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Full-Text Articles in Law
Safety Inside And Out: Why International Human Rights Standards Fail To Curb The Worst Excesses Of Police Policies And Practices, Dr. Mary O'Rawe
Safety Inside And Out: Why International Human Rights Standards Fail To Curb The Worst Excesses Of Police Policies And Practices, Dr. Mary O'Rawe
Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law
No abstract provided.
Discovering Racial Discrimination By The Police, Alison Siegler, William Admussen
Discovering Racial Discrimination By The Police, Alison Siegler, William Admussen
Northwestern University Law Review
For decades, it was virtually impossible for a criminal defendant to challenge racial discrimination by the police or prosecutors. This was because in United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996), the Supreme Court set an insurmountable standard for obtaining discovery in support of a selective prosecution claim. Equating the roles of prosecutors and law enforcement officers, lower courts applied this same standard to claims alleging racial discrimination by the police. This high standard led courts to deny discovery and stifle potentially meritorious claims. Recently, criminal defendants have initiated a wave of challenges to “fake stash house” operations, in which …
The Unconstitutional Police, Brandon Hasbrouck
The Unconstitutional Police, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
Most Fourth Amendment cases arise under a basic fact pattern. Police decide to do something--say, stop and frisk a suspect. They find some crime--say, a gun or drugs--they arrest the suspect, and the suspect is subsequently charged with a crime. The suspect--who is all too often Black--becomes a defendant and challenges the police officers' initial decision as unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. The defendant seeks to suppress the evidence against them or perhaps to recover damages for serious injuries under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The courts subsequently constitutionalize the police officers' initial decision with little or no scrutiny. Effectively, the …
Racial Bias Still Exists In Criminal Justice System? A Review Of Recent Empirical Research, Yu Du
Racial Bias Still Exists In Criminal Justice System? A Review Of Recent Empirical Research, Yu Du
Touro Law Review
The debate on whether racial bias is still embedded in the criminal justice (CJ) system today has reached its plateau. One recent article in the Washington Post has claimed an overwhelming evidence of racial bias in the CJ system. Whereas some scholars argue that racial disparity is an epitome of real crime rates, others indicate that implicit and/or explicit racial bias against Blacks held by law enforcement agents persists in the system. This review considers both supporting arguments and relevant counterarguments. After evaluating empirical and rigorous research during the past five years, the review maintains that racial bias still exists …
Facial Recognition And The Fourth Amendment, Andrew Ferguson
Facial Recognition And The Fourth Amendment, Andrew Ferguson
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Facial recognition offers a totalizing new surveillance power. Police now have the capability to monitor, track, and identify faces through networked surveillance cameras and datasets of billions of images. Whether identifying a particular suspect from a still photo, or identifying every person who walks past a digital camera, the privacy and security impacts of facial recognition are profound and troubling.
This Article explores the constitutional design problem at the heart of facial recognition surveillance systems. One might hope that the Fourth Amendment – designed to restrain police power and enacted to limit governmental overreach – would have something to say …
Policing And "Bluelining", Aya Gruber
Policing And "Bluelining", Aya Gruber
Publications
In this Commentary written for the Frankel Lecture symposium on police killings of Black Americans, I explore the increasingly popular claim that racialized brutality is not a malfunction of policing but its function. Or, as Paul Butler counsels, “Don’t get it twisted—the criminal justice system ain’t broke. It’s working just the way it’s supposed to.” This claim contradicts the conventional narrative, which remains largely accepted, that the police exist to vindicate the community’s interest in solving, reducing, and preventing crime. A perusal of the history of organized policing in the United States, however, reveals that it was never mainly about …
A Taxonomy Of Police Technology’S Racial Inequity Problems, Laura M. Moy
A Taxonomy Of Police Technology’S Racial Inequity Problems, Laura M. Moy
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Over the past several years, increased awareness of racial inequity in policing, combined with increased scrutiny of police technologies, have sparked concerns that new technologies may aggravate inequity in policing. To help address these concerns, some advocates and scholars have proposed requiring police agencies to seek and obtain legislative approval before adopting a new technology, or requiring the completion of “algorithmic impact assessments” to evaluate new tools.
In order for policymakers, police agencies, or scholars to evaluate whether and how particular technologies may aggravate existing inequities, however, the problem must be more clearly defined. Some scholars have explored inequity in …
Citizens, Suspects, And Enemies: Examining Police Militarization, Milton C. Regan
Citizens, Suspects, And Enemies: Examining Police Militarization, Milton C. Regan
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Concern about the increasing militarization of police has grown in recent years. Much of this concern focuses on the material aspects of militarization: the greater use of military equipment and tactics by police officers. While this development deserves attention, a subtler form of militarization operates on the cultural level. Here, police adopt an adversarial stance toward minority communities, whose members are regarded as presumptive objects of suspicion. The combination of material and cultural militarization in turn has a potential symbolic dimension. It can communicate that members of minority communities are threats to society, just as military enemies are threats to …