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Improving Community Safety Means Addressing Police Violence As A Public Health Problem, Kami Chavis, Josh Horwitz

Popular Media

JURIST Guest Columnists from the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence Kami Chavis, a law professor at Wake Forest University, and Josh Horwitz, the Fund's executive director, discuss ways to address systemic police violence against people of color.

Psychopathy And Police Officers: A Cross-Sectional Analysis Of The Relationship Between Psychopathic Traits And Police Work Across Temporal Factors, Hunter N. Moore

Student Theses

It’s estimated that psychopathic personalities constitute about 1% of the general population but is seen at elevated rates in particularly stressful and harsh environments (Babiak & Hare, 2006; Hare, 1996). A career in law enforcement is one known to be uniquely stressful (Lucas et al., 2012), and the trauma from their career seems to be having an impact on their personality (Wills & Schuldberg, 2016). While psychopathy traits have been reported in police officers (Próchniak, 2012), these traits have yet to be assessed as a function of time. The current study explores these relationships by assessing psychopathy traits, as measured …

Civil Rights Ecosystems, Joanna C. Schwartz

Michigan Law Review

The Philadelphia and Houston Police Departments are similarly sized, but over a recent two-year period, ten times more civil rights suits were filed against Philadelphia and its officers than were filed against Houston and its officers. Plaintiffs in cases brought against Philadelphia and its officers were awarded one hundred times more in settlements and judgments. What accounts for these differences? Although the frequency and severity of misconduct and injury may play some role, I contend that the volume and outcome of civil rights litigation against any given jurisdiction should be understood as a product of what I call its civil …

Public Matters? Comparing Decision-Making By Appointed And Elected Prosecutors In Cases Of Deadly Use-Of-Force By Police In The Hartford Judicial District And Suffolk County, Andrew E. Dubsky

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis dissects prosecutor discretion for appointed and elected prosecutors after a “catalyst” event shifts public opinion. Previous studies have shown that elected prosecutors are more likely to use discretion favoring the opinion of the public than their appointed counterparts (Bandyopadhyay 2014, Nelson 2014, and Valenti 2011). Because elected prosecutors are more likely to follow public opinion, they should also be more likely to respond to the demands of the public than their appointed counterparts. In effect, elected prosecutors are expected to be more likely to exercise discretion in their charging and prosecuting. To test this, I use the 2014 …

Blue Lives & The Permanence Of Racism, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In true dystopian form, the killing of unarmed Black people by the police has sparked a national narrative about the suffering of police officers. “Blue Lives Matter” has become the rallying call for those offended by the suggestion that we should hold police officers accountable for killing unarmed Black people. According to a December 2016 poll, 61% of Americans believed that there was a “war on police,” and 68% of Whites had a favorable view of the police as compared to 40% of Blacks. Lawmakers around the country have been proposing Blue Lives Matter laws that make it a hate …

Survey Says?: U.S. Cities Double Down On Civilian Oversight Of Police Despite Challenges And Controversy, Sharon R. Fairley

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

The emergence of police accountability as an issue of concern in communities across the nation has led to a watershed era in the evolution of accountability systems involving civilian oversight of municipal police agencies. This Article reports on a survey of the civilian oversight entities in the one hundred most populous U.S. cities and draws on recent trends it identifies to illuminate the challenges inherent in civilian oversight of police. This Article is intended to serve as a resource for civilian oversight professionals as well as local government and community leaders who are advocating for new or revised oversight systems.

Stepping Into The Shoes Of The Department Of Justice: The Unusual, Necessary, And Hopeful Path The Illinois Attorney General Took To Require Police Reform In Chicago, Lisa Madigan, Cara Hendrickson, Karyn L. Bass Ehler

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Unh Students’ Attitudes Toward University Of New Hampshire Police, Angela R. Hurley

Honors Theses and Capstones

This study examines undergraduate students from the University of New Hampshire attitudes towards campus police, specifically how student experience with campus police affects their attitudes toward them. There were a total of 113 respondents from the University of New Hampshire that answered an online survey. The survey looked specifically at the relationship between students' experience and attitudes towards UNH police, hypothesizing that students who had perceived fair encounters with campus police would be more likely to contact them in an emergency and have more positive attitudes toward them . Multivariate analysis shows perceptions of witnessing an interaction and being approached …

Unpacking The Untapped Potential Of First-Line Supervisors : Sergeants' Role In Managing Police Discretion, Danielle Leigh Reynolds

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The operational uncertainties for police work—e.g. isolation, ambiguity, contextually contingent decision-making—force police departments to push discretion down to its lowest level employees. Consequently, officers are expected to exercise independent thought and judgment in response to the challenges confronted. Yet public criticism of police often breeds from officers’ “poor” decisions and the inordinate amount of discretion they are granted. Police organizations rarely experience crises for failing to control crime, rather it is failure to control police discretion that most often threatens a department’s legitimacy. Consequently, police departments rely on supervision to limit, constrain or shape officers’ discretion so that it mirrors …

As Pertains To The Criminal Justice System, Is Hindsight 20/20?, Syndie G. E. Molina, Cristina Negrillo

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Confessions, Convictions And Controversy: An Examination Of False Confessions Leading To Wrongful Convictions In The United States Throughout History, Kirandeep Kaur

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Bankruptcy, Duty Related Stress And Policing In Detroit, Sarah Markel

Department of Conflict Resolution Studies Theses and Dissertations

Urban police officers are regularly exposed to trauma and duty-related stress. The City of Detroit’s highly publicized bankruptcy proceedings reached finality in December 2014 but led to an additional layer of stress via financial uncertainty to Detroit police officers. The officers already experience high critical incident exposure rates and organizational tension/instability. While certain types of stressors (critical incident, organizational and family/personal) have been extensively researched and are largely anticipated within law enforcement agencies, the bankruptcy resolution, which included wage, pension, and medical insurance losses, may have compounded issues within the department. This research project used a mixed method case study …

A Qualitative Study: Black Male College Students’ Perceptions Of Campus Law Enforcement Officers On A College Campus, Junelle M. Bennett

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Black males are often the recipients of police brutality, criminal stereotyping, and inequitable treatment in higher education. This qualitative study examined the experiential narratives of 15 Black male college students’ perception towards law enforcement officers. The data was collected via one-on-one interviews, concluded with a focus group, and then presented in narrative forums. The participants’ feelings, attitudes, or beliefs about themselves as Black males significantly contributed to their inherent identification of the cultural challenges associated with law enforcement officers. The participants’ personal and vicarious life experiences prior to enrolling into higher education were significant to the authentic comprehension of the …

Higher Education And Police Officers: The Effects On Citizen Complaints, Evan D. Brown

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This study was conducted to examine the effects that different levels of education may have on the number of citizen complaints filed against police officers. There are many literature articles pertaining to the education of police officers but few studies have been conducted to measure the specific effects of higher education in law enforcement. The analysis in this paper will show relationships between higher education of police officers and if it has a relationship with the number of officer complaints.

Government Misconduct And Convicting The Innocent: The Role Of Prosecutors, Police And Other Law Enforcement, Samuel R. Gross, Maurice J. Possley, Kaitlin Jackson Roll, Klara Huber Stephens

Other Publications

This is a report about the role of official misconduct in the conviction of innocent people. We discuss cases that are listed in the National Registry of Exonerations, an ongoing online archive that includes all known exonerations in the United States since 1989, 2,663 as of this writing. This Report describes official misconduct in the first 2,400 exonerations in the Registry, those posted by February 27, 2019.

In general, we classify a case as an “exoneration” if a person who was convicted of a crime is officially and completely cleared based on new evidence of innocence.

The Report is …

Profiling And Consent: Stops, Searches, And Seizures After Soto, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Following Soto v. State (1999), New Jersey was the first state to enter into a Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to end racially selective enforcement on the state’s highways. The Consent Decree led to extensive reforms in the training and supervision of state police troopers, and the design of information technology to monitor the activities of the State Police. Compliance was assessed in part on the State’s progress toward the elimination of racial disparities in the patterns of highway stops and searches. We assess compliance by analyzing data on 257,000 vehicle stops on the New Jersey Turnpike …

Race And Reasonableness In Police Killings, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Alexis D. Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on …

A New Breed Of Cop: Keeping Kids On The Straight And Narrow, Michael Tashji

Capstones

Policing kids in America today has changed—the ‘tough on crime’ days are over. Public scrutiny of police is at an all-time high, five years after the unrest in Ferguson. Officers Camacho, Charles and Romano serve the town of Bloomfield, New Jersey, and work specifically with kids in the community. They’ve adapted to these changes. But they’ve also banded together to support each other behind the thin blue line.

https://michaeltashji.com

Cops And Cars: How The Automobile Drove Fourth Amendment Law, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

This is an essay on Professor Sarah A. Seo’s new book, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard Univ. Press 2019). I focus on Professor Seo’s analysis of Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132 (1925) and Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160 (1949). Carroll is important not only because it was the Court’s first car case. Understanding Carroll (and Brinegar, which solidified and expanded Carroll’s holding) is essential because, nearly one hundred years later, its logic continues to direct how the modern Court resolves Fourth Amendment claims of motorists. Put simply, a majority of today’s …

Assessing The Impact Of Police Body Camera Evidence On The Litigation Of Excessive Force Cases, Mitch Zamoff

Georgia Law Review

In the wake of several hotly debated and widely publicized shootings of civilians by police officers, calls for the increased use of body-worn cameras (bodycams) by law enforcement officers have intensified. As police departments across the country expand their use of this emergent technology, courts will increasingly be presented with video evidence from bodycams when making determinations in cases alleging the excessive use of force by the police. This Article tests the hypotheses that bodycam evidence will be dispositive in most excessive force cases and that such evidence will positively impact the way those cases are litigated and decided. In …

To Knock Or Not To Knock? No-Knock Warrants And Confrontational Policing, Brian Dolan

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Note proceeds in three parts. Part I begins by explaining what no-knock warrants are and why they are used. Part I then addresses recent state legislative efforts to reform no-knock warrant use and argues that these efforts, however well-intentioned, are insufficient. Part I will also provide a brief history of how no-knock warrant use developed and gives an overview of the current status of state law regarding no-knock warrants. Part II argues that, contrary to the arguments of no-knock proponents, elimination of no-knock warrants and strict adherence to the knock-and-announce requirement is a more effective way to ensure …

Improving Law Enforcement Daily Deployment Through Machine Learning-Informed Optimization Under Uncertainty, Jonathan David Chase, Duc Thien Nguyen, Haiyang Sun, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Urban law enforcement agencies are under great pressure to respond to emergency incidents effectively while operating within restricted budgets. Minutes saved on emergency response times can save lives and catch criminals, and a responsive police force can deter crime and bring peace of mind to citizens. To efficiently minimize the response times of a law enforcement agency operating in a dense urban environment with limited manpower, we consider in this paper the problem of optimizing the spatial and temporal deployment of law enforcement agents to predefined patrol regions in a real-world scenario informed by machine learning. To this end, we …

Guilt By Alt-Association: A Review Of Enhanced Punishment For Suspected Gang Members, Rebecca J. Marston

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This essay, written in reaction to the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform’s 2018 Symposium entitled “Alt-Association: The Role of Law in Combating Extremism” (the Symposium), does not dispute the seriousness of gang-related violence. Rather, it examines ways in which current strategies for combating gang-related crimes are ineffective or problematic and suggests possible reforms. Part One of this essay will describe current methods used in labeling, tracking, and prosecuting gang members, which result in a cycle of enhanced punishment. Part Two will evaluate these practices and reflect on whether enhanced punishment is the best way to reduce gang-related violence, …

Location Tracking And Digital Data: Can Carpenter Build A Stable Privacy Doctrine?, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

In Carpenter v United States, the Supreme Court struggled to modernize twentieth-century search and seizure precedents for the “Cyber Age.” Twice previously this decade the Court had tweaked Fourth Amendment doctrine to keep pace with advancing technology, requiring a search warrant before the government can either peruse the contents of a cell phone seized incident to arrest or use a GPS tracker to follow a car’s long-term movements.

The Quantum Of Suspicion Needed For An Exigent Circumstances Search, Kit Kinports

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

For decades, the United States Supreme Court opinions articulating the standard of exigency necessary to trigger the exigent circumstances exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement have been maddeningly opaque and confusing. Some cases require probable cause, others call for reasonable suspicion, and still, others use undefined and unhelpful terms such as “reasonable to believe” in describing how exigent the situation must be to permit the police to proceed without a warrant. Not surprisingly, the conflicting signals coming from the Supreme Court have led to disagreement in the lower courts.

To resolve this conflict and provide guidance to law enforcement …

Tort Justice Reform, Paul David Stern

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article calls for a comprehensive reform of public tort law with respect to law enforcement conduct. It articulates an effective and equitable remedial regime that reconciles the aspirational goals of public tort law with the practical realities of devising payment and disciplinary procedures that are responsive to tort settlements and judgments. This proposed statutory scheme seeks to deter law enforcement misconduct without disincentivizing prudent officers from performing their duties or overburdening them with extensive litigation. Rather than lamenting the dissolution of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics or the insurmountability of qualified immunity, reform …

Creating The Best: A Two-Prong Policy Approach To Improve The Quality Of Future Certified Ohio Peace Officers, Amy English

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This qualitative client applied study explained and explored a two-fold approach that could be used to implement policy changes that will aid small Ohio police departments in commissioning intellectually developed and psychologically suited individuals for employment in law enforcement. Several issues needed to be addressed in order to accomplish these policy changes. Criminological theories were correlated to deviant behaviors of criminally charged Ohio police officers. Past legislated police reform acts were addressed. Past studies of police officer higher education were analyzed. Finally, the implementation factors for psychological evaluations as a police academy pre-enrollment requirement were identified. This study, based on …

Effective Assistance Of Counsel? An Empirical Study Of Defense Attorneys’ Decision-Making In False-Confession Cases, Sara C. Appleby, Hadley R. Mccartin

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Although there is considerable literature on the causes of false confessions and the effects confession evidence has on juror decision-making, little research has examined attorneys’ decision-making in disputed confession cases. As the intervening step between when the confession is elicited and the case is resolved, it is crucial that research examine effects of confession evidence on this population. The current studies investigate defense attorneys’ knowledge and perception of key interrogation and confession issues as well as their decision-making in a disputed confession case. Overall, results show that defense attorneys are knowledgeable about key interrogation and confession issues and are aware …

White Caller Crime: Racialized Police Communication And Existing While Black, Chan Tov Mcnamarah

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Over the past year, reports to the police about Black persons engaged in innocuous behaviors have bombarded the American consciousness. What do we make of them? And, equally important, what are the consequences of such reports?

This Article is the first to argue that the recent spike in calls to the police against Black persons who are simply existing must be understood as a systematic phenomenon which it dubs racialized police communication. The label captures two related practices. First, racially motivated police reporting—calls, complaints, or reports made when Black persons are engaged in behavior that would not have been read …

Policing, Danger Narratives, And Routine Traffic Stops, Jordan Blair Woods

Michigan Law Review

This Article presents findings from the largest and most comprehensive study to date on violence against the police during traffic stops. Every year, police officers conduct tens of millions of traffic stops. Many of these stops are entirely unremarkable—so much so that they may be fairly described as routine. Nonetheless, the narrative that routine traffic stops are fraught with grave and unpredictable danger to the police permeates police training and animates Fourth Amendment doctrine. This Article challenges this dominant danger narrative and its centrality within key institutions that regulate the police.

The presented study is the first to offer an …