Law Commons^™

An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen J. Pita Loor

Michigan Law Review

Protesting is supposed to be revered in our democracy, considered “as American as apple pie” in our nation’s mythology. But the actual experiences of the 2020 racial justice protesters showed that this supposed reverence for political dissent and protest is more akin to American folklore than reality on the streets. The images from those streets depicted police officers clad in riot gear and armed with shields, batons, and “less than” lethal weapons aggressively arresting protesters, often en masse. In the first week of the George Floyd protests, police arrested roughly 10,000 people, and approximately 78 percent of those arrests were …

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

When The Cops Were Not 'Handcuffed', Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

Are we losing the war against crime? Is the public getting a fair break? Has the pendulum swung too far to the left? Do the victims of crime have some rights, too? Are the courts handcuffing the police?

If there were a hit parade for newspaper and magazine articles, speeches and panel discussions, these questions would rank high on the list. Not only are they being raised with increasing frequency, but they are being debated with growing fury.

Last year, probably the most famous police chief in the United States, William H. Parker of Los Angeles, protested that American police …

Order And Civil Liberties: A Complex Role For The Police, George Edwards

Michigan Law Review

The Honorable Edward J. Jeffries was Mayor of the City of Detroit at the time. He was a great mayor; but he had not known that this terror was imminent or that it was even possible. This attitude was shared by most of the city's residents, and to say that Detroit was not ready for this outburst of racial strife would be to put it mildly. In this respect, every mayor in America would find it useful to read a recent journalistic account of the events of that twenty-four-hour period. The authors of this commentary were not very kind in …

An Extravagant Account

Michigan Law Review

A review of OUR LAWLESS POLICE. By Ernest Jerome Hopkins.

Report On Lawlessness In Law Enforcement, John Barker Waite

Michigan Law Review

The first part of this Report offers taxpayers little return on their investment. All it even purports to do is to inform the public that the police throughout the country sometimes use intolerable, brutal methods to extract information concerning crime and occasionally keep arrested persons out of communication with lawyers and friends until they can be questioned at length. But of these facts the public was already convinced through newspaper and magazine. Indeed, the Report itself uses the widespread public knowledge of the evil as evidence of its existence. Yet, beyond this repetition of already accepted beliefs, the Report really …