A few years ago there was a murder of a mexican immigrant in a portion of my state known for it's xenophobia. The sheriffs department there was known to abuse s

A few years ago there was a murder of a mexican immigrant in a portion of my state known for it's xenophobia. The sheriffs department there was known to abuse said immigrants and intentionally mishandled the police report to aid the teens in being acquitted by the local all-white jury. The feds picked the case up and tried the murderers in federal court under federal hate crime laws, they were sentenced to 9 years. The police chief and some of his deputies were convicted and their minimum sentences ranged from 5-7 years (although they of course served much less than that) for essentially a badly biased police report and some terrible local ties - truly, the only thing that saved them from a very long prison sentence was the compassion of a judge. There's still a lot of xenophobia in the town, of course - but I'm betting the institutional memory of a DOJ civil rights investigation will last quite a while.