The United States sues Philadelphia over its police
Rizzo commissioner from 1967 and mayor 1972-80; federal suit filed 13 August 1979, dismissed 30 October 1979The Philadelphia Police Department, city-wide, Philadelphia County, PA
In 1979 the Justice Department sued a city over police brutality for the first time, naming Philadelphia, Mayor Frank Rizzo and eighteen officials. A federal court threw it out: no statute let the government bring such a case.
Frank Rizzo ran the Philadelphia Police Department as commissioner from 1967 and the city as mayor from 1972 to 1980, on an explicit promise of force. In 1970, after the killing of a Fairmount Park officer, his department raided the city's Black Panther Party offices and stripped the men naked on the pavement in front of news photographers, and the photograph ran in the papers the next morning - which was the point of it. Black and Puerto Rican Philadelphians described a department that shot people who were not armed, beat people who were handcuffed, and ran an internal complaints system that was fragmented by design so that no complaint ever arrived anywhere.
Two class actions brought under the civil rights statutes reached the Supreme Court as Rizzo v. Goode in January 1976. The district court had found a pattern of illegal and unconstitutional mistreatment of minority citizens and ordered the department to rewrite how it handled complaints. The Supreme Court reversed, holding that the order was an unwarranted intrusion by federal judges into matters left to state and local officials.
On 13 August 1979 the Justice Department filed suit against the City of Philadelphia, Mayor Rizzo, the police commissioner and eighteen other officials, alleging that they had condoned systematic brutality. It was the first time the federal government had alleged that an entire police department violated the constitutional rights of the people it policed. Rizzo called it hogwash.
On 30 October 1979 the district court dismissed the heart of the case, finding that Congress had never given the Attorney General authority to bring it and had in fact declined to; the Third Circuit affirmed on 29 December 1980. Fifteen years later Congress filled the gap, writing the pattern-or-practice power into the 1994 crime act - the authority under which the Justice Department has since investigated dozens of police departments. That power exists because of what Philadelphia's police did and because no one could sue over it.
The shape is the City of Philadelphia, drawn indicatively; the authoritative boundary is the Census TIGER/Line place file. The claim here is about a department's practice across the whole city, not a single site.
Sources
- Philadelphia Police DepartmentEncyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, Rutgers-Camdenphiladelphiaencyclopedia.orgBacks Rizzo's tenure as commissioner and mayor, the raid on the Black Panther Party offices and the strip-search before news photographers, and the lasting effect on the department's relations with Black Philadelphians.
- U.S. Reports: Rizzo v. Goode, 423 U.S. 362 (1976)Library of Congress (1976)loc.govThe official report. Records the district court's finding of a pervasive pattern of unconstitutional police mistreatment of minority citizens, and the Supreme Court's reversal of the remedy ordered for it.
- Justice Accuses Philadelphia of Police AbusesThe Washington Post (1979)washingtonpost.comContemporaneous reporting of the filing on 13 August 1979, the officials named, and the specific practices alleged.