Latest in Policing in America
Fourth Amendment doctrine and new policing technologies have made law enforcement less transparent, less accountable and less trustworthy. Transparency law is beginning to fill the gap.
Although law enforcement investigations have always depended on information from private actors, modern technology and big data have transformed an analog collection process into an automated, digital one. This shift has elevated the role that private entities play in the investigative process, mirroring the growth of private influence across the entire criminal system. Many of these private influences have been fiercely criticized.
Policing increasingly relies on the collection of digital data, often of people for whom there is no basis for suspicion. Police seek fewer search warrants and more requests to harvest metadata, they buy data from brokers, they track location and other aspects of our lives. Sometimes police collect the data themselves. More often they gather it from third parties. They do so by purchase, and by court order.
Today, more than ever, law enforcement has access to massive amounts of consumer data that allow police to, essentially, pluck a suspect out of thin air. Internet service providers and third parties collect and aggregate precise location data generated by our devices and their apps, making it possible for law enforcement to easily determine everyone who was in a given area during a given time period.
A parsing of the legal issues at play in the police shooting in the Capitol on Jan. 6.
On June 21, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed several claims in the overlapping suits filed by Black Lives Matter, the American Civil Liberties Union and others against former President Donald Trump, former Attorney General William Barr and a number of federal and local officers and agencies for the forcible clearing of protestors in Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020.
The report found no evidence that the Park Police cleared the park of racial justice marchers so that then-President Trump could walk through the park for a photo-op at St. John’s Episcopal Church.
In use-of-force trainings, police departments impose hard and fast rules on their officers despite departmental claims that such rules are unworkable. These rules, invisible to the public, often distribute risks of harm to the very civilians police are sworn to protect.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act will use federal grants to regulate police departments. Will this be enough to undo a century of policies and practices that have shielded local police from state and federal oversight?
It's been a year since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and there have been a lot of police reform efforts since then. A lot of them have come to nothing, but some of them have been very productive—at the state level, in certain cities and even, to a certain extent, at the federal level. To discuss the police reform successes and failures of the last year, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Rashawn Ray, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the David M.