At Parsons Law Group, LLC, attorney Thomas Toscano represented individuals filing police misconduct lawsuits. As to whether those lawsuits created meaningful policy changes in the CPD, his answer was sometimes. His first example was a court case he fought not as an attorney, but as a defendant. In 2003, the police arrested Toscano and hundreds of others for an antiwar protest. The City had given them a permit to march, but the CPD immediately revoked it after demonstrations began. Eight years later, the U.S. Court of Appeals decided the police were wrong, and since then, Toscano hadn’t seen anything like the mass arrests the CPD conducted that day.
As to whether he believed work like his would ever reduce police misconduct across the board, it depended on how optimistic he was feeling that day.