Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

Policing The Police: Personnel Management And Police Misconduct, Max Schanzenbach

Vanderbilt Law Review

Police misconduct is at the top of the public policy agenda, but there is surprisingly little understanding of how police personnel management policies affect police misconduct. Police-civilian interactions in large jurisdictions are, in principle at least, highly regulated. But these regulations are at least partially counteracted by union contracts and civil service regulations that constrain discipline and other personnel decisions, thereby limiting a city’s ability to manage its police force. This Essay analyzes police personnel management by bringing forth evidence from a variety of data sources on police personnel practices as well as integrating an existing, but relatively siloed, literature …

Policing, Masculinities, And Judicial Acknowledgment, Nicholas J. Prendergast

Vanderbilt Law Review

In the 1980s, the Supreme Court held that courts must consider the “totality of the circumstances” when deciding the reasonableness of a police officer’s conduct in an excessive force suit. To this day, the precise meaning of “reasonableness” remains elusive. For years, courts around the country have struggled to articulate what police conduct should and—equally as saliently— should not be considered during reasonableness determinations. Thus far, the Supreme Court has been unwilling to substantively clarify its reasonableness doctrine. This lack of clarity has led to an untenable patchwork of differing legal frameworks throughout the United States.

This issue exists in …

Putting Cano On Ice – A Path Forward For Border Searches Of Electronic Devices, Davis Price Shugrue

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Across the country, circuit courts disagree over what level of suspicion, if any, is required for border officials to search electronic devices. This leaves law enforcement agencies in the lurch because they must craft nationwide policies that cover jurisdictions with differing rules. The Supreme Court should bring this quandary to an end by holding that no reasonable suspicion or warrant is required for border searches of electronic devices. Many scholars and litigants have called for a reasonable suspicion or warrant requirement in light of Supreme Court decisions like Riley and Carpenter that recognize the privacy concerns raised by searches of …

Equality In The Streets: Using Proportionality Analysis To Regulate Street Policing, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The racially disparate impact and individual and collective costs of stop and frisk, misdemeanor arrests, and pretextual traffic stops have been well documented. Less widely noticed is the contrast between Supreme Court case law permitting these practices and the Court's recent tendency to strictly regulate technologically enhanced searches that occur outside the street policing setting and that--coincidentally or not--happen to be more likely to affect the middle class. If, as the Court has indicated, electronic tracking and searches of digital records require probable cause that evidence of crime will be found, stops and frisks should also require probable cause that …