January 1994

Under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton, New York City implemented Compstat and aggressive Broken Windows enforcement beginning in 1994. The Street Crimes Unit, whose officers killed Amadou Diallo, operated under the motto 'We Own the Night.' Stop-and-frisk stops increased dramatically; internal NYPD data showed over 80% of those stopped were Black or Latino, with the vast majority innocent of any crime.

Under Mayor Giuliani and Commissioner Bratton beginning 1994, NYPD implemented Compstat and aggressive Broken Windows enforcement. The Street Crimes Unit — whose officers killed Amadou Diallo — operated under the motto 'We Own the Night.' Internal data showed over 80% of those stopped were Black or Latino, with the vast majority innocent of any crime.

Secret recordings from 1994 captured Texaco executives discussing destruction of documents in a discrimination lawsuit and referring to Black employees as 'black jelly beans' and using racial slurs. When the tapes were revealed publicly in November 1996, a national boycott followed. Texaco settled the class-action racial discrimination lawsuit for $176.1 million — the largest race discrimination settlement in U.S. history at the time.

Zero tolerance policies expanded following the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act, disproportionately affecting Black students. Federal OCR data showed Black students were suspended at 2-3 times the rate of white students even controlling for poverty. Researchers documented connections between suspension and later incarceration, coining the 'school-to-prison pipeline' concept.

Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living filed suit under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, arguing Pennsylvania's DEP disproportionately sited toxic waste facilities in Chester, a predominantly Black city. Chester had five waste facilities processing two-thirds of Pennsylvania's waste while representing a fraction of its population. The case, Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living v. Seif, reached the Third Circuit before the Supreme Court vacated it in 1998.

Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living sued Pennsylvania's DEP under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, arguing disproportionate siting of toxic waste facilities in Chester, a predominantly Black city. Chester had five waste facilities processing two-thirds of Pennsylvania's waste. The case Chester Residents v. Seif reached the Third Circuit before the Supreme Court vacated it in 1998.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and American Civil Liberties Union documented systematic NYPD and Baltimore Police Department brutality against Black residents throughout the early 1990s. Consent decree negotiations with multiple cities including Pittsburgh (following the Jonny Gammage case) in 1997 established the first uses-of-force policies and community oversight boards. These early structural reforms were precursors to later DOJ pattern-or-practice investigations.