Law Commons^™

Changing The Public Drunkenness Laws: The Impact Of Decriminalization, David Aaronson, C. Dienes, Michael Musheno

Michael Musheno

Laws that decriminalize public drunkenness continue to use the police as the major intake agent for public inebriates under the "new" public health model of detoxification and treatment. Assuming that decriminalization introduces many disincentives to police intervention using legally sanctioned procedures, we hypothesize that it will be followed by a statistically significant decline in the number of public inebriates formally handled by the police in the manner designated by the "law in the books." Using an "interrupted time-series quasi-experiment" based on a "stratified multiple-group single-I design," we confirm this hypothesis for Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis, Minnesota. However, through intensive "microanalysis" …

Policing Identities: Cop Decision Making And The Constitution Of Citizens, Trish Oberweis, Michael Musheno

Michael Musheno

Examines police decision making by focusing on stories from 10 officers & drawing together contemporary thought about identities & police subculture. The inquiry suggests that police decision making is both improvisational & patterned. Cops are moral agents who tag people with identities as they project identities of their own. They engage in raw forms of division or stereotyping, marking some as Others to be feared & themselves as protectors of society, while exercising their coercive powers to punish "the bad." Due, in part, to the many ways that they identify themselves, cops also connect with people as unique individuals, including …

Reforming To Preserve: Compstat And Strategic Problem Solving In American Policing, David Weisburd, Stephen Mastrofski, Ann Marie Mcnally, Rosann Greenspan

Rosann Greenspan

Provides a national description of Compstat programs, considered in the framework of strategic problem solving. Examination of the diffusion of Compstat programs and nature of Compstat model through out the U.S.; Recognition of Compstat as a major innovation in U.S. policing; Features of Compstat.

Interrogating Richard Leo's Claims About Police Scholarship, Michael Musheno

Michael Musheno

The article discusses notions of police scholars propounded by review essayist Richard Leo. The current generation of sociolegal scholars pursuing police studies are integrating American and European traditions to generate a new body of critical inquiry, uncovering new insights about the meaning of policing, pursuing issues of policing ignored in the 1960s and connecting police practices to processes of state formation and legitimacy. This latter focus includes critical scholarship about community policing, an area of inquiry that Leo claims is fully under the grip of the policy audience. As for the pull of the policy audience, Leo offers no empirical …

Incursion: Effects Of Militarization Of The Police In The United States, Andrea Lyon

Andrea D. Lyon

No abstract provided.

Neighborhood Differences In Attitudes Toward Policing: Evidence For A Mixed-Strategy Model Of Policing In A Multi-Ethnic Setting, Roger Dunham, Geoffrey Alpert

Roger G. Dunham Dr.

No abstract provided.

Immigration Policing And Federalism Through The Lens Of Technology, Surveillance, And Privacy, Anil Kalhan

Anil Kalhan

With the deployment of technology, federal programs to enlist state and local police assistance with immigration enforcement are undergoing a sea change. For example, even as it forcefully has urged invalidation of Arizona’s S.B. 1070 and similar state laws, the Obama administration has presided over the largest expansion of state and local immigration policing in U.S. history with its implementation of the “Secure Communities” program, which integrates immigration and criminal history database systems in order to automatically ascertain the immigration status of every individual who is arrested and booked by state and local police nationwide. By 2012, over one fifth …

The Responsibility To Protect In Oceania: A Political Assessment Of The Impact And Influence Of R2p On Police Forces, Andrew Goldsmith, Charles Hawksley, Nichole Georgeou

Charles M Hawksley

The project ‘R2P in Oceania’ is a political assessment of the impact and influence of R2P principles on the developing police forces of three states, Timor-Leste, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG). It links most strongly with the Centre’s priority concept two: supporting states to build their capacities to protect their own populations from abuses of human rights, including genocide and mass atrocities. This articulates with the Responsibility to Assist, the least studied aspect of the UNSG’s ‘Three Pillars’ Approach to R2P. Our research provides empirical findings surrounding the process of police-building in these states. It points to the …

The Gatehouses And Mansions: 50 Years Later, Richard Leo, K. Alexa Koenig

Richard A. Leo

In 1965, Yale Kamisar authored “Equal Justice in the Gatehouses and Mansions of American Criminal Procedure,” an article that would come to have an enormous impact on the development of criminal procedure and American norms of criminal justice. Today, that article is a seminal work of scholarship, hailed for “playing a significant part in producing some of the [Warren] Court’s most important criminal-procedure decisions” (White 2003-04), including Miranda v. Arizona. The most influential concept Kamisar promoted may have been his recognition of a gap that loomed between the Constitutional rights actualized in mansions (courts) versus gatehouses (police stations). Kamisar passionately …

Interrogation Through Pragmatic Implication: Sticking To The Letter Of The Law While Violating Its Intent, Deborah Davis, Richard A. Leo

Richard A. Leo

In response to increasing evidence that police interrogation procedures can and do elicit false confessions from innocent suspects, American Courts have offered guidelines intended to protect suspects from coercive interrogations and to ensure the voluntariness and reliability of any confessions obtained. However, faced with legal prohibitions against police promotion of suspect confessions through use of physical coercion or explicit incentives for confession, American police interrogation tactics have evolved to rely on the use of pragmatic implication to nevertheless convey strong incentives for suspects to confess guilt—practices that have essentially diluted or circumvented the intended protections and that have continued to …

Police Interrogation And Coercion In Domestic American History: Lessons For The War On Terror, Richard Leo, K. Alexa Koenig

Richard A. Leo

The use of torture during interrogations conducted by U.S. special forces, military police, CIA agents, the FBI, and private contractors during the War on Terror has been widely documented. While many chroniclers of the use of torture have characterized its use as a dramatic break from the past, the use of torture by American interrogators and the tacit sanctioning by U.S. officials are not new. The routine use of torture by American domestic police during the early part of the twentieth century has been largely ignored by scholars who study contemporary uses of torture in the international context. This chapter …

Psychological And Cultural Aspects Of Interrogations And False Confessions: Using Research To Inform Legal Decision-Making, Richard A. Leo, Mark Costanzo, Netta Shaked-Schroer

Richard A. Leo

False confessions are a major cause of wrongful convictions. In many countries, physical abuse and torture are still used to extract confessions from criminal suspects. Cultural orientations such as collectivism and power distance may influence the tendency to confess, and a suspect's past experience in a country that uses physical abuse during interrogations may render suspects fearful and more prone to falsely confess. After looking at interrogations outside the United States, we examine the issue of why false confessions sometime occur in the U.S. legal system. We prove an overview of the stages of a typical interrogation and provide a …

Police Paternalism: Community Caretaking, Assistance Searches, And Fourth Amendment Reasonableness, Michael R. Dimino

Michael R Dimino

Strategies For Preventing False Confessions And Their Consequences, Deborah Davis, Richard Leo

Richard A. Leo

Researchers have amply documented that contemporary methods of psychological interrogation can, and sometimes do, lead innocent individuals to confess falsely to serious crimes. The consequences of these false confessions can be disastrous for innocent individuals. This chapter reviews the primary causes of false confession and resultant miscarriages of justice that are subject to the influence of law enforcement and the courts. We first review the major identifiable causes of false confession, offering suggestions for ways to minimize or avoid them. We offer four primary strategies for prevention of false confessions: (i) interrogation only of those for whom there is sufficient …