Civil Rights and Wrongs for March 22, 2022

This Tuesday we’ll have an encore presentation that first aired on July 6, 2021.  We talked with Beth Schwartzapfel, award-winning Staff Writer for The Marshall Project, which seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency regarding the US criminal justice system.  Their goal is to render that system more fair, effective, transparent and humane.  Last May, Beth co-authored an article in the Austin American-Statesman that covered a particularly egregious case of police misconduct.  We focus on the matter of qualified immunity for law enforcement personnel.  The show also featured Jim Harrington, retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project, who spoke from his own experience in dealing with police misconduct.

And in a new segment, Austin Sanders, Staff Writer at the Austin Chronicle, discusses his frustration in trying to find out what sort of sanctions APD has administered to officers as a result of complaints/incidents stemming from the racial justice protests in May, 2020.  We begin with a review of accountability, starting from within the ranks of APD but extending to the broader city government (Office of Police Oversight), and even to the judiciary, both criminal and civil courts.