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It is an uneasy fact that the Justice Department has received more complaints of police abuses from such cities as Philadelphia, Houston and Memphis than it has from Miami. It sued the city of Philadelphia last year for what it considered a systematic abuse of police powers, but a federal judge ruled that the Government had no legal right to do that—a decision now being appealed.
It is traditional, however, that police powers are and should be a local, not a federal matter. "There is a dilemma between the federal and local presence," says Louis Nunez, staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. "Our society has left crime to local police. When should the Federal Government step in?" The answer is when local police and prosecutors fail to perform their duties in a color-blind way—and before such injustices arouse the equally outrageous resort to killing, looting and burning. ·