Law Commons^™

Are Police Officers Bayesians? Police Updating In Investigative Stops, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Lila J.E. Nojima

Faculty Scholarship

Theories of rational behavior assume that actors make decisions where the benefits of their acts exceed their costs or losses. If those expected costs and benefits change over time, behavior will change accordingly as actors learn and internalize the parameters of success and failure. In the context of proactive policing, police stops that achieve any of several goals — constitutional compliance, stops that lead to “good” arrests or summonses, stops that lead to seizures of weapons, drugs, or other contraband, or stops that produce good will and citizen cooperation — should signal to officers the features of a stop that …

Terry'S Original Sin, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In Mapp v. Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court extended the due process protections of the exclusionary rule to include all "constitutionally unreasonable searches" that were done without a basis of probable cause. In the seven years after Mapp, when homicide rates in the U.S. nearly doubled, riots broke out in at least forty-seven U.S. cities. During the same era, a heroin epidemic gripped the nation's urban centers, giving rise to street drug markets and associated violence and pressures on law enforcement to curb those markets. As violence increased, a turn in the nation's political culture questioned Mapp's restraints on …

Muslim Profiles Post-9/11: Is Racial Profiling An Effective Counterterrorist Measure And Does It Violate The Right To Be Free From Discrimination?, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Racial profiling as a defensive counterterrorism measure necessarily implicates a rights trade-off: if effective, racial profiling limits the right of young Muslim men to be free from discrimination in order to promote the security and well-being of others. Proponents of racial profiling argue that it is based on simple statistical fact and represents just smart law enforcement. Opponents of racial profiling, like New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly, say that it is dangerous and just nuts.

As a theoretical matter, both sides are partly right. Racial profiling in the context of counterterrorism measures may increase the detection of terrorist …