Josh Sanburn

Investigation found that officers excessively used deadly force, unnecessarily used Tasers and chemical sprays, and used unwarranted force against mentally ill people

The U.S. Department of Justice has told the Cleveland police department to conduct an internal shake-up after a federal probe found its officers systematically and routinely used excessive and unreasonable force.

A 21-month-long investigation into the practices of the Cleveland Division of Police concluded Thursday that officers excessively use deadly force, unnecessarily utilize tools like Tasers and chemical sprays, and use unwarranted force against people who are mentally ill.

The report is a damning portrayal of a department that has been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union and others within Cleveland for years over its conduct.

(MORE: Attorney General Eric Holder Plans ‘Institute of Justice’ to Address Protest Concerns)

The federal government began investigating the department in March 2013 after the officer-related shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams following a high-speed car chase. On Nov. 29, 2012, more than 100 Cleveland police officers were involved in trying to apprehend Russell and Williams, both of whom were black and unarmed. Officers eventually fired 137 shots at the car. Almost all of the officers who fired were white.

The department has come under scrutiny again in recent days after a black 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, was shot dead on Nov. 22 by a white police officer in a Cleveland park, who apparently mistook a toy pellet gun for a real firearm.

Cleveland police have agreed to an independent monitor who will oversee a series of reforms within the department.

Richard Combs was formally charged over the 2011 shooting of Bernard Bailey

—TheA white former police chief in South Carolina was formally charged in the 2011 shooting death of a black man in a town hall parking lot Wednesday, the same day a New York grand jury declined to indict a white NYPD officer in the death of a black Staten Island man, sparking widespread protests.

A South Carolina grand jury indicted Richard Combs, an ex-police chief who fatally shot 54-year-old Bernard Bailey during a confrontation near town hall. Combs was the only officer in Eutawville, S.C., a population of about 300 people.

(MORE: Behind the Video of Eric Garner’s Deadly Confrontation With Police)

According to the Associated Press, Combs attempted to arrest Bailey in May 2011 after he went to the Eutawville town hall about a broken-taillight ticket given to his daughter. The two got into a fight and Combs shot Bailey while he was in his truck. In 2013, Combs was indicted for misconduct in office, a lesser charge.

The indictment comes after recent decisions by grand juries in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City in which white officers were involved in deadly confrontations with two unarmed black men, Ferguson’s Michael Brown and Staten Island’s Eric Garner.

Both grand juries decided there was insufficient evidence to convict the officers involved. Combs’ lawyer questioned the timing of the murder charge and claimed that prosecutors were merely trying to piggyback off national outrage over the deaths of Brown and Garner.

The latest Census numbers show Americans aged 18 to 34 struggling worse than their parents did in the '80s

Millennials make less money, are more likely to live in poverty and have lower rates of employment than their parents did at their ages 20 and 30 years ago.

That’s the bleak assessment from the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey numbers Thursday, which paint a financially disheartening portrait of Americans aged 18 to 34 who are still trying to rebound from the Great Recession.

The survey largely shows that millennials are worse off than the same age group in 1980, 1990 and 2000 when looking at almost every major economic indicator:

1. Median income
Millennials earned roughly $33,883 a year on average between 2009 and 2013 compared with $35,845 in 1980 and $37,355 in 2000 (all in 2013 inflation-adjusted dollars).

(MORE: American Women are Waiting to Have Kids)

2. Leaving home
More than 30% of millennials live with at least one parent compared to about 23% in 1980, largely because they can’t get a job.

3. Employment
Only about 65% of millennials are currently working compared with more than 70% in 1990

4. Poverty
Almost 20% live in poverty compared with about 14% in 1980.

But it’s not all bad news. The new Census numbers show that young Americans are much more diverse and educated than previous generations. About 22% have a bachelor’s degree or higher (up from 16% in 1980), and a quarter have grown up speaking a language other than English at home (up from 10% in 1980).

And possibly the most interesting statistic in the new numbers? A little over 2% of those aged 18 to 34 are veterans, compared with almost 10% in 1980.

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Read next: Millennials Are Mooches…and Other Money Myths

The NYPD has a strict definition

On Wednesday, a grand jury in New York decided not to indict an NYPD officer in the death of an unarmed black man during his arrest for selling loose cigarettes in his Staten Island neighborhood.

Video footage of the incident shows Eric Garner being subdued by several officers, with NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo apparently wrapping his forearm around the man’s neck — a move that has widely been described as a “chokehold.” Garner can be heard in the video saying “I can’t breathe.”

In grand jury testimony, Pantaleo says he merely used a maneuver that had been taught to him in police academy. According to the New York Times, Pantaleo says he hooked his arm under one of Garner’s arms as he wrapped his other arm around Garner’s body.

But was it a chokehold? Here’s the precise language the NYPD Patrol Guide uses to describe the maneuver, which it has banned for two decades:

“A chokehold shall include, but is not limited to, any pressure to the throat or windpipe, which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air.”

That definition is generally the same one used in martial arts or other combat sports.

Despite the ban, chokeholds are still widely used by police officers in New York City. According to the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, dozens of chokehold complaints are filed every year. So far this year, more than 100 have been filed. The high water mark was in 2012, when about 250 complaints were lodged.

Scott Panetti, who is scheduled to die Wednesday, has a long history of severe mental illness

In 1992, Scott Panetti shaved his head, dressed himself in camo and fatally shot his in-laws in front of his wife and daughter. Afterward, he put on a suit and surrendered to police.

At his trial, Panetti wore a cowboy costume and acted as his own lawyer, waiving his right to counsel. He applied for 200 subpoenas that included John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ. He asked prospective jurors whether they had any Indian blood in them. His opening statement referenced demons. And he referred to himself as Sergeant Iron Horse when he confessed to killing his wife’s parents. It wasn’t Scott who killed them, he said. It was Sarge.

Panetti’s defense appeared to be that of a seriously ill man. And by most accounts, he was. First diagnosed with early schizophrenia in 1978, Panetti had been in and out of a dozen mental hospitals over 14 years, regularly determined to have paranoia, depression, delusions and hallucinations and eventually deemed disabled by the Social Security Administration, qualifying him for monthly benefits before he turned 30. Since that first diagnosis, Panetti came to see life as a cosmic battle between good and evil, one in which he—or Sarge, or the other voices in his head—played a role.

In one instance, Panetti’s first wife came home to find that he had buried his furniture in the front yard because he believed he needed to purge Satan from the objects. In an affidavit, she said she believed her husband should be involuntarily committed and that he had become “obsessed with the idea that the devil was in our house.” Panetti’s explanation for killing the parents of his second wife was similar, according to his lawyers and court documents: the shootings were “Sarge’s” attempt to get rid of the devil he believed was inside his in-laws.

(MORE: Ohio Looks to Shield Lethal Injection Drugmakers)

In 1995, a jury found Panetti guilty and sentenced him to death. That sentence comes due Wednesday, when Panetti is scheduled to die by lethal injection. To some, it will be justice finally being served. But to Panetti’s lawyers and other supporters, the planned execution is unconstitutional, and evidence of a capital punishment system in dire need of reform.

Panetti’s attorneys are appealing to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for a last-minute stay of execution, arguing that Panetti doesn’t understand he’s being executed for the double murder. They say Panetti hasn’t been given a competency hearing in seven years, and they believe his mental state has deteriorated since then. Panetti’s attorneys are challenging an earlier denial by an appeals court to hold a competency hearing, while also seeking a stay of execution from the Supreme Court on the grounds that putting to death someone who is mentally ill is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

So far, courts haven’t been receptive to those arguments. Several witnesses for the state of Texas have testified that Panetti is competent and has an understanding of his crime. The state has provided hours of audio recordings of Panetti discussing the murders in which he “spoke rationally, demonstrated a fairly sophisticated understanding of his case, and discussed in an intelligent manner the death penalty and its moral implications,” according to court documents.

Kathryn Kase, executive director of the Texas Defender Service who is representing Panetti, questions those accounts and says that his history with mental illness alone should be enough to prevent him from being executed.

(MORE: Utah Looks to Old Execution Method: Firing Squad)

“This is not a situation where a guy gets admitted to a hospital once and comes out and commits a crime,” Kase says. “These were multiple hospital admissions over a 12-year period. This is a pretty astonishing and well-documented history of mental illness. Nobody exists for 36 years like this in an effort to get off the hook of criminal responsibility.”

Dozens of mental health professionals and organizations have come out in support of clemency for Panetti, including the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and Mental Health America. But time is running out.

Panetti would be the 11th inmate executed in Texas this year, the most of any state. For years, Texas has killed more death row inmates than any other state.

Kase, who visited Panetti a couple weeks ago, says his mental health is worsening, possibly due to stress related to the upcoming execution date.

“He is extremely paranoid, and he is delusional,” Kase says. “And these delusions are that the prison wants to kill him to prevent him from preaching the gospel on death row or telling others about corruption at TDCJ [the Texas Department of Criminal Justice]. We’re not psychologists. We’re not mental health professionals. But we do know we’re seeing something really terrible happen.”

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Body-worn cameras are poised to become standard for police around the U.S. after the tragedy in Ferguson

In the fevered moments after the grand jury’s decision not to charge Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, the family of the slain 18-year-old released a statement pleading for peace — and urging people to join their campaign to get police around the nation to wear cameras.

“We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen,” the statement read. “Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.”

The crusade is understandable. No video recordings of the Aug. 9 confrontation between Wilson and Brown exist, and eyewitness accounts of the incident were often in conflict. Some said Brown had his hands up when he was shot. Others said Brown was charging toward Wilson when he officer fired. To many, a camera on Wilson’s uniform would have ended the uncertainty and potentially avoided the subsequent tumult that engulfed the St. Louis suburb.

VOTE: Should the Ferguson Protestors Be TIME’s Person of the Year?

The lesson wasn’t lost on other police departments. In the weeks after Brown’s death, numerous law-enforcement agencies around the U.S. began experimenting with body cameras. Anaheim, Calif.; Denver; Miami Beach; Washington, D.C.; and even Ferguson have all begun outfitting officers with cameras or announced plans to start. The movement Brown’s family called for the night Wilson was cleared has actually been growing since the day their son was killed.

“Police realize that they’re under greater levels of public scrutiny,” says Art Lurigio, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Loyola University Chicago. “And the Michael Brown case is elevating this urgency. It’s bringing this discussion of cameras to a more fevered pitch.”

For police, cameras have the potential to offer visual evidence of confrontations, which could provide a level of public transparency and potentially save law-enforcement agencies millions of dollars in legal fees spent fighting and settling suits brought by citizens.

But only a few studies have been conducted on the effects body-worn cameras. The most frequently cited came out of the police department in Rialto, Calif., which found an 88% drop in the number of complaints filed against officers and a 60% decline in use of force incidents compared with the year before officers adopted cameras.

(MORE: All the Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown)

Most experts say that the Brown case has accelerated a discussion about cameras that was already taking place inside many of the country’s bigger departments thanks to the ubiquity of camera-equipped phones.

“The big question is not whether or not agencies will adopt body-worn cameras but the sorts of policies that will be put into place to monitor and control the use of this new technology,” says Victor Thompson, an expert in race and crime at Rider University in New Jersey.

For instance, Thompson says a camera that can be easily turned on and off at the discretion of an officer may be of little value because it would allow that officer to control what’s ultimately being recorded and fail to provide the kind of transparency activists are calling for. Other experts advocate establishing rules about how and when the cameras are used along with clear protocols for review of video footage and sanctions against officers if they fail to comply.

Not all cops are on board. As police departments increasingly experiment with making officers a mobile surveillance pod, some police unions are pushing back. They argue that having to turn on a camera during a threatening situation could lead to deadly consequences at a time when every second is important.

Such resistance is unlikely to stop the spread of cameras. In recent weeks, police departments in cities such as Cleveland and Dallas have announced plans to put cameras on officers or expand existing wearable programs.

“In 10, 15 years,” Lurigio says, “I think we’ll be talking about the camera in the way that today we talk about the baton or the badge.”

Should Ferguson Protestors Be Person of the Year? Vote below for #TIMEPOY

'We objected to this prosecutor back in August,' said the attorney for Michael Brown's family

On Tuesday, attorneys for the family of Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, took out their frustration over the lack of an indictment in the fatal incident on one man: Bob McCulloch.

“We objected back in August to this prosecutor,” said attorney Benjamin Crump. “The process should be indicted.”

McCulloch moved to the center of the nation’s attention with his remarks Tuesday night, broadcast through cable television and streamed online, ahead of the announcement that the grand jury would not indict Wilson. He criticized the media’s coverage of the investigation and targeted users of social media for spreading falsehoods.

“The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation,” McCulloch said, “has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything, to talk about, following closely behind with the nonstop rumors on social media.”

(MORE: Don’t blame social media for Ferguson.)

St. Louis County’s long-time prosecutor, McCulloch was first elected in 1991. He quickly made a name for himself when he charged Axl Rose, the lead singer for the rock band Guns N’ Roses, with a misdemeanor assault and property damage following a concert where, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 40 concertgoers and 25 police officers were injured.

McCulloch soon gained a reputation not for pursuing rock stars but as a prosecutor who protected police officers, often angering minority communities around St. Louis in the process.

In 2001, McCulloch declined to prosecute two undercover officers who killed two unarmed black drug dealers. The officers said the two men tried to escape and drove their car toward them, but a federal investigation found that they had not moved their car forward. The investigation still concluded, however, that the officers fired in self-defense, and McCulloch called the two suspects “bums.”

Activists have also raised questions over his family’s long-standing connection to law enforcement. McCulloch’s uncle, brother and cousin were all police officers. His mother worked in the St. Louis Police’s homicide bureau. McCulloch’s father, also a St. Louis police officer, was killed in 1964 by a kidnapper, who was black. Like his father, McCulloch initially wanted to become a police officer but was unable to after losing his right leg to cancer.

“I couldn’t become a policeman, so being county prosecutor is the next best thing,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Since August, black communities around St. Louis have scrutinized the grand jury investigation into Brown’s death, specifically McCulloch’s decision not to recommend a specific charge for Wilson and instead allowing the grand jury to decide. As TIME’s Alex Altman wrote in September, that non-decision decision was viewed by activists as a way for McCulloch to avoid indictment.

“To present a case to a grand jury, without any direction or instructions with regard to what you want them to achieve gives the best odds that an indictment will not occur,” Adolphus Pruitt of the St. Louis NAACP told TIME then.

(MORE: Inside Darren Wilson’s Testimony)

On Monday, McCulloch defended the grand jury process and its outcome, saying that eyewitness accounts regarding the incident were often unreliable and that the physical evidence showed that Wilson was justified in shooting Brown.

“Our only goal was that our investigation would be thorough and complete,” McCulloch said. “The grand jury worked tirelessly to examine and reexamine all of the testimony of the witness and all of the physical evidence.”

“As tragic as this is,” McCulloch added, “it was not a crime.”

Wilson described Brown as a ‘demon’ and ‘Hulk Hogan’-like in grand jury testimony

Police officers in Missouri, as in most of the United States, have wide latitude to use deadly force if they believe it’s necessary to prevent injury or death. Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson apparently feared for his life multiple times before he killed Michael Brown, according to Wilson’s newly released grand jury testimony.

Wilson’s remarks were made public on Nov. 24, after the grand jury declined to charge the officer for killing Brown on Aug. 9. Below are the portions of testimony in which Wilson described his fear of the unarmed 18-year-old:

Wilson first noticed Brown and another man, Dorian Johnson, walking in the middle of the street on the double yellow line near the Canfield apartment complex. After Wilson attempted to get the two men to walk along the sidewalk, Brown eventually replied with “f— what you have to say.” Wilson testified that he attempted to get out of his vehicle, but Brown slammed his door shut.

“He was just staring at me, almost like to intimidate me or to overpower me,” Wilson said. It was then when Brown, according to Wilson, reached into his police SUV and punched him.

“When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” Wilson, who is 6′ 4″ and 210 lbs., said of Brown, who was 6′ 4″ and 292 lbs. at the time of his death.

Wilson said that Brown went for the officer’s gun, saying: “You are too much of a p—- to shoot me.” He said Brown tried to get his fingers inside the trigger. “And then after he did that, he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”

Wilson testified that his gun went off twice inside the vehicle. Brown then began to flee and Wilson followed. But Brown turned around.

“He turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back toward me. His first step is coming towards me, he kind of does like a stutter step to start running,” Wilson said.

“At this point,” Wilson said, “it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”

It was then that Wilson fired multiple rounds at Brown, from roughly 8 to 10 feet away. Wilson said that he witnessed one of those shots hitting Brown.

“And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean, I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped,” he testified.

Read next: Darren Wilson Evidence Photos: What He Looked Like After Killing Michael Brown

A circuit judge may not unseal evidence without an indictment

If a St. Louis County grand jury does not indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, evidence in the case may never be made public, despite promises from the prosecutor.

According to a letter from a St. Louis court administrator, the St. Louis County circuit court judge presiding over the case has not agreed to release evidence currently being considered by the grand jury, which was convened to decide whether to charge Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager.

St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCullough has repeatedly stated that he would obtain a court order to unseal grand jury evidence, an unusual step that was seen as an attempt to defuse potential anger over the decision. In a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on Nov. 23, St. Louis County Court Administrator Paul Fox said Judge Carolyn Whittington had agreed to grant the request.

But Fox described the paraphrased quote attributed to him as “not accurate,” in a letter released after the story, and said Whittington had not made an agreement to release grand jury evidence and that any requests “will require the Court to analyze the need for maintaining secrecy of the records with the need for public disclosure of the records.”

(MORE: Cop in Ferguson Shooting Gets Married)

On Monday the grand jury reconvened to determine whether to formally charge Wilson for the shooting, which sparked weeks of riots and protests in the St. Louis suburb and reignited the debate over race, privilege and police conduct in the U.S. A decision is expected soon.

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