PHOENIX — The Phoenix Police Department has had obvious problems for years, the evidence was everywhere, and city leaders who claimed they didn’t know are lying to the public, according to a collection of community groups.
Poder in Action, Black Lives Matter, and Mass Liberation AZ held a joint news conference Thursday to give their reaction to the investigative report released by the Department of Justice.
“In the 126 pages, it lays out what we have known for decades: That this Phoenix police department is racist and violent,” said Kathy Brody, a civil rights attorney.
Activists, attorneys, and victims of police abuse spoke during the event held outside the Phoenix Police headquarters.
The speakers focused less on individual findings within the DOJ’s report and instead focused on how city leaders have claimed they didn’t know about the extent of the problems inside their police department.
“When Mayor Gallego and City of Phoenix say this is new to them, they are lying,” said Rebecca Denis, who’s with Poder in Action.
In a series of statements and interviews following the DOJ report released last week, Phoenix officials said they need time to review the findings.
“We want to see not only what these individual incidents are that the Department of Justice refers to, but we also want to see whether it included policy change or whether it possibly included discipline, or other changes within the department as far as practices go,” Chief Michael Sullivan wrote in a statement.
But critics said those statements are misleading.
Many of the specific cases cited in the DOJ’s report were widely known and publicly covered in recent years.
Several cases made national headlines.
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That includes a major scandal that involved officers colluding with prosecutors to invent a fake gang to falsely charge protesters as members.
Denis said it was clear that city leaders were “gaslighting” the public.
“Absolutely, I think that’s them trying to save themselves and try to figure out what they have to go do,” she said.
Several people at the news conference also criticized Phoenix for claiming that the city fully cooperated with the federal investigation.
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In the DOJ’s report, it states that the city’s cooperation was “less than fulsome.”
“The City allowed employees to decline our interview requests, and more than 40 officers and supervisors involved in PhxPD’s protest response declined to speak to us. We believe these employees had relevant information about PhxPD’s protest response and that interviewing them would have enabled us to complete our investigation more efficiently. The City also refused to produce external reports containing recommendations about PhxPD’s protest practices in 2020, or to allow us to interview the consultants who conducted those reviews,” according to the federal investigation.
Brody highlighted how much money Phoenix has spent trying to get ahead of the DOJ’s findings during the three-year investigation.
“The city even hired political operative Michael Bromwich to oversee the city’s response to the investigation. And they paid Bromwich’s firm more than a million bucks in taxpayer money over the past three years,” Brody said. “And I’m a lawyer, and I would say, that not too many times that somebody pays a million bucks to a lawyer to cooperate fully with an investigation. This is not the behavior of a city, police department that has nothing to hide.”
Bromwich is a former high-ranking DOJ attorney who now works in private practice.
Contact ABC15 Chief Investigator Dave Biscobing at Dave@ABC15.com.
