Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
-
- Columbia Law School (4)
- SelectedWorks (4)
- Washington and Lee University School of Law (4)
- University of Colorado Law School (3)
- University of Michigan Law School (3)
-
- American University Washington College of Law (2)
- University of Pittsburgh School of Law (2)
- Boston University School of Law (1)
- Georgia State University College of Law (1)
- Loyola University Chicago, School of Law (1)
- Maurer School of Law: Indiana University (1)
- Northwestern Pritzker School of Law (1)
- Seattle University School of Law (1)
- Selected Works (1)
- Touro University Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center (1)
- University of Florida Levin College of Law (1)
- University of Washington School of Law (1)
- Publication Year
- Publication
-
- Faculty Scholarship (5)
- Rachel A. Harmon (4)
- Publications (3)
- Scholarly Articles (3)
- Articles (2)
-
- Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals (2)
- Michigan Law Review (2)
- Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty (1)
- Faculty Publications & Other Works (1)
- Faculty Publications By Year (1)
- Michigan Journal of Race and Law (1)
- Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy (1)
- Scholarly Works (1)
- Seattle University Law Review (1)
- Stephen Rushin (1)
- UF Law Faculty Publications (1)
- Washington Law Review (1)
- Washington and Lee Law Review (1)
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 30 of 32
Full-Text Articles in Civil Rights and Discrimination
Unshielded: How The Police Can Become Touchable, Brandon Hasbrouck
Unshielded: How The Police Can Become Touchable, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
This Review proceeds in three Parts. First, Part I examines Shielded’s text, highlighting Schwartz’s analysis of the problem of unaccountable police, the many barriers to holding police accountable, and her proposed solutions. Part II then critically examines Schwartz’s work, examining pieces of the problem she left undiscussed and the relative shortcomings of her discussion of possible solutions. Finally, Part III takes an abolitionist approach, delving into potential nonreformist reforms and the solution of full abolition, as well as examining the most significant objection to abolitionist approaches: the problem of violence.
Policing For Profit: A Constitutional Analysis Of Washington State’S Civil Forfeiture Laws, Julia Doherty
Policing For Profit: A Constitutional Analysis Of Washington State’S Civil Forfeiture Laws, Julia Doherty
Seattle University Law Review
The summer of 2020 reignited a conversation about the relationship between race and policing in the United States. While many have taken the opportunity to scrutinize the racially discriminate components of our criminal justice system, comparable aspects of civil law must be equally scrutinized. A particular area of concern pertains to racially biased policing and the concept of “policing for profits” with Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities (BIPOC), which is accomplished mainly through civil asset forfeiture at a state and federal level.
Sheriffs, Shills, Or Just Paying The Bills?: Rethinking The Merits Of Compelling Merchant Cooperation With Third-Party Policing In The Aftermath Of George Floyd’S Death, Stephen Wilks
Washington and Lee Law Review
This Article frames the killing of George Floyd as the result of flawed business regulation. More specifically, it captures the expansion of third-party policing paradigms throughout local nuisance abatement regulations over a period of time that coincided with the militarization of policing culture across the United States. Premised on the notion that law enforcement alone cannot succeed in reducing crime and disorder, such regulations transform grocery stores, pharmacies, bars, and other retail spaces into surveillance hubs by prescribing situations that obligate businesses to contact the police. This regulatory framework, however, sustains the larger historical project of rationalizing enhanced scrutiny of …
Rewriting Whren V. United States, Jonathan Feingold, Devon Carbado
Rewriting Whren V. United States, Jonathan Feingold, Devon Carbado
Faculty Scholarship
In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Whren v. United States—a unanimous opinion in which the Court effectively constitutionalized racial profiling. Despite its enduring consequences, Whren remains good law today. This Article rewrites the opinion. We do so, in part, to demonstrate how one might incorporate racial justice concerns into Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, a body of law that has long elided and marginalized the racialized dimensions of policing. A separate aim is to reveal the “false necessity” of the Whren outcome. The fact that Whren was unanimous, and that even progressive Justices signed on, might lead one to conclude that …
Race And Washington’S Criminal Justice System: 2021 Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0
Race And Washington’S Criminal Justice System: 2021 Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0
Washington Law Review
RACE & WASHINGTON’S CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM:
EDITOR’S NOTE
As Editors-in-Chief of the Washington Law Review, Gonzaga Law Review, and Seattle University Law Review, we represent the flagship legal academic publications of each law school in Washington State. Our publications last joined together to publish the findings of the first Task Force on Race and the Criminal Justice System in 2011/12. A decade later, we are honored to join once again to present the findings of Task Force 2.0. Law journals have enabled generations of legal professionals to introduce, vet, and distribute new ideas, critiques of existing legal structures, and reflections …
Reimagining Public Safety, Brandon Hasbrouck
Reimagining Public Safety, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, abolitionists were repeatedly asked to explain what they meant by “abolish the police”—the idea so seemingly foreign that its literal meaning evaded interviewers. The narrative rapidly turned to the abolitionists’ secondary proposals, as interviewers quickly jettisoned the idea of literally abolishing the police. What the incredulous journalists failed to see was that abolishing police and prisons is not aimed merely at eliminating the collateral consequences of other social ills. Abolitionists seek to build a society in which policing and incarceration are unnecessary. Rather than a society without a means of protecting public safety, …
Sometimes They Don't Die: Can Criminal Justice Reform Measures Help Halt Police Sexual Assault On Black Women?, Michelle S. Jacobs
Sometimes They Don't Die: Can Criminal Justice Reform Measures Help Halt Police Sexual Assault On Black Women?, Michelle S. Jacobs
UF Law Faculty Publications
In the eighteen months between March 2019 and August 2020, at least eight Black women were murdered by the police. Breonna Taylor was one of them. Officer Brett Hankison, one of the three officers who murdered Breonna Taylor, was eventually discharged from the Louisville Police Department. In the memo discharging him, the police chief cited behavior that amounted to an extreme indifference to the value of human life: Hankison blindly fired ten rounds into the home of Ms. Taylor's neighbor. Additionally, in the aftermath of Ms. Taylor's death, two women came forward and accused Hankison of sexually assaulting them while …
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 …
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 …
Beyond Policing, India Thusi
Beyond Policing, India Thusi
Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty
We all deserve to live in communities where we feel safe
And true community safety means feeling safe from violence by the state, which includes the police. Social inequity has systematically and institutionally permeated our country since its founding, becoming more visible at various times in our history. We are now living in one of those moments of tremendous clarity, and it calls on us to look deeply at the efficacy of the reforms and narratives which preceded it . The deadly consequences of political decisions that create health disparities are now a wound that cannot be unseen as the …
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.
#Metoo And Mass Incarceration, Aya Gruber
#Metoo And Mass Incarceration, Aya Gruber
Publications
This Symposium Guest Editor’s Note is an adapted version of the Introduction to The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration (UC Press 2020). The book examines how American feminists, in the quest to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, often acted as soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities Today, despite deep concerns over racist policing and mass incarceration, many feminists continue to assert that gender crime …
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.
Fiscal Pressures And Discriminatory Policing: Evidence From Traffic Stops In Missouri, Allison P. Harris, Elliott Ash, Jeffrey A. Fagan
Fiscal Pressures And Discriminatory Policing: Evidence From Traffic Stops In Missouri, Allison P. Harris, Elliott Ash, Jeffrey A. Fagan
Faculty Scholarship
This paper provides evidence of racial variation in traffic enforcement responses to local government budget stress using data from policing agencies in the state of Missouri from 2001 through 2012. Like previous studies, we find that local budget stress is associated with higher citation rates; we also find an increase in traffic-stop arrest rates. However, we find that these effects are concentrated among White (rather than Black or Latino) drivers. The results are robust to the inclusion of a range of covariates and a variety of model specifications, including a regression discontinuity examining bare budget shortfalls. Considering potential mechanisms, we …
Illuminating Black Data Policing, Andrew Ferguson
Illuminating Black Data Policing, Andrew Ferguson
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
The future of policing will be driven by data. Crime, criminals, and patterns of criminal activity will be reduced to data to be studied, crunched, and predicted. The benefits of big data policing involve smarter policing, faster investigation, predictive deterrence, and the ability to visualize crime problems in new ways. Not surprisingly then, police administrators have been seeking out new partnerships with sophisticated private data companies and experimenting with new surveillance technologies. This potential future, however, has a very present limitation. It is a limitation largely ignored by adopting jurisdictions and could, if left unaddressed, delegitimize the adoption and use …
Policing Narrative, Tal Kastner
Policing Narrative, Tal Kastner
Scholarly Works
Counter narrative, a story that calls attention to and rebuts the presumptions of a dominant narrative framework, functions as an essential tool to reshape the bounds of the law. It has the potential to shape the collective notion of what constitutes legal authority. Black Lives Matter offers a counter narrative that challenges the characterization of the shared public space, among other aspects of contemporary society, as the space of law. Using the concept of necropower--the mobilization and prioritization of the state's power to kill--I analyze the contested physical and conceptual space of law exposed by the counter narrative of Black …
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.
Armed Response: An Unfortunate Legacy Of Apartheid, Leila Lawlor
Armed Response: An Unfortunate Legacy Of Apartheid, Leila Lawlor
Faculty Publications By Year
No abstract provided.
Closing The Gap Between What Is Lawful And What Is Right In Police Use Of Force Jurisprudence By Making Police Departments More Democratic Institutions, Jonathan M. Smith
Closing The Gap Between What Is Lawful And What Is Right In Police Use Of Force Jurisprudence By Making Police Departments More Democratic Institutions, Jonathan M. Smith
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was shot to death in Ferguson, Missouri, by police officer Darren Wilson. Members of the Ferguson community rose up in response. Protests demanding that police violence against African Americans cease and that accountability for police misconduct be addressed erupted across the country, and they have not subsided since. Incidents in Baltimore, Maryland; Chicago, Illinois; WallerCounty, Texas; and elsewhere have kept the movement alive. The mass media, the political elite, and the White middle class woke up to a reality that had been long known to communities of color – force is used disproportionately against …
The Lgbt Piece Of The Underenforcement-Overenforcement Puzzle, Aya Gruber
The Lgbt Piece Of The Underenforcement-Overenforcement Puzzle, Aya Gruber
Publications
No abstract provided.
The Duty Of Responsible Administration And The Problem Of Police Accountability, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon
The Duty Of Responsible Administration And The Problem Of Police Accountability, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon
Faculty Scholarship
Many contemporary civil rights claims arise from institutional activity that, while troubling, is neither malicious nor egregiously reckless. When law-makers find themselves unable to produce substantive rules for such activity, they often turn to regulating the actors’ exercise of discretion. The consequence is an emerging duty of responsible administration that requires managers to actively assess the effects of their conduct on civil rights values and to make reasonable efforts to mitigate harm to protected groups. This doctrinal evolution partially but imperfectly converges with an increasing emphasis in public administration on the need to reassess routines in the light of changing …
Federal Programs And The Real Costs Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon
Federal Programs And The Real Costs Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon
Rachel A. Harmon
Dozens of federal statutes authorize federal agencies to give money and power to local police departments and municipalities in order to improve public safety. While these federal programs encourage better coordination of police efforts and make pursuing public safety less financially costly for local communities, they also encourage harmful policing. Of course, policing often interferes with our interests in autonomy, privacy, and property, and those harms are often worthwhile in exchange for security and order. Federal public safety programs, however, are designed, implemented, and evaluated without reference to the nonbudgetary costs of policing. When those costs are high, federal programs …
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 …
Race And Selective Enforcement In Public Housing, Jeffrey Fagan, Garth Davies, Adam Carlis
Race And Selective Enforcement In Public Housing, Jeffrey Fagan, Garth Davies, Adam Carlis
Faculty Scholarship
Drugs, crime and public housing are closely linked in policy and politics, and their nexus has animated several intensive drug enforcement programs targeted at public housing residents. In New York City, police systematically conduct “vertical patrols” in public housing buildings, making tens of thousands of Terry stops each year. During these patrols, both uniformed and undercover officers systematically move through the buildings, temporarily detaining and questioning residents and visitors, often at a low threshold of suspicion, and usually alleging trespass to justify the stop. We use a case-control design to identify the effects of living in one of New York …
How Accountability-Based Policing Can Reinforce - Or Replace - The Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule, David A. Harris
How Accountability-Based Policing Can Reinforce - Or Replace - The Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule, David A. Harris
Articles
In Hudson v. Michigan, a knock-and-announce case, Justice Scalia's majority opinion came close to jettisoning the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule. The immense costs of the rule, Scalia said, outweigh whatever benefits might come from it. Moreover, police officers and police departments now generally follow the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, so the exclusionary rule has outlived the reasons that the Court adopted it in the first place. This viewpoint did not become the law because Justice Kennedy, one member of the five-vote majority, withheld his support from this section of the opinion. But the closeness of the vote on …
Law Enforcement In Subordinated Communities: Innovation And Response, Richard Delgado
Law Enforcement In Subordinated Communities: Innovation And Response, Richard Delgado
Michigan Law Review
Policing styles and policy reform today exhibit a ferment that we have not seen since the turbulent sixties. The reasons propelling reform include some of the same forces that propelled it then - minority communities agitating for a greater voice, demands for law and order - but also some that are new, such as the greater premium that society places on security in a post-9/11 world. Three recent books discuss this new emphasis on styles of policing. Each centers on policing in minority communities. Steve Herbert's Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community examines the innovation known as …
The Importance Of Research On Race And Policing: Making Race Salient To Individuals And Institutions Within Criminal Justice, David A. Harris
The Importance Of Research On Race And Policing: Making Race Salient To Individuals And Institutions Within Criminal Justice, David A. Harris
Articles
For years, criminologists have directed research efforts at questions at the intersection of race and law enforcement. This has not always been welcomed by practitioners, to put it mildly; rather, many police officers view research focused on race and policing as nothing short of an attempt to paint the policing profession and police officers as racist.
This commentary argues that, to the contrary, research into race and policing can still impart to everyone in our society, including police officers and their law enforcement institutions, much that they do not know about how race plays a role in both routine and …