Decodedc

There are hard, deep-seeded questions in the public’s outcry following two police killings – that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City. Race, poverty, police training, and the use of deadly force are only a few of them. There’s a legal question, too, only a small slice of the issue, but one that could be worked on in concrete ways. It stems from this: In both Ferguson and New York City, local prosecutors took the cases before local grand juries, and in both instances the jurors declined to indict the police officers involved in the killings. So the legal question is this: Should a criminal justice system investigate itself? Is there a conflict of interest when prosecutors, who work with cops every day putting away criminals, turn around and prosecute accused police officers? Gina Barton, an award-winning investigative reporter at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, says it’s a question people have been asking in Wisconsin for years. “If somebody in your own police department do