Jay-Z‘s social justice initiative, Team Roc, is pressing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate the Kansas City Police Department to review allegations of wrongdoing and discrimination.
In an open letter sent Tuesday, Team Roc and the nonprofit organization Midwest Innocence Project said there is enough evidence of systematic police misconduct within the department to warrant a probe.
According to NBC News, Alex Spiro, Team Roc’s attorney, said the allegations of corruption and civil rights violations against the Kansas City department over the past decades aren’t isolated incidents.
The incidents reported include a case of a former detective who was accused of exploiting Black women for sex and framing people for crimes they did not commit.
“The DOJ’s continued inaction tells targeted minority communities held hostages to the whims of the carceral state that justice does not exist for them, that their lives do not matter,” Team Roc wrote in their letter to Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta.
“To be silent is to admit to victims and survivors of persuasive police violence in Kansas City, Kansas, and across this nation that the entire system is guilty.”
The social justice initiative sued DOL last September to obtain additional records to “help ascertain the scope of the misconduct and evaluate the adequacy of the KCKPD’s training and supervision.”
The initiative had also previously sent a letter to DOJ asking for a federal investigation into KCKPD.
Gupta, who oversees the DOJ’s civil litigating divisions, said the department would take all requests and information provided seriously even if an investigation is not opened, according to an interview she did with the Washington Post.
“Whether or not an investigation is opened, we take all of the requests and information provided seriously,” Gupta told the post in October. “But we get a lot more requests than the department is able to investigate.”
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