For the Leadership Conference, which represents more than 200 organizations dedicated to protecting the rights of people of color, that means Congress needs to pass long-idling bills including the End Racial Profiling Act, the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act, and The Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act. But there’s one other place Congress should look for solutions for meaningful police reform: The Voting Rights Act.
So say the Co-Director of the Program in Constitutional Theory, History & Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Jason Mazzone, and Stephen Rushin, a law professor at the University of Alabama. Their paper, “From Selma to Ferguson: The Voting Rights Act as a Blueprint for Police Reform,” argues that the civil rights law passed in 1965 to mitigate voter discrimination also offers guidance on how to mitigate rogue policing.
Under the Voting Rights Act, Congress created a formula that determines which areas of the country warrant federal supervision over their election affairs. That formula was derived by looking at where African Americans were prevented from voting due to obstructions such as literacy tests and poll taxes. It also includes places with historically low voter-registration and turnout rates among African Americans.
A similar formula could be applied to areas where police departments have been found guilty of engaging in patterns and practices of racial discrimination and misconduct, write Rushin and Mazzone. The Justice Department has already established that such patterns exist in police departments not only inFerguson and Baltimore, but also Newark, Cleveland and New Orleans. There are currently more than 20 police departments being monitored by the Justice Department due to police misconduct.