Racial Disparity in Policing
"The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average." - Cody T. Ross, Plos One Journal
"Black Chicagoans were subjected to 72% of all stops, yet constitute just 32% of the city’s population. And, even in majority white police districts, minorities were stopped disproportionately to the number of minority people living in those districts" - ACLU, 2015 Study
Special Collections
- Police Conduct Resources (Westlaw Edge) Access limited to College of Law Students and Faculty
- Criminal Justice & Criminology {Hein} This link opens in a new window HeinOnline’s Criminal Justice & Criminology offers an historical overview of these ever-changing disciplines and their various expressions in American and English law over time. Collecting Bureau of Justice statistics, memoirs of retired Scotland Yard investigators, congressional hearings on drug control policies, accounts of prison life in days long past and much more, this collection explores how criminal justice has changed in America and the effect criminology has had on those changes. It collects government documents as well as rare or hard to find pamphlets, memoirs, and books written by ordinary law enforcement officers and not-so-famous criminals. To help users navigate the content spanning these two wide-reaching disciplines, all titles in this collection have been subject coded into 16 subject areas: Attorney General, Crimes and Criminals, Criminal Statistics, Criminology, Drug Enforcement, Government Law, Investigation and Forensics, Juvenile Justice, Law and Procedure, Law Enforcement, Organized Crime, Penology, Reform and Recidivism, Reminiscences, Sex Crimes, and Victimology.
- Criminal Justice Journals {Hein} This link opens in a new window This sub-collection of the Law Journal Library contains only titles pertaining to Criminal Justice
Important Works
- When an Officer Kills: Turning Legal Police Conduct into Illegal Police Misconduct What would it look like to explicitly criminalize killings like that of Stephon Clark--to turn legal police conduct into illegal police misconduct? To answer this question, Part I will discuss what Butler has termed the “Super Power to Kill,”13 which describes the way the law authorizes police officers to shoot unarmed and disproportionately minority civilians. I will discuss the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment “reasonableness” standard and show how it is reflected in state criminal law concerning police use of force. I will explain how this standard creates difficulty-of-proof issues that prevent the criminal prosecution of police officers for killing civilians. Furthermore, the standard tolerates officer biases and permits juries and judges to use prejudicial considerations in evaluating whether an officer acted reasonably.
- Toward Improving Policing in African American Communities The distressed state of police relations with African American communities has enraptured national and international attention recently. Demonstrations and protests have persisted while pundits and interested parties have debated the matter in public and private spheres. No one can deny that disturbing problems exist, and reasonable people recognize that contributing factors are stubborn and complex. This article briefly surveys the environmental circumstances that have given rise to recent troubles in New York City, New York; Ferguson, Missouri; Cleveland, Ohio; and Baltimore, Maryland, because they are illustrative of similar troubles in many African American communities nationwide. The article then proffers five proactive initiatives local police departments should implement in order to improve the tenor and effectiveness of their relations with these communities, namely (1) provide comprehensive emotional and psychological training; (2) initiate intensive cultural competency education; (3) apologize for past transgressions; (4) broadly deploy body cameras; and (5) engage in cooperative crisis management planning with community leaders.
- When is Police Violence Justified? In this Article, I argue that the concepts that structure justification defenses can and should be imported, subject to appropriate modifications, into the Fourth Amendment doctrine regulating police violence. Specifically, the law of justification defenses permits individuals to use force to serve particular well-defined interests, such as to protect themselves or others, under specific, carefully delineated conditions, i.e., when that force is necessary to protect against an imminent threat to one of those interests and is proportional to that threat.3 Analogously, I contend that the Fourth Amendment permits police uses of force only to serve directly the state's distinct interests in (1) facilitating its institutions of criminal law, most commonly by enabling a lawful arrest; (2) protecting public order; and (3) protecting the officer from physical harm. Moreover, even if one of these interests is at stake, a use of force should be considered unreasonable-- and therefore unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment--unless it is a response to an imminent threat to one of these interests, the force reasonably appears necessary in both degree and kind to protect the interest, and the harm the force threatens is not substantially disproportionate to the interest it protects. In this way, the substructure of justification defenses can be used to analyze whether a police use of force is constitutional.
- #Sayhername #BlackWomensLivesMatter: State Violence in Policing the Black Female Body The central theme of this Article is that Black female bodies are regularly policed and eventually sorted in United States prisons in accordance with their material value to the State and their ability to threaten its foundations. Undergirding this theme is the notion that the State is not a benign benefactor and protector of rights, but rather a malevolent entity that feeds on a material valuation of Black bodies, male and female, ordered as inferior to White bodies to gain both economic strength and political currency. This Article traces this phenomenon and its evolution in four parts. The discussion commences at the plantation as a proxy for the State and its actors, and its role in shaping the material and political valuation of Black female bodies. Next, it moves to the transfer of power from the plantation to state governments with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, and the implications for policing and sorting Black female bodies. Third, it interrogates the race and gendered dimensions of Jim Crow and its impact on policing Black women in the twenty-first century. The fourth and final section is a series of contemporary examples of how the vestiges of these systemic oppressive regimes persist in policing Black female bodies today. Although the main site of this Article is Georgia, it incorporates regional and national trends shaped by forces similar in kind and impact.
Black Resistance/White Law by
How the government has used the Constitution to deny black Americans their legal rights From the arrival of the first twenty slaves in Jamestown to the Howard Beach Incident of 1986, Yusef Hawkins, and Rodney King, federal law enforcement has pleaded lack of authority against white violence while endorsing surveillance of black rebels and using "constitutional" military force against them. In this groundbreaking study, constitutional scholar Mary Frances Berry analyzes the reasons why millions of African Americans whose lives have improved enormously, both socially and economically, are still at risk of police abuse and largely unprotected from bias crimes.
Call Number: E 185.61 .B45 1994ISBN: 9780140232981Publication Date: 1995
Police Violence by
Although the prevalence of police-citizen conflict has diminished, police use of excessive force remains a concern for the police. This study focuses on what is known and what still needs to be learned to understand, prevent and remediate police abuse of force.
Call Number: HV 8141 .A72 1996ISBN: 9780300064292Publication Date: 1996-09-25- Beyond the Rodney King Story by A study based on public forums conducted by the National Association for Colored People (NAACP) in six American cities, incorporating the perspectives of police representatives, criminal justice experts, community leaders, public officials, and citizens. The study concludes that racism is a centralCall Number: HV 8141 .B49 1995ISBN: 9781555532024Publication Date: 1994
Handcuffed by
The current crisis in policing can be traced to failures of reform. "Sparrow surely is right to condemn policing directed only at crime rates rather than community satisfaction." -The New York Times Book Review In the past two years, America has witnessed incendiary milestones in the poor relations between police and the African-American community: Ferguson, Baltimore, and more recently Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas. Malcolm Sparrow, who teaches at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and is a former British police detective, argues that other factors in the development of police theory and practice over the last twenty-five years have also played a major role in contributing to these tragedies and to a great many other cases involving excessive police force and community alienation. Sparrow shows how the core ideas of community and problem-solving policing have failed to thrive. In many police departments these foundational ideas have been reduced to mere rhetoric. The result is heavy reliance on narrow quantitative metrics, where police define how well they are doing by tallying up traffic stops, or arrests made for petty crimes. Sparrow's analysis shows what it will take for police departments to escape their narrow focus and perverse metrics and turn back to making public safety and public cooperation their primary goals. Police, according to Sparrow, are in the risk-control business and need to grasp the fundamental nature of that challenge and develop a much more sophisticated understanding of its implications for mission, methods, measurement, partnerships, and analysis.
Call Number: HV 8139 .S618 2016ISBN: 9780815727811Publication Date: 2016
Chokehold by
Finalist for the 2018 National Council on Crime & Delinquency's Media for a Just Society Awards Nominated for the 49th NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction) A 2017 Washington Post Notable Book A Kirkus Best Book of 2017 "Butler has hit his stride. This is a meditation, a sonnet, a legal brief, a poetry slam and a dissertation that represents the full bloom of his early thesis: The justice system does not work for blacks, particularly black men." --The Washington Post "The most readable and provocative account of the consequences of the war on drugs since Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow . . . ." --The New York Times Book Review "Powerful . . . deeply informed from a legal standpoint and yet in some ways still highly personal" --The Times Literary Supplement (London) With the eloquence of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the persuasive research of Michelle Alexander, a former federal prosecutor explains how the system really works, and how to disrupt it Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread--all with the support of judges and politicians. In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. For example, a white woman is ten times more likely to be raped by a white male acquaintance than be the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a black man. Butler also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer--without relying as much on police. Chokehold powerfully demonstrates why current efforts to reform law enforcement will not create lasting change. Butler's controversial recommendations about how to crash the system, and when it's better for a black man to plead guilty--even if he's innocent--are sure to be game-changers in the national debate about policing, criminal justice, and race relations.
Call Number: HV 8141 .B88 2017ISBN: 9781620974834Publication Date: 2018
Hands up, Don't Shoot by
Understanding the explosive protests over police killings and the legacy of racism Following the high-profile deaths of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, both cities erupted in protest over the unjustified homicides of unarmed black males at the hands of police officers. These local tragedies--and the protests surrounding them--assumed national significance, igniting fierce debate about the fairness and efficacy of the American criminal justice system. Yet, outside the gaze of mainstream attention, how do local residents and protestors in Ferguson and Baltimore understand their own experiences with race, place, and policing? In Hands Up, Don't Shoot, Jennifer Cobbina draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Brown and Gray. She examines how protestors in both cities understood their experiences with the police, how those experiences influenced their perceptions of policing, what galvanized Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and how policing tactics during demonstrations influenced subsequent mobilization decisions among protesters. Ultimately, she humanizes people's deep and abiding anger, underscoring how a movement emerged to denounce both racial biases by police and the broader economic and social system that has stacked the deck against young black civilians. Hands Up, Don't Shoot is a remarkably current, on-the-ground assessment of the powerful, protestor-driven movement around race, justice, and policing in America.
Call Number: HV 8141 .C56 2019ISBN: 9781479874415Publication Date: 2019
Campaign Zero
Campaign ZERO was developed with contributions from activists, protesters and researchers across the nation. This data-informed platform presents a package of policy solutions to end police violence in America. It integrates community demands and policy recommendations from research organizations and President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
- The President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing Trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve is essential in a democracy. It is key to the stability of our communities, the integrity of our criminal justice system, and the safe and effective delivery of policing services. In light of recent events that have exposed rifts in the relationships between local police and the communities they protect and serve, on December 18, 2014, President Barack Obama signed an executive order establishing the Task Force on 21st Century Policing. The President charged the task force with identifying best practices and offering recommendations on how policing practices can promote effective crime reduction while building public trust
- We the Protestors We The Protesters is a national organization focused on ending racism and police violence in the United States. Since 2015, we’ve built the most comprehensive database of police violence in the nation, used the data to identify effective policy solutions and supported movement organizers to enact these policies at every level of government.
- Policy Link: Community Safety and Justice While visioning and building an equitable and just system that keeps all communities safe, PolicyLink also works to reduce the harm of our current policing system, including shifting the narrative about policing, limiting the power of police unions to weaken public safety, and, through the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, supporting campaigns to defund the police, limiting use of force, increasing accountability, and making police racial profiling and misconduct records more transparent in California.
Other Resources
- Mapping Police Violence We believe the data represented on this site is the most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013. A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated approximately 1,200 people were killed by police between June, 2015 and May, 2016. Our database identified 1,106 people killed by police over this time period. While there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database (namely, those that go unreported by the media), these estimates suggest that our database captures 92% of the total number of police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing campaign to end police violence in our communities.
- Pew Research Center: Perceptions on Race and Policing George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police have brought new attention to questions about police officers’ attitudes toward black Americans, protesters and others. The public’s views of the police, in turn, are also in the spotlight. Here’s a roundup of Pew Research Center survey findings from the past few years about the intersection of race and law enforcement.
- Stop and Frisk in Chicago A review of how Terry stops have been used in Chicago demonstrates a persistent problem – inadequate training, supervision and monitoring of law enforcement in minority communities.
- Funders for Justice Funders for Justice (FFJ) is a national funder organizing platform focused on grassroots organizing led by and for people of color at the intersections of racial justice, gender justice, criminalization, and models for community safety and justice. FFJ launched in late 2014 to mobilize funding resources in solidarity with the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, and communities of color resisting state violence and criminalization around the country. Funders for Justice enables philanthropy’s role in partnering with communities of color towards creating and living with dignity, free from state, interpersonal, and systemic violence. We know that models and frameworks of community safety and justice cross many places, identities, lived experiences, and movements; are decided by communities most impacted by violence; and are deeply informed by the place in which people live.
- Special Issue: Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination The Radical History Review has a new special issue out on Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination. All articles are available for download free.
- Police Practices Resources (University of Arizona Law Library) his national calendar of publicly accessible events related to police practices including police ethics, accountability, and reforms was created collaboratively between law librarians and the ABA Legal Education Police Practices Consortium. The Consortium "aims to contribute to the national effort examining and addressing legal issues in policing and public safety, including conduct, oversight, and the evolving nature of police work."