Graphic: Ledelle Muhammad/MGN Online

Mr. Davis is no ordinary activist. In fact, he would be the last person expected to be involved in these activities. That’s because he is a police officer. Twelve years ago, he decided he would stop tolerating unprovoked beatings and abuse of criminal suspects by police when he established Black Cops Against Police Brutality (B-CAP).

"Those kinds of practices shamed me. I wasn’t a party to any of it. But as I traveled and moved around the country, I was seeing this as a pattern in law enforcement. And what I found shameful was that I, as a Black man, did not have the courage to publicly speak out about it," he says, a sergeant in the East Orange, N.J. police department. "And when I began to quietly ask questions about it, my colleagues–Black and White–thought that was a taboo subject."

Police brutality is a topic that is no longer taboo. And from New York to California, cities are being forced to deal with brutal cops.

This past January in Louisville, Ky., Michael Newby, 19, was fatally shot four times in the back. Authorities said the shooting incident grew out of an undercover drug bust.

In Cincinnati, the beleaguered police department was in the news again over the beating death of Nathaniel Jones in Cincinnati, the 18th Black man to be killed by police in that city since 1995. In Columbus, Ga., police came under fire for the shooting death of 39-year-old Kenneth Walker. The unarmed man was shot twice in the head by a Muscogee County sheriff’s deputy when he didn’t show both hands inside his car.

Amadou Diallo, 22, was also unarmed in New York City when he was shot to death in a hail of 41 bullets on Feb. 4, 1999. New York police opened fire on him after they claimed to mistake his wallet for a gun. His mother was awarded a $3 million dollar settlement in January.

The 1968 Kerner Commission, formed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate widespread racial violence in major cities that erupted following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., reported that nothing was likely to spark an urban rebellion quicker than an incidence of police brutality.

Thirty-six years later, authorities are still struggling to curb police brutality, trying everything from community policing to deployment of civilian review boards.

"Civilian complaint review boards—they get sort of nervous results. But they create the sense in communities where they’re working that there’s someone looking over your shoulder," says Ronald Hampton, executive director of the Washington D.C. - based National Black Police Association. "Police brutality and racial profiling and all of these things would not even be an issue if there wasn’t a place in policing in this country where they could exist and hide."

They can’t hide in San Francisco, says Mr. Hampton. He points to Bay Area Police Watch, a citizens group that works to expose and challenge police violence.

"Due to the increased militarization and expansion of police presence in localities across the country, low-income communities and communities of color are routinely policed by heavily armed officers subject to little or no civilian oversight," the group says on its website. "Police Watch is the only project in the Bay Area operating a misconduct hotline, documentation center, and lawyer referral service for survivors of police abuse."

A program of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Police Watch, a non-profit organization, has influenced the strengthening of San Francisco’s Office of Citizen Complaints (OCC), the publicly-funded investigatory agency that has 15 investigators, subpoena power, and the authority to discipline wayward police officers, including firing them. It answers to an independent, seven-member commission.

"The charter itself mandates that every city and county employee of San Francisco has to cooperate with us," says Kevin Allen, director of the OCC. "You can call in an anonymous complaint. You don’t have to be the victim of whatever it was you perceived. What the charter mandates we are able to do is investigate any complaint by a civilian."

Anthony R. Scott, president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Officers (NOBLE) and chief of the Holyoke, Mass. police department, isn’t impressed with review boards, especially those that are not independent.

"They don’t work. They end up being more lenient," Mr. Scott says. "Training is the answer in all cases of unnecessary use of force. It takes its directions from the top down. It’s what the person at the top will tolerate and the message that is going to be sent from the top down."

The person at the top is often the mayor, not the police chief, says Wellington E. Webb, the first Black mayor of Denver and former president of the U. S. Conference of Mayors.

"It’s important for elected officials to stand up and say, in the event that a mistake was made, that, ‘We made a mistake," he explains. In addition, the offending officer must be sternly disciplined, especially in high-profile cases that rile the public.

For example, Mr. Webb points to the July 2002 Inglewood, Calif. videotaped incident showing a police officer, Jeremy Morse, smashing the face of a handcuffed Black teenager, Donovan Jackson, into the hood of a police cruiser and then punching him in the face.

"The mayor of that city, Roosevelt Dorn, a former superior court judge, immediately [said the officer should be fired], which calmed the community down," he says. After an investigation, Officer Morse was fired four months later; then charged with assault. The case has resulted in two mistrials with hung juries.

"The difficulty, as we all know, in most cases, is that district attorneys are not prone to prosecute police officers," says Mr. Webb.

That’s not the case in Richmond, Va., where David M. Hicks has served in that pressure-filled role for 10 years.

"Too many prosecutors and other elected officials are scared of looking like they’re being ‘anti-police’ as opposed to being pro-law. And there is a difference," he states. "The police are not the law. They are supposed to enforce it, just like judges and prosecutors. But people get that confused."

Mr. Hicks has taken his share of criticism while prosecuting two police officers, the most high-profile one for shooting an unarmed robbery suspect while he stood on his front porch brushing his teeth. That case has ended with two mistrials and Mr. Hicks is taking it back for a third trial next month.

In many police brutality cases, the Blue Code of silence—the unwritten rule that police officers don’t testify against one another—takes over.

"Everybody wants to be politically correct," Mr. Hicks says. "Nobody wants to get real. Everybody wants to work up through the ranks."

Surprisingly, cops who brutalize innocent citizens are more likely to move up the ranks than be punished for their misbehavior.

In 1992, the Gannett News Service studied 100 civil lawsuits that had been filed against police officers in which each victim was awarded at least $100,000. Of 185 officers that cost cities a total of nearly $92 million, no disciplinary action was taken against 160 of them, eight were disciplined and 17 were promoted.

Some cities are seeking a more diverse police force, hoping that the increased presence of officers of color will decrease incidents of police brutality. Many are coupling expanded recruitment with community policing and sensitivity training.

"There’s a value to all of this," Mr. Davis says. "But part of the problem is that we ought not to have to go back and teach people whose job it is to interact with people, how to interact with people. Police officers can’t do their job if they don’t know how to interact with people."