- Police Brutality Watch

Houston is a prime example of a national trend that shows law enforcement officials hardly ever are taken to court over allegations of violating people's civil rights, according to a study of federal records. Federal prosecutors nationwide decline to prosecute about 98 percent of the cases against police officers, prison guards and other government officials, according to U.S. Justice Department records analyzed in a report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. TRAC, an independent, nonprofit research institute at Syracuse University, files hundreds of Freedom of Information requests a year and provides federal data to news organizations in an online database. The federal Southern District of Texas, dominated by Houston, gets the nation's largest number of FBI investigations of police abuse and other civil rights complaints, and has one of the lowest prosecution rates, according to the report. The U.S. Attorney's Office declines to take action on 99.3 percent of the cases in the Houston region, the study found, and four Texas districts were ranked among the five districts nationwide with the largest number of cases received from the FBI from 1986 to 2003. [more]