The outside camera had recorded two odd incidents. First, a man whom Talley didn’t know approached the apartment while Talley wasn’t home. Looking anxious, the man knocked, waited a few moments and then left. A few days later, the camera picked up a police officer outside the door. The officer looked around, snapped a photo of Talley’s door with his cellphone, and left.

Talley at one point told his father about the two visits, who in turn relayed the story to a police officer friend. “When he heard about both men, he told my dad, ‘It sounds like they’re about to kick down your son’s door,’ ” Talley says.

After an initial search, the SWAT team called in K9 units. The police later documented on an evidence sheet what they found. It wasn’t much:

Sylvia Perkins is sitting in an oversized chair at her home in a Little Rock subdivision. She’s wearing a black sweatshirt displaying a photo of her son, Bobby Moore. He’s smiling and saluting while wearing a Boston Celtics cap. The shirt’s format is familiar. It is similar to shirts worn by participants in police brutality protests all over the country. It is a shirt you wear when someone you love was killed by the police.

Fifteen-year-old Bobby Moore was fatally shot in 2012 by Josh Hastings, a police officer with the Little Rock Police Department. Despite serving on the force for only five years, Hastings’s tenure would prove to be enormously consequential. He had been hired over the objection from a high-ranking black police officer, and that objection was well-founded: Before his hiring, Hastings had once attended a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan, then lied about it on his application. He went on to accumulate an astonishing disciplinary record, usually resulting in lax punishment for misconduct.

Hastings once boasted about body-slamming a homeless black woman to the ground. Video footage showed he had lied about a burglary investigation. He slept on the job, drove recklessly and had problems activating his dashboard-mounted camera. He admitted to using racist language. He sometimes needed help writing reports, and colleagues described him as lazy, incompetent and unfit to be a police officer.

Hastings’s ultimate confrontation with Moore, then, seemed almost inevitable. He confronted Moore and two other boys after reports that they were breaking into cars. When the boys managed to get one of the cars started, Hastings fired into the car, killing Moore. Hastings would later claim Moore was attempting to run him over, but forensic analysis showed the vehicle was either stopped or moving backward, and Moore’s wounds were consistent with a driver backing up, not surging forward. The other boys were not wounded.

But Hastings’s story isn’t one of a rogue, aberrant cop so much as a glimpse into the police culture of Arkansas’s largest city. Disturbing as Hastings’s disciplinary record may be, other officers in the department have even thicker personnel files. In fact, many of the very officers who trained and supervised Hastings have had lengthy histories of misconduct — including domestic violence, lying, and the use of excessive force.

A review of LRPD personnel records, emails and court cases dating back to Hastings’s hiring in March 2007 suggests a department plagued by nepotism, cronyism and racism — both blatant and subtle. Internal investigations of officer misconduct can be sloppy and incomplete, and are often haphazardly conducted by officers with clear conflicts of interest. There appears to be little supervision at any level, whether by sergeants over beat cops, the high command over supervising officers, or city and elected officials over the department’s leadership. When officers have been fired — and it takes a lot to get fired — they are often able to appeal and win back their jobs, either in court or through the city’s Civil Service Commission, usually with the help of the police union.

“The sheer number of misconduct allegations against some of these officers is staggering,” said Chiraag Bains, former senior counsel for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Bains, who is now a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Criminal Justice Policy Program and is now director of legal strategies for the reform group Demos, co-wrote the Justice Department’s report on policing in Ferguson, Mo. I asked him to look over and comment on my reporting from Little Rock. “Assuming these allegations are true, there’s a lot here that’s deeply disturbing. The lack of discipline and accountability is almost comical. And it appears to be a diverse array of misconduct, not just excessive force or shootings,” he said.

The Josh Hastings story, then, is also one of cascading institutional failure.

“Josh Hastings was fired and criminally charged,” said Lt. Johnny Gilbert Jr., the only high-ranking officer to raise objections to Hastings’s hiring. “But getting rid of him doesn’t get rid of the rot, of the internal rot, that allowed Josh Hastings to happen. If you don’t get at that rot, you just get more officers like Josh Hastings.”

Hastings has already been found personally liable for Moore’s death but holding the LRPD accountable for its failure to prevent the incident is more of a challenge. Under federal law, cities and towns aren’t liable for the actions of the police officers in the way private corporations are often liable for the actions of their employees. Instead, a plaintiff must show a pattern or culture of deficient training, supervision and misconduct so pervasive that constitutional violations are nearly inevitable — a type of lawsuit known as a Monell claim. Because elected officials are often loath to criticize police agencies, Monell claims are often the last best hope for reforming an out-of-control police department. But they are also expensive, time-consuming and rarely successful. It can be difficult to even get such a claim in front of jury. Consequently, there also aren’t many lawyers who will take them on.

Moore’s family filed a lawsuit alleging that Hastings was personally liable for the boy’s death and that the LRPD and city were liable under Monell. While they were successful against Hastings, last year, a federal district court judge rejected the Monell claim from Moore’s family, effectively removing the police department and city of Little Rock from its lawsuit. The family appealed. In April, the case moved to oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. At those hearings, civil rights lawyer Michael Laux, representing Moore’s family, and lawyers for Little Rock debated whether the training, policies, supervision and disciplinary record of the Little Rock Police Department are deficient, and whether those deficiencies could foreseeably lead to violations such as the fatal shooting of Moore. The decision should come down later this year.

But the repercussions of this case could go well beyond Little Rock. The Trump administration has made clear that the Justice Department will no longer investigate and oversee problem police agencies as the Obama administration did in places such as Ferguson, Baltimore and Chicago. Police reformers say that will make it more difficult to draw attention to problematic police agencies, much less push for systemic reform. Difficult as they are to win, lawsuits such as the one brought by Moore’s family may still be the best chance.

“To me, this looks like a strong Monell claim,” said Bains. “I’d be really concerned if the 8th Circuit doesn’t overturn the district court’s ruling. If it doesn’t, the court is telling other plaintiffs, other victims of this sort of misconduct, that they aren’t going to get any relief either.”