Policing Posts

What the #MeToo Campaign Teaches About Stop and Frisk

“What the #Metoo Campaign Teaches About Stop and Frisk” applies feminist tools to investigate current policing methods. Feminist tools exposed sexual harassment by listening to the stories of those affected, by a nuanced understanding of power dynamics, and by recognizing that consent is impossible within certain unequal relationships.

The Worrisome Future of Policing Technology

A New York Times op-ed piece discusses the recent U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Carpenter v. United States, which ruled that the government must now have probable cause and a warrant to access cellphone location records.

Interrogation Parity

Over the past several years there has been increased focus on the way police are treated by the criminal justice system and their own internal disciplinary mechanisms. Scholars and the media have taken note of special interrogation protections afforded to the police when they become the target of internal or criminal investigation.

Pushback Against the CLOUD Act

USA Today addresses the privacy concerns raised after Congress passed the CLOUD Act, a bill that would allow police in other countries to have access to emails and other electronic communications more easily from their own citizens as well as Americans.

Cross-Enforcement of the Fourth Amendment

In “Cross-Enforcement of the Fourth Amendment,” forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Orin S. Kerr of the Southern California Gould School of Law tackles the complexity of identifying who can enforce what law under the Fourth Amendment.

Everyday justice

Professor Tracey Meares has sandwiched this trip to Chicago between two teaching days at the Yale Law School, timing it for when her kids are out of the house. On this cool Thursday morning in May 2017, she’s back in her favorite city, where she lived for almost 20 years. She’s come to Chicago State University to help train investigators for the city’s new Civilian Office of Police Accountability. At Yale, she teaches students in their 20s, in a wood-paneled room hung with portraits in oil, but here in this windowless, fluorescent-lit room, her students are three dozen former prosecutors, defense attorneys, and ex-cops. They will soon begin investigating complaints against Chicago’s often reviled police.

Digital Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Carpenter v. United States, where the question presented is whether the Fourth Amendment permits the warrantless seizure and search of a user’s cellphone location and movement information.