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Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons™
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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Civil Rights and Discrimination
The Procedural Justice Industrial Complex, Shawn E. Fields
The Procedural Justice Industrial Complex, Shawn E. Fields
Indiana Law Journal
The singular focus on procedural justice police reform is dangerous. Procedurally just law enforcement encounters provide an empirically proven subjective sense of fairness and legitimacy, while obscuring substantively unjust outcomes emanating from a fundamentally unjust system. The deceptive simplicity of procedural justice – that a polite cop is a lawful cop – promotes a false consciousness among would-be reformers that progress has been made, evokes a false sense of legitimacy divorced from objective indicia of lawfulness or morality, and claims the mantle of “reform” in the process. It is not just that procedural justice is a suboptimal type of reform; …
Trauma-Informed Policing: The Impact Of Adult And Childhood Trauma On Law Enforcement Officers, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Todd J. Clark, Caleb Gregory Conrad, Honorable Amy Dunn Johnson
Trauma-Informed Policing: The Impact Of Adult And Childhood Trauma On Law Enforcement Officers, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Todd J. Clark, Caleb Gregory Conrad, Honorable Amy Dunn Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
For every six months that a police officer serves in the line of duty, he or she is likely to experience an average of three traumatic events. Such events may include fatal accidents, murders, suicides, and active threats to the life of the officer or someone else. Given the wealth of available data on how trauma reorganizes the nervous system to respond to everyday stimuli as threatening, this is an area that cries for critical exploration, especially in light of the frequency with which unarmed Black civilians are killed at the hands of officers who often make split-second decisions to …
Trauma: Community Of Color Exposure To The Criminal Justice System As An Adverse Childhood Experience, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Todd Clark, Caleb Gregory Conrad, Amy Dunn Johnson
Trauma: Community Of Color Exposure To The Criminal Justice System As An Adverse Childhood Experience, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Todd Clark, Caleb Gregory Conrad, Amy Dunn Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
The reality that traumatic childhood experiences are directly linked to negative health outcomes has been known and widely recognized in public health and clinical literature for more than two decades. Adverse Childhood Experiences (“ACEs”) represent the “single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today” according to Dr. Robert Block, former President of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
ACEs are traumatic events that occur in early childhood, which can range from abuse and neglect to experiences derived from household and community dysfunction, such as losing a caregiver, being incarcerated, or living with a household member suffering from mental illness. …
"Send Freedom House!": A Study In Police Abolition, Tiffany Yang
"Send Freedom House!": A Study In Police Abolition, Tiffany Yang
Washington Law Review
Sparked by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the 2020 uprisings accelerated a momentum of abolitionist organizing that demands the defunding and dismantling of policing infrastructures. Although a growing body of legal scholarship recognizes abolitionist frameworks when examining conventional proposals for reform, critics mistakenly continue to disregard police abolition as an unrealistic solution. This Essay helps dispel this myth of “impracticality” and illustrates the pragmatism of abolition by identifying a community-driven effort that achieved a meaningful reduction in policing we now take for granted. I detail the history of the Freedom House Ambulance Service, a Black civilian …
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 …
Race, Surveillance, Resistance, Chaz Arnett
Race, Surveillance, Resistance, Chaz Arnett
Faculty Scholarship
The increasing capability of surveillance technology in the hands of law enforcement is radically changing the power, size, and depth of the surveillance state. More daily activities are being captured and scrutinized, larger quantities of personal and biometric data are being extracted and analyzed, in what is becoming a deeply intensified and pervasive surveillance society. This reality is particularly troubling for Black communities, as they shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden and harm associated with these powerful surveillance measures, at a time when traditional mechanisms for accountability have grown weaker. These harms include the maintenance of legacies of state …
Stepping Into The Shoes Of The Department Of Justice: The Unusual, Necessary, And Hopeful Path The Illinois Attorney General Took To Require Police Reform In Chicago, Lisa Madigan, Cara Hendrickson, Karyn L. Bass Ehler
Stepping Into The Shoes Of The Department Of Justice: The Unusual, Necessary, And Hopeful Path The Illinois Attorney General Took To Require Police Reform In Chicago, Lisa Madigan, Cara Hendrickson, Karyn L. Bass Ehler
Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy
No abstract provided.
State Labor Law And Federal Police Reform, Stephen Rushin, Allison Garnett
State Labor Law And Federal Police Reform, Stephen Rushin, Allison Garnett
Stephen Rushin
No abstract provided.
From Selma To Ferguson: The Voting Rights Act As A Blueprint For Police Reform, Stephen Rushin
From Selma To Ferguson: The Voting Rights Act As A Blueprint For Police Reform, Stephen Rushin
Stephen Rushin
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 revolutionized access to the voting booth. Rather than responding to claims of voter suppression through litigation against individual states or localities, the Voting Rights Act introduced a coverage formula that preemptively regulated a large number of localities across the country. In doing so, the Voting Rights Act replaced reactive, piecemeal litigation with a proactive structure of continual federal oversight. As the most successful civil rights law in the nation's history, the Voting Rights Act provides a blueprint for responding to one of the most pressing civil rights problems the country faces today: police misconduct. …
State Labor Law And Federal Police Reform, Stephen Rushin, Allison Garnett
State Labor Law And Federal Police Reform, Stephen Rushin, Allison Garnett
Faculty Publications & Other Works
No abstract provided.
From Selma To Ferguson: The Voting Rights Act As A Blueprint For Police Reform, Stephen Rushin
From Selma To Ferguson: The Voting Rights Act As A Blueprint For Police Reform, Stephen Rushin
Faculty Publications & Other Works
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 revolutionized access to the voting booth. Rather than responding to claims of voter suppression through litigation against individual states or localities, the Voting Rights Act introduced a coverage formula that preemptively regulated a large number of localities across the country. In doing so, the Voting Rights Act replaced reactive, piecemeal litigation with a proactive structure of continual federal oversight. As the most successful civil rights law in the nation's history, the Voting Rights Act provides a blueprint for responding to one of the most pressing civil rights problems the country faces today: police misconduct. …
Across The Hudson: Taking The Stop And Frisk Debate Beyond New York City, David A. Harris
Across The Hudson: Taking The Stop And Frisk Debate Beyond New York City, David A. Harris
Articles
This article presents the results of a survey conducted by the author of 56 police departments across the country concerning the practice of data collection on stop and frisk practices of those police departments. These results are discussed against the backdrop of the debate on stop and frisk, examined in this article through a review of the legal basis for the practice and its use by police departments. The article then argues that greater data collection efforts in places other than New York City, where such efforts have been more robust than elsewhere, could broaden and deepen the debate on …
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 …
Police Reform And The Department Of Justice: An Essay On Accountability, Debra A. Livingston
Police Reform And The Department Of Justice: An Essay On Accountability, Debra A. Livingston
Faculty Scholarship
In 1994, Congress promulgated a significant piece of legislation that may prove to have an extremely important impact on the operation of local police departments. Section 14141 of Title 42, enacted as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, prohibits governmental authorities or those acting on their behalf from engaging in "a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officials" that deprives persons of "rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States." Whenever the Attorney General has reasonable cause to believe that a violation has occurred, …
Brutality In Blue: Community, Authority, And The Elusive Promise Of Police Reform, Debra Ann Livingston
Brutality In Blue: Community, Authority, And The Elusive Promise Of Police Reform, Debra Ann Livingston
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force by Jerome H. Skolnick and James J. Fyfe