving the Black Lives Matter movement – that police officers are rarely held accountable when faced with allegations of brutality or misconduct, and whose victims, more often than not, are Black and Hispanic.
A geographical analysis found that federal prosecutors in the South are actually more likely to charge police with a civil rights violation than anywhere else in the country. In fact, one U.S. attorney's office in northern Mississippi charged police in 24 civil rights cases, more than any other office. Of those 24, 20 cases resulted in convictions.
When asked, Fraternal Order of Police National Executive Director Jim Pasco said, “Maybe they're not taking the cases because they're not good cases. It could be 96 percent of the time. Do you know how many false complaints are made against police officers?” Yet, in the past few years alone we’ve seen incident after incident of law enforcement officers violating the civil rights of civilians.
A Justice Department spokesperson said that they "take any allegation of law enforcement misconduct seriously and will review those allegations when they are brought to our attention."