Policing in the 21st Century: The Importance of Public Security

I was honored to be asked by the student leaders of the University of Chicago Legal Forum to give this keynote, and thrilled, really, to be back home. Hyde Park has changed so much and in so many good ways. I admit to feeling sad about the demise of Ribs and Bibs, though. The food was not always great, but the sniffs were incomparable. I have thought a great deal about what I wanted to say today. My primary goal was to emphasize the hard work-great work-that I, along with ten other colleagues who range from police chiefs to young activists, from civil rights lawyers to union representatives, who all served on President Obama\u27s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, have done. But, after I was in town last week for the International Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference, where I heard FBI Director James Comey speak at the PERF (that\u27s the Police Executive Research Forum to non-insiders) annual town meeting, I decided to shift the emphasis of my remarks

This Land Is My Land?

Book review of Vagrant Nation by Risa Goluboff. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. 2016. Almost twenty years ago, I wrote in a piece with Professor Dan Kahan that one of the central features of modern criminal procedure was its unrelenting hostility toward institutionalized racism.\u27 Specifically, we argued that the Supreme Court in a series of cases such as Mapp v. Ohio, Miranda v. Arizona, Gideon v. Wainwright, and Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, all decided in about a decade from 1961 to 1972, voiced a deep concern on the Court\u27s part about the machinery of ordinary criminal justice in a context of very little federal oversight, especially in the South. Before the so-called Warren Court revolution, federal court oversight of state criminal justice was sporadic and shallow, advanced through case-by-case consideration of state criminal court adjudications as opposed to oversight and review of the police investigations that generated those convictions. The Warren Court\u27s cases created what Kahan and I called a muscular doctrine8 designed to address the fact that, in a context in which African Americans were systematically disenfranchised and despised, it was impossible to expect the communities in which they resided to apply criminal laws to them evenhandedly

The Good Cop: Knowing the Difference Between Lawful or Effective Policing and Rightful Policing — And Why it Matters

My Essay will proceed in four parts. First, I will lay out the two often-used metrics of police evaluation, lawfulness and crimefighting effectiveness. Next, I will explain the theoretical foundation underlying the third way, which is what I am calling rightful policing. In the third Section, I will present an overview of empirical work that I have done in collaboration with my colleague, Tom Tyler, and others. This work demonstrates that ordinary people care a great deal about the theoretical precepts underlying rightful policing. In the Essay’s last Section, I will conclude with some implications of both the theory and the empirical results for governing police in a way that is meaningfully democratic. In short, I will sketch out what it could mean to produce the Good Cop

Burying the Lede: Why Teaching the Due Process Cases Is Critical to Investigations in Criminal Procedure

When teaching the basic criminal procedure class on police practices-the course that covers the Fourth, Fifth, and small portions of the Sixth Amendments-the conventional wisdom is that one should address Mapp v. Ohio at or near the beginning of the course. The reason is not particularly mysterious. Mapp held that the exclusionary rule is an essential part of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. By requiring states to exclude evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment at a criminal defendant\u27s trial, Mapp insured both that the exclusionary rule would play a central role in regulating police and also that the rule would play a central role in our understanding of the appropriate way to regulate police. The goal of this Article is to trouble the ease to which students and professors come to the conclusions regarding the propriety of using the exclusionary rule as a best or even good way to regulate the police. By making an argument about the order in which topics in the criminal procedure course on investigations is typically taught, I intend to upend the conventional wisdom of Mapp\u27s place in the course in two parts. First, I will lay out an argument for starting the police practices course with confessions rather than searches. This approach emphasizes the importance of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment rather than incorporation of the exclusionary rule. Second, I will offer an argument about why it makes sense to highlight Miranda as opposed to highlighting Mapp. In short, I\u27m suggesting that teachers bury Mapp. Before readers become too alarmed, let me hasten to say that I do not mean that Mapp should be buried because it is incorrect and unimportant. Neither of these things is true. Rather, I simply mean to suggest that Mapp might be buried in the sense that one might bury the lede

Signaling, Legitimacy, and Compliance: A Comment on Posner\u27s Law and Social Norms and Criminal Law Policy

Although criminal law can be justified with respect to non-utilitarian goals such as retribution, no one can deny that one way to justify criminal law is with respect to the instrumental ends of deterrence. So, one question of interest to scholars in the field has been how to think about the kinds of criminal law policy that encourage compliance. My own work has focused on this important question. Specifically, I have been concerned with the ways in which different kinds of criminal proscriptions, along with certain methods of law enforcement, could affect crime rates in disadvantaged, urban neighborhoods. In undertaking such analyses, I have emphasized classical sociological theory and social psychology, often for the purpose of criticizing economic approaches to crime control, which have been interpreted to emphasize higher levels of severe punishments for conduct such as drug offenses