Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

Police Funding, Stephen Rushin, Roger Michalski

Faculty Articles

A number of civil rights activists have called for the defunding or abolition of American police departments. These activists claim that the United States overinvests in police, leaving fewer scarce resources to support other government services. Activists also claim that overinvestment in policing contributes to higher rates of police misconduct and unnecessary criminalization, particularly in communities of color. This Article considers these calls for the defunding of police. It ultimately cautions against widespread defunding of police and offers an alternative proposal. Part I brings together multiple national databases on local government expenditures to evaluate empirically how states and municipalities fund …

Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J. J. Prescott, Benjamin David Pyle, Sonja B. Starr

Faculty Scholarship

People convicted of violent crimes constitute a majority of the imprisoned population but are generally ignored by existing policies aimed at reducing mass incarceration. Serious efforts to shrink the large footprint of the prison system will need to recognize this fact. This point is especially pressing at the time of this writing, as states and the federal system consider large-scale prison releases motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those convicted of violent crimes constitute a large majority of older prisoners, who are extremely vulnerable to the spread of the virus behind bars. Excluding them from protective measures will deeply undermine those …

Law Enforcement Officers As Victims Of Felonious Killings And Assaults: An Analysis Of The Predictors Of Lethality And The Likelihood Of Officer Assault Or Death, Gabriella Mercado

Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to explore the predictors of lethality for the outcome of police officer assault with injury and felonious death. Recent news has focused on police brutality and their excessive use of force. Conversely, the inverse relationship has not received much focus. To explore the aforementioned relationship, data from the LEOKA program on 1,375 officers who were feloniously killed or assaulted with serious injury between the years of 2008 and 2017 were examined to determine the statistical significance between several predictor variables and the outcome variable.

Binary logistic regression was used to answer the research questions posed by …

Job Stress Effects On Job Satisfaction And Attrition In 9-1-1 Call Centers, Damarys Jaile Gilligan

Theses and Dissertations

In 9-1-1 call centers across the nation the personnel shortage has become a crisis. The nature of the job of a 9-1-1 telecommunicator is stressful due to the high volume of emergency calls. This applied dissertation was designed to learn if there is a relationship between job stress, burnout levels, and job satisfaction in 9-1-1 telecommunicators. This was a nonexperimental quantitative survey research with a correlational approach. The population was a nonprobability convenience sample recruited through the Survey Monkey Audience platform. Data was collected at one point in time. A total of 37 participants took part in the study. All …

Beyond Policing, India Thusi

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

We all deserve to live in communities where we feel safe

And true community safety means feeling safe from violence by the state, which includes the police. Social inequity has systematically and institutionally permeated our country since its founding, becoming more visible at various times in our history. We are now living in one of those moments of tremendous clarity, and it calls on us to look deeply at the efficacy of the reforms and narratives which preceded it . The deadly consequences of political decisions that create health disparities are now a wound that cannot be unseen as the …

The Wandering Officer, Ben Grunwald, John Rappaport

Faculty Scholarship

“Wandering officers” are law-enforcement officers fired by one department, sometimes for serious misconduct, who then find work at another agency. Policing experts hold disparate views about the extent and character of the wandering-officer phenomenon. Some insist that wandering officers are everywhere—possibly increasingly so—and that they’re dangerous. Others, however, maintain that critics cherry-pick rare and egregious anecdotes that distort broader realities. In the absence of systematic data, we simply do not know how common wandering officers are or how much of a threat they pose, nor can we know whether and how to address the issue through policy reform.

In this …

Boots And Bail On The Ground: Assessing The Implementation Of Misdemeanor Bail Reforms In Georgia, Andrea Woods, Sandra G. Mayson, Lauren Sudeall, Guthrie Armstrong, Anthony Potts

Georgia Law Review

This Article presents a mixed-methods study of misdemeanor bail practice across Georgia in the wake of reform. We observed bail hearings and interviewed system actors in a representative sample of fifty-five counties to assess the extent to which pretrial practice conforms to legal standards clarified in Senate Bill 407 and Walker v. Calhoun. We also analyzed jail population data published by county jails and by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. We found that a handful of counties have made promising headway in adhering to law and best practices, but that the majority have some distance to go. Most counties …

Reform Prosecutors And Separation Of Powers, Logan Sawyer

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

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

Dangerous Drivers Still On City Streets Despite Thousands Of Speeding Tickets, Liam Quigley

Capstones

A months-long investigation of a vehicle in New York City with many speeding tickets led to a Nassau County address and a man who claims his employer paid all the tickets. It’s one of a limited number of cases where thousands of dollars in fines have proven ineffective at changing behavior and highlights a blind spot of the city’s Vision Zero initiative. This article explores a bill that lawmakers are hoping to use to get the worst drivers off the road and into a safety course.

Link: https://medium.com/@lquigley/dangerous-drivers-still-on-city-streets-despite-thousands-of-speeding-tickets-2cfda50883d7

After 31 Years In Prison, Lee Chalk Asks For Forgiveness., Jeffery Harrell, Brenda Leon

Capstones

Lee Chalk has spent more than three decades in state prison, and is now applying for executive clemency to have his sentence ended early. He is guilty of a crime, being involved in an armed robbery turned deadly which killed two people. Our project explores the potential for transformation and rehabilitation inside prison, and the personal and political ramification of mass incarceration and extreme sentencing.

https://medium.com/p/738d1cb28532/edit

A shorter version of the capstone was also published with Gothamist here: https://gothamist.com/news/ny-prison-clemency-parole-cuomo

Who Ya Gonna Call? An Analysis Of Paradigm Shifts And Social Harms As A Result Of Hyper-Viral Police Violence, Ariana H. Aboulafia

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

Safety & Risk Management News - December 2019, Otterbein University

Otterbein Police Department

No abstract provided.

Experimental Punishments, John F. Stinneford

Notre Dame Law Review

The Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause prohibits, under its original meaning, punishments that are unjustly harsh in light of longstanding prior practice. The Clause does not prohibit all new punishments; rather, it directs that when a new punishment is introduced it should be compared to traditional punishments that enjoy long usage. This standard presents a challenge when the government introduces a new method of punishment, particularly one that is advertised as more “progressive” or “humane” than those it replaces. It may not always be obvious, for example, how to compare a prison sentence to a public flogging, or death by …

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 …

Killer's Code: Familial Dna Searches Through Third-Party Databases Under Carpenter, Jesse Kitnick

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

Incarceration Or E-Incarceration: California's Sb 10 Bail Reform And The Potential Pitfalls For Pretrial Detainees, Ashley Mullen

Cornell Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Bail In California: Analyzing Sb 10 Through The Prism Of Past Reforms, Adam Peterson

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

The cash bail system is the cause of numerous injustices. It favors the rich over the poor, it packs jails to the breaking point, and it forces those who have yet to be found guilty to sit in jail—often for weeks or months at a time. In 2018, the California legislature passed SB 10. The bill purported to abolish cash bail wholesale and replace it with a risk assessment program. While SB 10 is a step in the right direction, it faces many obstacles before it accomplishes its goal. This Note examines the bill in light of past attempts at …

Enter At Your Own Risk: Criminalizing Asylum-Seekers, Thomas M. Mcdonnell, Vanessa H. Merton

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In nearly three years in office, President Donald J. Trump’s war against immigrants and the foreign-born seems only to have intensified. Through a series of Executive Branch actions and policies rather than legislation, the Trump Administration has targeted immigrants and visitors from Muslim-majority countries, imposed quotas on and drastically reduced the independence of Immigration Court Judges, cut the number of refugees admitted by more than 80%, cancelled DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and stationed Immigration Customs and Enforcement (“ICE”) agents at state courtrooms to arrest unauthorized immigrants, intimidating them from participating as witnesses and litigants. Although initially saying that …