Law Commons^™

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, …

"You Crossed The Fog Line!"—Kansas, Pretext, And The Fourth Amendment, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

In Whren, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned pretextual traffic stops. In practice the holding of Whren condones police investigations that target certain suspect classes of people, like Hispanics, for increased police scrutiny. In permitting pretextual stops, the Court ignored the risk that such practices will encourage police to distort the truth, overlooked the cost of under-enforcement of the laws, and ignored the consequences to the criminal justice system of race and ethnicity based discrimination.

Kansas law exacerbates these risks by making fog-line stops a model for protecting ulterior motives from a sifting judicial inquiry. In Kansas, it makes …