Law and Race Commons^™

Do You See What I See? Problems With Juror Bias In Viewing Body-Camera Video Evidence, Morgan A. Birck

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In the wake of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, advocates and activists called for greater oversight and accountability for police. One of the measures called for and adopted in many jurisdictions was the implementation of body cameras in police departments. Many treated this implementation as a sign of change that police officers would be held accountable for the violence they perpetrate. This Note argues that although body-camera footage may be useful as one form of evidence in cases of police violence, lawyers and judges should be extremely careful about how it is presented to the jury. Namely, the …

The Case Against Police Militarization, Eliav Lieblich, Adam Shinar

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

We usually think there is a difference between the police and the military. Recently, however, the police have become increasingly militarized – a process which is likely to intensify in coming years. Unsurprisingly, many find this process alarming and call for its reversal. However, while most of the objections to police militarization are framed as instrumental arguments, these arguments are unable to capture the core problem with militarization.

This Article remedies this shortcoming by developing a novel and principled argument against police militarization. Contrary to arguments that are preoccupied with the consequences of militarization, the real problem with police militarization …

Dead Canaries In The Coal Mines: The Symbolic Assailant Revisited, Jeannine Bell

Georgia State University Law Review

The well-publicized deaths of several African-Americans—Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling among others—at the hands of police stem from tragic interactions predicated upon well-understood practices analyzed by police scholars since the 1950s. The symbolic assailant, a construct created by police scholar Jerome Skolnick in the mid-1960s to identify persons whose behavior and characteristics the police view as threatening, is especially relevant to contemporary policing. This Article explores the societal roots of the creation of a Black symbolic assailant in contemporary American policing.

The construction of African-American men as symbolic assailants is one of the most important factors characterizing police …

Newsroom: Have We Outgrown Brown? 02-06-2018, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Sb 160 - "Blue Lives Matter" Protection Of Public Safety Officers, Caitlin V. Fox, Joseph A. Wallace Jr.

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act redefines and broadens protection for public safety officers who are subjected to violent attacks while engaged in their duties. The Act creates original jurisdiction and stiffens penalties for juvenile offenders charged with violent crimes. The Act also increases indemnification payments made to the surviving spouse of a law enforcement officer who loses his or her life in the line of duty.

Crossing The Thin Blue Line: Protecting Law Enforcement Officers Who Blow The Whistle, Ann C. Hodges

Law Faculty Publications

Law enforcement makes headline news for shootings of unarmed civilians, departmental corruption, and abuse of suspects and witnesses. Also well-documented is the code of silence, the thin blue line, which discourages officers from reporting improper and unlawful conduct by fellow officers. Accordingly, accountability is challenging and mistrust of law enforcement abounds. There is much work to be done in changing the culture of police departments and many recommendations for change. One barrier to transparency that has been largely ignored could be eliminated by reversal of the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos. Criticism of the decision has …

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 …

Terry Stops And Frisks: The Troubling Use Of Common Sense In A World Of Empirical Data, David Rudovsky, David A. Harris

All Faculty Scholarship

The investigative detention doctrine first announced in Terry v. Ohio and amplified over the past fifty years has been much analyzed, praised, and criticized from a number of perspectives. Significantly, however, over this time period commentators have only occasionally questioned the Supreme Court’s “common sense” judgments regarding the factors sufficient to establish reasonable suspicion for stops and frisks. For years, the Court has provided no empirical basis for its judgments, due in large part to the lack of reliable data. Now, with the emergence of comprehensive data on these police practices, much can be learned about the predictive power of …

Police, Race, And The Production Of Capital Homicides, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Racial disparities in capital punishment have been well documented for decades. Over 50 studies have shown that Black defendants more likely than their white counterparts to be charged with capital-eligible crimes, to be convicted and sentenced to death. Racial disparities in charging and sentencing in capital-eligible homicides are the largest for the small number of cases where black defendants murder white victims compared to within-race killings, or where whites murder black or other ethnic minority victims. These patterns are robust to rich controls for non-racial characteristics and state sentencing guidelines. This article backs up the research on racial disparities to …