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Limited Leverage: Federal Remedies And Policing Reform, Rachel A. Harmon
Limited Leverage: Federal Remedies And Policing Reform, Rachel A. Harmon
Rachel A. Harmon
With respect to deterring police misconduct, federal remedies are almost as good as they are ever going to get. Federal remedies for police misconduct, and most other remedies for misconduct, promote change by making misconduct costly for police departments and municipalities. Improving federal remedies would encourage some additional departments to seek the positive expected return on reform measures likely to reduce misconduct. But existing federal remedies all focus on either increasing the cost of misconduct or reducing its benefits. The problem is that even if existing federal remedies are altered to maximize deterrence, they cannot be employed to impose a …
The Problem Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon
The Problem Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon
Rachel A. Harmon
The legal problem of policing is how to regulate police authority to permit officers to enforce law while also protecting individual liberty and minimizing the social costs the police impose. Courts and commentators have largely treated the problem of policing as limited to preventing violations of constitutional rights and its solution as the judicial definition and enforcement of those rights. But constitutional law and courts alone are necessarily inadequate to regulate the police. Constitutional law does not protect important interests below the constitutional threshold or effectively address the distributional impacts of law enforcement activities. Nor can the judiciary adequately assess …
Why Do We (Still) Lack Data On Policing?, Rachel A. Harmon
Why Do We (Still) Lack Data On Policing?, Rachel A. Harmon
Rachel A. Harmon
The Wickersham Commission report on The Third Degree, found in the Commission’s famous Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement ended with the argument that the “real remedy” for police misconduct “lies in the will of the community,” which in turn depends on evidence about the nature and extent of police abuse. In this brief essay, I argue that the report’s call for information about policing has gone largely unanswered. Eighty years later, we still lack enough data about what the police do to shape their conduct effectively. Public policy and legal decisions about policing depend heavily on empirical judgments, but …