Selection Bias: The Character of Policing on the Street

By Professor Eric Miller 

This post originally appeared on Prawsblawg, where Prof. Miller is guest blogging.

Criminal procedure scholars tend to think of policing in terms of the way the Constitution permits or restricts certain police practices; and more narrowly, in terms of what rights may be asserted by criminal suspects against the police. But most of what counts as policing is low visibility: out of sight of the courts that could enforce these constitutional regulations. Of much more importance to policing are the laws and policy decisions about who gets to be a police officer, and what training they receive. The selection and training issue has become especially pressing with he “rise of the warrior cop,” and the ways in which the discussion of policing selection and police training has been insulated from public and political scrutiny.

The core case on police selection is Washington v. Davis, which is often thought of as a Title VII and civil rights case. Davis was, however, a police selection case seeking to diversify the police force of Washington, D.C. And hidden behind Davis is a story of who gets to control the standards used to train the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. By 1976, African American police officers were making strides in admittance to the department; by 1978, the Chief of Police was African American, as were the majority of the officers. Nonetheless, just two years earlier, Davis had argued that the police test was having a discriminatory impact; the Court sided with the police in requiring a showing of discriminatory intent.

Policing and Procedural Justice in an Unjust Society

By Professor Eric Miller 

This post originally appeared on Prawsblawg, where Prof. Miller is guest blogging.

There is a sense, at least among a chunk of people, that policing in this country is broken: that the police are an authoritarian group that too often ignore the rights of minorities, especially African Americans, but also Latinos and other minority groups. The police hold these groups in contempt, and engage in unwarranted violence against minorities without being held properly to account. The popular reform proposed for this kind of police violence is "procedural justice": training the police to allow the people they encounter to given their side of the story before engaging in further action, increasing the chances that the civilian will voluntarily comply. The upside for the public is that "procedural justice" lowers the likelihood of police violence. The downside is that it is touted as real reform. But "procedural justice" is an inherently conservative response to problems with policing, and ignores—and perhaps even obfuscates—the need for real change. Worse, it potentially places the police in harms way in a manner that has longlasting moral and political (and perhaps psychological) costs for the police and the public. Here's why.

One way of seeing the problem is to realize that "procedural justice" explains the psychological impact on civilians of procedural due process. If police officers adhere to a form of procedural due process on the streets, civilians are more likely to comply with their directives. From a justice-oriented perspective, however, introducing procedural due process as a standard operating procedure for the police seems like a mealy mouthed—and long overdue—reform.

A standard critique of procedural due process is that it is insensitive to background considerations of justice. Procedural due process simply ensures that the parties get a chance of a hearing before someone who does not have a clear interest in the outcome of some dispute. But if the background equities are stacked against one of the parties, then that party has a much harder chance of success, even though the procedure used is just (in the sense of ensuring the parties get the right amount of participation). Worse, having committed to the procedure, the parties are bound by the results. The loser is disempowered from protesting her loss (except by means provided by the procedure, such as an appeal to some other authority, if such a right exists). Systems of procedurally just systems are often substantively unjust because a fair procedure in a system that is otherwise unfair cannot ensure that the parties receive their distributive or corrective due. Such inequities are often a feature of majoritarian political systems which are stacked against minorities; some form of substantive due process is often introduced as a means of mitigating against this sort of majority advantage.

President & Policing: What the Candidates Need to Consider

By Adjunct Professor Steve Lurie
Lieutenant, Los Angeles Police Department

The next president of the United States will lead our nation’s police through the most important four years in the history of American policing. Their most critical responsibility will be to rebuild the morale of our nation’s police officers. The president will inherit a nation where law enforcement professionals feel paralyzed. As a result, violent crime is rising in all of our major cities. Recruitment numbers are falling. Proactive policing is dying or dead. Without a motivated, professional police community, re-energized to walk the thin blue line, no progress will be made.

In tandem with this mission, the president must address communities who do not trust that policing is being done in a constitutional, even-handed manner. There is no doubt that a small percentage of officers make errors in judgment during their shifts. Even more rarely, an officer with bad intentions uses their power for evil. These breaches of the public trust are abhorrent and should be swiftly punished. Increased funding for body cameras and other accountability tools should come in the first 100 days of the new administration. Once deployed, these will show that police misconduct is extraordinarily uncommon. The current national tone far exaggerates the frequency of true wrongdoing by sworn officers.

Leadership on policing starts at the White House and the Attorney General’s office. Both of these have failed to curtail the fomentation of an environment where the police are viewed as the enemy, and the law breakers are empowered as never before in our history. The expected result, a marked increase in crime, is beginning to cast its cloud over our people. The next president of the United States must act immediately and decisively to turn back this storm in a way that strengthens the bond between members of law enforcement and the communities they serve.

Adjunct Professor Steve Lurie teaches the Police Practice Seminar at Loyola Law School. He is a lieutenant with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Trusting Policing

By Professor Eric J. Miller

For the past eight months, since the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man in the City of Ferguson, Missouri, the problem of white police officers using excessive force upon unarmed African Americans has gripped the United States of America The latest incident occurred last week, at a public swimming pool in McKinney, an upper-middle-class suburb of Dallas, Texas. Eric Casebolt, a police officer responding to reports of a fight at a public swimming pool, started shouting at the African American children attending a pool party. A bystander’s video shows him wrestling a bikini-clad and unarmed African American teenage girl to the ground, then drawing his weapon and using it to threaten other African Americans who were clearly disturbed by his use of force. He then kneels on the girl, whose screams of pain can distinctly be heard.

A common trope in contemporary policing is the idea that policing depends upon trust between the police and the community. Building trust between the police and communities is a central part of President Obama’s initiatives to strengthen relationships between communities and the police. But trust (and its opposite, distrust or suspicion) can be misplaced in stereotypical ways that unfairly empower or disempower people or groups. In those sorts of cases, we wrong people when we jump to conclusions based on their race, or gender, or some other superficial feature, and on that basis do afford their assertions less credibility than they deserve. In some cases, we give credence to the testimony of a witness because he is male, or white, and withhold it from another because she is female, or Latina. In countries around the world, we’ve seen, to our cost, that we tend to dismiss children when they claim abuse, but believe the priest or parent because of his position in the community.