The Problem of Policing

The legal problem of policing is how to regulate police authority to permit officers to enforce law while also protecting individual liberty and minimizing the social costs the police impose. Courts and commentators have largely treated the problem of policing as limited to preventing violations of constitutional rights and its solution as the judicial definition and enforcement of those rights. But constitutional law and courts alone are necessarily inadequate to regulate the police. Constitutional law does not protect important interests below the constitutional threshold or effectively address the distributional impacts of law enforcement activities. Nor can the judiciary adequately assess law enforcement practices or predict police conduct. The problem of policing is fundamentally a problem of regulation-a fact largely invisible in contemporary scholarship. While scholars have criticized the conventional paradigm, contemporary scholarship continues to operate within its limits. In this Article, I advocate a new agenda for scholars considering the police, one that asks not how the Constitution constrains the police but how law and public policy can best regulate the police. First, scholars should evaluate policing practices to determine what harms they produce, which practices are too harmful, and which are harm efficient. These inquiries are essential to ensuring that the benefits of policing are worth the costs it imposes. Second, scholars should explore the full law of the police -the web of interacting federal, state, and local laws that govern the police and police departments. Presently, for example, courts tailor their interpretation of § 1983 and the exclusionary rule to encourage changes in police behavior yet civil service law, collective bargaining law, and federal and state employment discrimination law simultaneously discourage the same reforms, a phenomenon ignored by the academy. Third, scholars should analyze the capacities and incentives of nonjudicial local, state, and federal institutions to contribute to a regulatory regime capable of intelligently choosing and efficiently promoting the best ends of policing. This agenda offers a path for moving beyond constitutional criminal procedure toward a legal regime that promotes policing that is both effective and protective of individual freedom

The Problem of Policing

The legal problem of policing is how to regulate police authority to permit officers to enforce law while also protecting individual liberty and minimizing the social costs the police impose. Courts and commentators have largely treated the problem of policing as limited to preventing violations of constitutional rights and its solution as the judicial definition and enforcement of those rights. But constitutional law and courts alone are necessarily inadequate to regulate the police. Constitutional law does not protect important interests below the constitutional threshold or effectively address the distributional impacts of law enforcement activities. Nor can the judiciary adequately assess law enforcement practices or predict police conduct. The problem of policing is fundamentally a problem of regulation-a fact largely invisible in contemporary scholarship. While scholars have criticized the conventional paradigm, contemporary scholarship continues to operate within its limits. In this Article, I advocate a new agenda for scholars considering the police, one that asks not how the Constitution constrains the police but how law and public policy can best regulate the police. First, scholars should evaluate policing practices to determine what harms they produce, which practices are too harmful, and which are harm efficient. These inquiries are essential to ensuring that the benefits of policing are worth the costs it imposes. Second, scholars should explore the full law of the police -the web of interacting federal, state, and local laws that govern the police and police departments. Presently, for example, courts tailor their interpretation of § 1983 and the exclusionary rule to encourage changes in police behavior yet civil service law, collective bargaining law, and federal and state employment discrimination law simultaneously discourage the same reforms, a phenomenon ignored by the academy. Third, scholars should analyze the capacities and incentives of nonjudicial local, state, and federal institutions to contribute to a regulatory regime capable of intelligently choosing and efficiently promoting the best ends of policing. This agenda offers a path for moving beyond constitutional criminal procedure toward a legal regime that promotes policing that is both effective and protective of individual freedom

Why Arrest?

Arrests are the paradigmatic police activity. Though the practice of arrests in the United States, especially arrests involving minority suspects, is under attack, even critics widely assume the power to arrest is essential to policing. As a result, neither commentators nor scholars have asked why police need to make arrests. This Article takes up that question, and it argues that the power to arrest and the use of that power should be curtailed. The twelve million arrests police conduct each year are harmful not only to the individual arrested but also to their families and communities and to society as a whole. Given their costs, arrests should be used only when they serve an important state interest; yet, they often happen even when no such interest exists. Governments have allowed constitutional law to become the primary constraint on arrest practices, and it has proved a poor proxy for good policy analysis. The Fourth Amendment permits arrests whenever an officer has probable cause: it has no mechanism for ensuring that the state has any interest in making an arrest—as opposed to starting the criminal process in another way. More broadly, traditional arguments for arrests cannot justify existing arrest practice. Arrests are usually unnecessary to start the criminal process effectively, to maintain order, to collect evidence, or to deter crime. In most cases, reasonable, less intrusive, alternative means exist or could exist for achieving these ends. Even arrests for some serious crimes might be curbed significantly without risking substantial harm to public safety or order. If the state can achieve its law enforcement objectives without arrests, then police departments should conduct far fewer arrests than they currently do, and states should restrict the statutory authority to arrest accordingly. Though there are risks to reducing arrests, those risks are far less problematic than continuing what is presently a massive, and largely unnecessary, enterprise of state coercion

Local seismicity around the Chain Transform Fault at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge from OBS observations

Summary Seismicity along transform faults provides important constraints for our understanding of the factors that control earthquake ruptures. Oceanic transform faults are particularly informative due to their relatively simple structure in comparison to their continental counterparts. The seismicity of several fast-moving transform faults has been investigated by local networks, but as of today there been few studies of transform faults in slow spreading ridges. Here we present the first local seismicity catalogue based on event data recorded by a temporary broadband network of 39 ocean bottom seismometers located around the slow-moving Chain Transform Fault (CTF) along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) from March 2016 to March 2017. We locate 972 events in the area by simultaneously inverting for a 1-D velocity model informed by the event P- and S-arrival times. We refine the depths and focal mechanisms of the larger events using deviatoric moment tensor inversion. Most of the earthquakes are located along the CTF (700) and Romanche transform fault (94) and the MAR (155); a smaller number (23) can be observed on the continuing fracture zones or in intraplate locations. The ridge events are characterised by normal faulting and most of the transform events are characterised by strike slip faulting, but with several reverse mechanisms that are likely related to transpressional stresses in the region. CTF events range in magnitude from 1.1 to 5.6 with a magnitude of completeness around 2.3. Along the CTF we calculate a b-value of 0.81 ± 0.09. The event depths are mostly shallower than 15 km below sea level (523), but a small number of high-quality earthquakes (16) are located deeper, with some (8) located deeper than the brittle-ductile transition as predicted by the 600˚C-isotherm from a simple thermal model. The deeper events could be explained by the control of seawater infiltration on the brittle failure limit

Increasing Invasive Plant Pest Early Detection Through Interagency First Detector Education

The Collaborative and Enhanced First Detector Training program has expanded invasive species detection efforts by teaching participants to scout for, identify, and submit suspect exotic species samples. Workshops were delivered to agriculture professionals, master gardeners, and other Extension audiences. Topics included introduction pathways, regulatory agency procedures, identification of invasive pests or pathogens, monitoring procedures, and sample submission. Survey data indicated the intent of participants to augment detection efforts and the efficacy of Extension workshops in improving participants\u27 perceptions of government agencies. Respondents perceived increases in knowledge related to particular invasive species, identification of potential future invaders, and sample submission. Other implications related to Extension programming on invasive species education are discussed

The macroecology of chemical communication in lizards: do climatic factors drive the evolution of signalling glands?

Chemical communication plays a pivotal role in shaping sexual and ecological interactions among animals. In lizards, fundamental mechanisms of sexual selection such as female mate choice have rarely been shown to be influenced by quantitative phenotypic traits (e.g., ornaments), while chemical signals have been found to potentially influence multiple forms of sexual and social interactions, including mate choice and territoriality. Chemical signals in lizards are secreted by glands primarily located on the edge of the cloacae (precloacal glands, PG) and thighs (femoral glands), and whose interspecific and interclade number ranges from 0 to >100. However, elucidating the factors underlying the evolution of such remarkable variation remains an elusive endeavour. Competing hypotheses suggest a dominant role for phylogenetic conservatism (i.e., species within clades share similar numbers of glands) or for natural selection (i.e., their adaptive diversification results in deviating numbers of glands from ancestors). Using the prolific Liolaemus lizard radiation from South America (where precloacal glands vary from 0-14), we present one of the largest-scale tests of both hypotheses to date. Based on climatic and phylogenetic modelling, we show a clear role for both phylogenetic inertia and adaptation underlying gland variation: (i) solar radiation, net primary productivity, topographic heterogeneity and precipitation range have a significant effect on number of PG variation, (ii) humid and cold environments tend to concentrate species with a higher number of glands, (iii) there is a strong phylogenetic signal that tends to conserve the number of PG within clades. Collectively, our study confirms that the inertia of niche conservatism can be broken down by the need of species facing different selection regimes to adjust their glands to suit the demands of their specific environments

Expanding the diversity of mycobacteriophages: insights into genome architecture and evolution.

Mycobacteriophages are viruses that infect mycobacterial hosts such as Mycobacterium smegmatis and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. All mycobacteriophages characterized to date are dsDNA tailed phages, and have either siphoviral or myoviral morphotypes. However, their genetic diversity is considerable, and although sixty-two genomes have been sequenced and comparatively analyzed, these likely represent only a small portion of the diversity of the mycobacteriophage population at large. Here we report the isolation, sequencing and comparative genomic analysis of 18 new mycobacteriophages isolated from geographically distinct locations within the United States. Although no clear correlation between location and genome type can be discerned, these genomes expand our knowledge of mycobacteriophage diversity and enhance our understanding of the roles of mobile elements in viral evolution. Expansion of the number of mycobacteriophages grouped within Cluster A provides insights into the basis of immune specificity in these temperate phages, and we also describe a novel example of apparent immunity theft. The isolation and genomic analysis of bacteriophages by freshman college students provides an example of an authentic research experience for novice scientists

Rapid establishment of the European Bank for induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (EBiSC):The Hot Start experience

A fast track “Hot Start” process was implemented to launch the European Bank for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (EBiSC) to provide early release of a range of established control and disease linked human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) lines. Established practice amongst consortium members was surveyed to arrive at harmonised and publically accessible Standard Operations Procedures (SOPs) for tissue procurement, bio-sample tracking, iPSC expansion, cryopreservation, qualification and distribution to the research community. These were implemented to create a quality managed foundational collection of lines and associated data made available for distribution. Here we report on the successful outcome of this experience and work flow for banking and facilitating access to an otherwise disparate European resource, with lessons to benefit the international research community. eTOC: The report focuses on the EBiSC experience of rapidly establishing an operational capacity to procure, bank and distribute a foundational collection of established hiPSC lines. It validates the feasibility and defines the challenges of harnessing and integrating the capability and productivity of centres across Europe using commonly available resources currently in the field

Why Arrest?

Arrests are the paradigmatic police activity. Though the practice of arrests in the United States, especially arrests involving minority suspects, is under attack, even critics widely assume the power to arrest is essential to policing. As a result, neither commentators nor scholars have asked why police need to make arrests. This Article takes up that question, and it argues that the power to arrest and the use of that power should be curtailed. The twelve million arrests police conduct each year are harmful not only to the individual arrested but also to their families and communities and to society as a whole. Given their costs, arrests should be used only when they serve an important state interest; yet, they often happen even when no such interest exists. Governments have allowed constitutional law to become the primary constraint on arrest practices, and it has proved a poor proxy for good policy analysis. The Fourth Amendment permits arrests whenever an officer has probable cause: it has no mechanism for ensuring that the state has any interest in making an arrest—as opposed to starting the criminal process in another way. More broadly, traditional arguments for arrests cannot justify existing arrest practice. Arrests are usually unnecessary to start the criminal process effectively, to maintain order, to collect evidence, or to deter crime. In most cases, reasonable, less intrusive, alternative means exist or could exist for achieving these ends. Even arrests for some serious crimes might be curbed significantly without risking substantial harm to public safety or order. If the state can achieve its law enforcement objectives without arrests, then police departments should conduct far fewer arrests than they currently do, and states should restrict the statutory authority to arrest accordingly. Though there are risks to reducing arrests, those risks are far less problematic than continuing what is presently a massive, and largely unnecessary, enterprise of state coercion