Police Malpractice

            Geographic Patterns of Police Malpractice in the United States.
             During the last thirty years a substantial number of social geographers, criminologists and experts in the regional sciences have demonstrated a growing interest in the geography crime. According to Georges (1978: 2), the geography of crime involves methods and theoretical foundations that make this research different from other approaches that study violence and corruption. The importance of this type of social science focus is that is associates the practice of anti-social relations with the spatial distribution of their negative effects. The geographical space is important in any form of social interaction and in the exercise of political, martial or paramilitary power (Georges).
             Police brutality is against the law wherever it occurs in the U.S., and those who commit such acts can be subjected to civil suits by their victims (Maran 1999). Those who investigate the geography of crime seem to overlook this particular offense. Although significant progress has been made when looking at law enforcement misconduct, most studies concerning police malpractice have not been geographical. The majority of these studies contain little information about the regional differences in police abuse across the U.S. While the media has focused on the seriousness of the problem in largely populated states such as New York or California, the majority of the cases investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice occur in different sections of the nation. In this paper I will try to examine interstate patterns of police malpractice. I will try to pay closer attention to the areas that the media usually does not address when police malpractice is suspected. .
             The work of crime geographers has gained importance in the social sciences during the last thirty years with the arrival of new mapping techniques and information systems. Herbert (1998:48) describes these developments as an "elaborate political technology" that surveys, monitors, controls and maintains a "cartography of power.