Municipium, Absens Parens: Rectifying Monell and Parens Patriae for Institutional Liability

This article examines how individual police officers in China interpret and justify the use of excessive force on social media through their WeChat Subscription Accounts (WSAs). Existing research examines how the police department uses social media to justify deadly force, but overlooks individual officers’ online justifications. Adopting a critical discourse analysis approach, this study analyses 211 articles commenting on a prominent case of police violence in China. The findings shed light on the online voice of Chinese frontline officers, revealing an ideology that defends the use of excessive force. The articles published in WSAs displayed strong empathy towards the involved officer; contested the characterization of the incident as police brutality by police officials, the public, and the media; and employed various strategies to justify the officer’s actions. The discussion section expands on these findings by drawing comparisons to justifications in the United States, emphasizing the distinctive dynamic between individual officers’ online expression and official police discourse in China, and offering insights for scholars examining online expression and digital nationalism in the Chinese context.

Sovereign immunity, which is confirmed by the Eleventh Amendment, has enormous significance for education lawyers and their clients. Essentially, “sovereign immunity of the States” means that private individuals or corporations cannot sue the States, state agencies, or state institutions. Therefore, if a state university or a school district is considered an “arm of the State,” then both the entity and its administrators, when sued in their official capacities, generally are immune from lawsuits. During the last years of the Rehnquist Court, the Supreme Court frequently addressed sovereign immunity issues. Between 1996 and 2002, a five Justice majority – Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O’Connor, Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Thomas – effectively restored and expanded the sovereign immunity of the States. In each of these cases, this majority was opposed by a four Justice dissenting bloc – Justice Stevens, Justice Souter, Justice Ginsburg and Justice Breyer. Although the Justices refused to expand sovereign immunity during the last years of the Rehnquist Court, the Court did not disturb the jurisprudential foundation that it had constructed between 1996 and 2002. With the death of Chief Justice Rehnquist and the retirement of Justice O’Connor, it is somewhat unclear where the Court stands. The fact that the Chief Justice joined Justice Thomas’ vigorous dissent in Central Virginia Cmty. Coll. v. Katz, suggests that he supports the reasoning of the 1996 through 2002 decisions. Justice Alito, who joined the Court after Katz was decided, was generally supportive of sovereign immunity during his tenure on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Thus, it is likely that there are five Justices – Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Alito – who will continue to support an expansive interpretation of sovereign immunity. I am optimistic about the future of sovereign immunity. Indeed, I believe that the Roberts Court will reaffirm the 1996 to 2002 precedents and will even expand the scope of the State’s sovereign immunity. In particular, I believe that the Roberts Court will: (1) limit Congress’ power to abrogate sovereign immunity to statutory claims that are also constitutional claims; (2) limit Congress’ power to use the Spending Clause to exact waivers of sovereign immunity to statutory claims that are also constitutional claims; and (3) restore a State’s sovereign immunity in the Courts of another State. The purpose of this Essay is to explain my beliefs about the future of sovereign immunity. This purpose is accomplished in three sections. First, because many readers may be unfamiliar with the Court’s sovereign immunity jurisprudence, Section I provides a general background of both the constitutional theory and recent developments in sovereign immunity. Second, because it is difficult to understand my beliefs about the future of sovereign immunity without understanding the exceptions to sovereign immunity, Section II briefly explains the exceptions to sovereign immunity – abrogation, waiver, exposure to a counter-claim, no immunity in the courts of another State, and the Ex parte Young doctrine. Third, Section III explores why I believe that it is likely that the Roberts Court will limit abrogation to statutory claims that are also constitutional claims, limit the ability to exact waivers to statutory claims that are also constitutional claims, and restore a State’s immunity in the courts of another State.

Despite the recent rash of social media videos of seemingly outrageous police misconduct, as mentioned earlier, police misconduct is difficult to document. One source of data is the individual police officer or police official. However, not only is it difficult to get information from individual officers or police officials (Collins, 1998) but because of the homogenous nature of police culture, findings from research at the individual level may be mixed, ambiguous and lack variability (Grant & Grant, 1996; McManus, 1969). Though somewhat more reliable than research at the individual level (Kane & White, 2009) research at the organizational level may nonetheless reflect an organizational subculture of policies formed by administrators but executed by individual police officers. For example, some police organizations may have a “siege mentality” of “them versus us” that permits and even encourages violent misconduct by individual police officers to maintain order on the streets (Fyfe & Skolnick, 1993). In such cases research at the organizational level may also be limited by its lack of variability but more importantly may suffer from external validity, in that administrative officials and supervisors in different police organizations may differ in determining what constitutes police misconduct in their particular organization.

Since the 1990s, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have killed approximately fifty Mexican and U.S. nationals along the U.S.-Mexico border. Many of the victims, including several teenagers, were unarmed and shot in the back. The vast majority of CBP agents have faced no criminal, civil, or disciplinary action for their conduct. This Article identifies U.S. legal doctrines, defenses, and procedures that make justice elusive for the relatives of victims. The Article argues that there is mounting legal and political pressure to hold CBP agents accountable for violence at the border and suggests that reformists look to international standards to help guide efforts to address systemic barriers to redress. To date, no civil plaintiff has prevailed at trial in a case involving a CBP killing. Courts have dismissed most federal civil claims for lack of jurisdiction or after finding the U.S. government or CBP agent has immunity. Federal legislation, specifically the Westfall Act, effectively bars state-law tort claims in this context. As for criminal charges, federal prosecutors have declined to bring charges in all cases but one and the few state prosecutions have rarely resulted in a guilty verdict. There is, however, mounting legal and political pressure to hold CBP agents accountable for border killings. In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide whether the U.S. Constitution protects foreign nationals killed in foreign territory by CBP agents. The U.S. Department of Justice recently brought criminal charges against a CBP agent for a border killing for the first time in the CBP’s nearly 100-year history. The Mexican government is also investigating multiple deaths and issued an arrest warrant for a CBP agent who killed an unarmed Mexican teenager. In addition, international human rights bodies have denounced the United States for use of excessive force and the failure to track or adequately investigate border deaths. This Article discusses doctrines and defenses such as sovereign and qualified immunity, extraterritoriality, and the Westfall Act that have led to the dismissal of civil suits and the closing of criminal investigations without pursuing charges. But legal doctrines do not alone explain the lack of accountability—institutional policies and practices also play a critical role. This Article argues that international human rights standards reveal how far U.S. law enforcement has strayed from global standards in preventing the excessive use of force and serves as a guide to identify and address the systemic barriers to redress faced by victims’ families.

"Despite the national attention police violence gained and the calls for police reform following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, police officers are killing more people each year. Significantly, although approximately one-half of the people shot and killed by police are white, black and Hispanic people are killed at higher rates than white people. One reason this assault on citizens continues is that very few roadblocks stand in the way of excessive violent policing. While any policing reform is beneficial, many discussed and enacted reforms are unlikely to significantly reduce police use of excessive force. Of all the police killings documented between 2013 and 2019, one data source found that only 1 percent of cases led to a conviction of a police officer. Many members of the public and some elected officials have argued that the excessive use of force by the police could be curtailed if more officers were held accountable for their actions, primarily their actions against innocent citizens. The authors of the chapters in this book subscribe to that view and discuss some significant reasons why and how police are not held accountable for their excessive use of force. This discussion is centered on four obstacles that stand in the way of getting accountability for police officers involved in cases of excessive police violence: Qualified immunity, the reasonable officer standard, police union contracts, and Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights. Of all the police killings documented between 2013 and 2019, one data source found that only 1 percent of cases led to a conviction of a police officer. This book discusses four obstacles that stand in the way of getting accountability for police officers involved in cases of excessive police violence: Qualified immunity, the reasonable officer standard, police union contracts, and Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights.

Barred Objects (o)Police Brutality, Black Fetishes, and Perverse Demonstrations Calvin Warren It is axiomatic that police brutality is an illegitimate exercise of power which society gives to police. As such, it is a perversion of the rule of law. —Alexa P. Freeman It is the sheer jouissance that comes from separating the other from the unendurable limit of its being that drives [the torturer] on. —David Marriott Society is structurally perverse … Civilization is no doubt discontent, but also content with its discontent. —Lorenzo Chiesa i On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police arrested George Floyd on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill. I use the word "suspicion" because neither the status of the bill nor the intention to commit fraud were confirmed. But apodictic certainty is not required to detain or deploy extreme violence against black bodies—a mere hint, a suspicion, a suggestion, a feeling is evidence enough to justify brutality. George Floyd was pinned to the ground (within seventeen minutes of a call placed by a store employee), while officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd's neck for at least nine minutes and twenty nine seconds (even after Floyd stopped breathing completely).1 If nine minutes and twenty nine seconds seems excessive, an unreasonable amount of time to kneel on a windpipe, we must remember that we are being transported to "another scene"—where time is both without duration and is unrestrained by Law and its mandates. In this frozen temporal frame, a knee is transformed into a deadly weapon, bystanders beg and plead for mercy, and Derek Chauvin, intoxicated with omnipotence, smirks at us. This smirk, somewhat of a Barthesian punctum, punctures in its confidence and arrogance. Chauvin knows something we don't know, or more precisely something we disavow. This scene is so familiar, repeated with such frequency, we could have described it in advance [End Page 29] without viewing the video: the supine, tortured black body; the omnipotent, brutal police officer; the witness(es). Because the scene, or let's call it an enactment, is lodged deeply in our unconscious, we anticipate it in advance, filling in the details as we learn more. Are we witnessing the enactment of fantasy? After watching this video, again and again, unable to refuse it or neglect it, I realized I was transfixed by Chauvin's smirk. It was a familiar smirk to me, psychoanalytically, resembling the pervert's enjoyment while re-staging fantasy. Is policing a perverse structure? How might our strategies shift if we consider police brutality an instantiation of the drive rather than the outcome of insufficient training? Is the law even capable of managing such a drive, a drive codified within its structure? Moreover, does "qualified immunity" constitute the impotence (and failure) of the Father's Name and his Law to manage jouissance or is it a necessary exception sustaining the Law itself? Police brutality might constitute what Frantz Fanon calls a "Real Fantasy" in that anti-black violence is not restricted to the dream-work but also enacted on actual black bodies—a terrifying deconstruction of outside/inside, psyche/culture, and individual/social.2 As an extravagant staging, police brutality is fantasy in real time, a repetitive production without end, without restriction, without reprieve. Understanding this fantasy, however, requires a rethinking of psychoanalysis, jouissance, and anti-blackness. In this meditation, I will argue police brutality is a structure of perversion and black victims are fetish-objects (barred objects); this brutality, then, is a repetitive demonstration of accessing jouissance, an exposure of Law's impotence, and the (failed) attempt to plug a hole in the Other, a hole the Law is complicit in filling. I offer a wayward reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis and introduce a new term (o) and a new formula (a<>o) to explain why police convictions are so rare and sentencing is often disproportionate, considering the severity of the brutality. Reading both police brutality and sentencing as facets of perversion offers psychoanalysis a new perspective on blackness, anti-black enjoyment, and racial fetishism. ii. the barred object (o) Traditional psychoanalytic accounts of racism explain it as a neurotic war of jouissance, where the racial other is presumed to have...

On January 23, 2007, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Vas-Cath, Inc. v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri removed a brick from this sovereign immunity wall when it held that a state university waived its Eleventh Amendment immunity by participating in a patent interference proceeding. This paper will argue that the Federal Circuit incorrectly applied previous Supreme Court precedent in finding a waiver of state sovereign immunity, and that its decision will likely be overruled by the Supreme Court if it grants certiorari under 28 U.S.C. § 1254. Part I briefly explains both interference proceedings and the Eleventh Amendment, specifically noting the impact of the Eleventh Amendment in the field of patent law. Part II sets out the background of the Vas-Cath case. Part III explains the decision of the Western District of Missouri, which found that the Eleventh Amendment was a bar to an appeal of an interference proceeding. Part IV examines the Federal Circuit's decision that reversed the district court's decision and found that the state had waived its sovereign immunity. Finally, Part V analyzes the reasons for which the Federal Circuit's decision was incorrect and why the Supreme Court will likely overturn this decision, should it grant certiorari. An additional purpose of this paper was to follow any filings by either party since the January 2007 decision, but as of May 7, 2007 no activity has taken place in this case.

Over the course of the past half century, policing in the United States has gone from an institution in deep crisis and a flashpoint in the country’s culture wars to a widely admired example of innovative, bipartisan reform—and then back again. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and politically reactionary. Liberals saw the police as racist, violent, and ineffective and blamed them, with justification, for the hundreds of riots that convulsed American cities under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. At the same time, conservatives rallied around the police as symbols of “law and order”—the cause that, more than any other, won Nixon the White House in 1968.1 By the late 1990s, however, the police had become far more diverse and far less insular, and new approaches to law enforcement, especially “community policing” and “problem-oriented policing,” had won remarkably broad respect across lines of race, class, and ideology.2 Enthusiasts of “new governance” regularly pointed to police departments as models of the kind of pragmatic reform other public sectors could profitably emulate.3 The pitched battles over the police in the Johnson and Nixon years, the jeering of officers as “pigs,” and the strident calls to “support your local police” felt increasingly remote.Then all the progress seemed to disappear. President Donald Trump resurrected “law and order” as a partisan rallying cry, championed the most violent and aggressive forms of policing, and allied himself with officers more loudly and divisively than Nixon ever had. In the summer of 2020, when tens of millions of protesters marched across the United States and riots broke out in a series of cities, the motivating grievances were about the police, and especially about the large number of young Black men killed by law enforcement officers. For many on the left, reforming the police no longer seemed possible; they wanted to abolish the police or least to slash their budgets.4 Americans on the right, meanwhile, increasingly saw attacks on law enforcement as attacks on them and on their idea of what the country should be.5 The calls in 2020 to “defund the police” were blamed, in 2021, for rising homicide rates across the United States, for spates of robberies and car thefts in some cities, and—by moderate Democrats—for off-year electoral losses to Republicans.6 Law enforcement is again a political battleground, not just dividing Democrats from Republicans but pitting progressives against moderates, young against old, and marginalized community against marginalized community.7 Once again, the police are in crisis, and once again they seem part of the reason the country is in crisis. The recent history of policing is a tale of reversals and upended expectations.In other ways, as well, the enterprise of policing is marked by contradictions. This is especially true of the deep and complicated connections between policing and equality. Public law enforcement agencies are inherently redistributionist, socializing the use of force, but ever since the birth of modern policing in London in the late nineteenth century, officers have protected the privileged against the “dangerous classes,” and American policing in particular has long and continuing connections with racial subordination. People of color in the United States are more likely than whites to be victims of crime and more likely to be victims of police violence and abuse; they suffer from both police nonfeasance and police malfeasance. Inadequate protection against crime is among the most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States, but so is the appallingly large number of young people of color, particularly African Americans, killed every year by the police.Charting a new course for public safety thus means confronting paradoxes and trade-offs. It requires accepting necessary compromises while rejecting those that have been tolerated for lack of imagination. It also means confronting two different social divides. The first is the ideological divide, the growing chasm between left and right that today, as half a century ago, has made policing a partisan flashpoint. The second divide is sociological: the gulf separating privileged Americans from the poor people and people of color who disproportionately bear the burdens of both crime and abusive forms of policing. Each of these two divides has implications for police reform. The ideological divide places a premium on proposals that can gain broad, cross-partisan support. The sociological divide provides reason to give special weight to the interests and views of poor people and people of color, especially African Americans.8Although police reform was never as successful as it was said to be in the 1980s and 1990s, neither was it a dead end. There are ways to make policing fairer, more effective, less abusive, and less lethal by building on successes of past reforms while addressing their very real shortcomings. Fortunately, moreover, the proposals most likely to work are supported by Americans on both sides of the ideological divide and by a majority of the groups most affected by crime and by abusive policing.How can American policing be transformed into a more effective and egalitarian system of public safety? We need to start with four key facts. First, crime has devastating, disproportionate impacts on poor people and people of color, especially Black Americans. Second, police violence and other forms of abusive law enforcement also take a tragic and outsize toll on poor people and people of color, and here, too, Black Americans are particularly likely to be victimized. Third, improved policing has helped make crime far less common today than thirty or forty years ago, but some of the progress has been lost in recent years. Fourth, there have been successes over the past several decades in reforming police departments, but the victories have been partial and very often fleeting.Fear of crime is often whipped up for partisan purposes, but the damage that crime inflicts on victims, as well as on their families and communities, is real and massive. Criminal victimization is also regressive, falling most heavily on those who are already disadvantaged. All of this is particularly true of the most extreme forms of violence—homicide, aggravated assault, and rape—which can fairly be called epidemic in the United States and which victimize African Americans, along with their families and neighborhoods, at greatly elevated rates.There are between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand homicides annually in the United States—a rate of about five or six per one hundred thousand people in the country. Among Black Americans, though, the rate is much higher. African Americans die violently at seven times the rate of whites; for men the ratio is nine to one. Homicide is the third-leading cause of death among Americans aged fifteen to thirty-four; it is the leading cause of death among Black males under forty-five and the second-leading cause of death among Latino males under forty-five. Young Black men are fifteen times more likely than their white counterparts to be the victims of homicide. Violence is responsible for more lost years of Black male lives than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Meanwhile more than a million Americans are hospitalized each year from attacks that do not turn out to be fatal, and African Americans are more likely than whites to be the victims of these attacks, too. Black people are also disproportionately represented among the several hundred thousand victims of rape each year in the United States.9The failure to protect African Americans and other marginalized populations from crime is among the starkest and most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States. No other wealthy country tolerates such extreme racial disparities in the risks of violent victimization.10Moreover, beyond the lives that it cuts short, homicide and other forms of extreme violence can have tragic consequences for the families of victims and for the neighborhoods where it occurs. High rates of violence make fear a constant presence in people’s lives, affecting the material conditions of their daily existence in countless ways. It turns heat waves more deadly, for example, by making people afraid to leave their homes. Children living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence perform worse in school, reinforcing the cycle of disadvantage that keep families locked in intergenerational poverty. This is not just a matter of correlation: Black schoolchildren do dramatically worse on standardized tests in the days immediately after a local homicide than in the days just before. Exposure to lethal violence makes it hard for them to concentrate, and the effects appear to accumulate with each additional killing. Crime, especially homicide and other serious forms of violence, also depress property values, helping to maintain the gaping disparities between the household wealth of Americans of different races and robbing local governments of tax revenues, which in turn makes it harder for them to confront not only violence but virtually every other challenge they face. For communities as well as for individuals, exposure to criminal victimization, and in particular to homicide and serious assault, is a pillar of American inequality.11Much of the explanation for the racial disparities in rates of criminal victimization in the United States lies outside the criminal justice system: in the pervasive, interlocking disadvantages imposed on people of color, especially on African Americans. Discrimination perpetuates poverty, and poverty breeds crime, making potential offenders more desperate and potential victims more vulnerable.12 But part of the explanation is inadequate policing, and more precisely the long history of police departments protecting white, wealthy neighborhoods more than poor neighborhoods disproportionately populated by people of color.13If poor people and people of color in the United States have long suffered from inadequate protection against crime, they have also suffered from an excess of violence and abuse at the hands of the police. Police officers kill roughly a thousand Americans every year. Somewhere between half and eighty percent of the deaths, probably, are unjustified.14 And the victims of police killings are disproportionately people of color, with young Black people men especially at risk. Black Americans are fourteen percent of the population but more than a quarter of the people shot dead by the police.15 From 1980 through 2019, on an age-adjusted basis, Black people were more than three times as likely to be killed by the police as whites; Latinos were close to twice as likely.16 Between 2015 and 2019, an unarmed Black man was four times as likely to be fatally shot by the police as an unarmed white man.17 For Black and white males between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, the ratio was five to one.18Deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers are the most extreme way, but far from the only way, in which the burdens of policing fall disproportionately on African Americans and other people of color. People of color, especially young Black men, are more likely to be stopped by the police. When they are stopped, they are less likely to be treated with respect, more likely to grabbed or struck, more likely to be searched, and more likely to be arrested.19The harsh, often brutal treatment of African Americans and other people of color by police has ramifications far beyond the deaths, physical injuries, and indignities it inflicts. Stops and arrests are entry points into the carceral system. Excessively aggressive, discriminatory policing helps to sustain jail and prison populations that are bloated and racially lopsided. And the interactions that people have with the police reverberate through their communities, with lasting effects not just on attitudes toward law enforcement but on broader ideas about law, government, and society.20 Unsurprisingly, African Americans consistently report less confidence in the police than whites.21 But mistreatment by the police often leads, also, to an enervating sense of disempowerment—a sense of physical vulnerability, lack of belonging, and alienation—not just in the immediate victim of the mistreatment but in friends, family, and neighbors as well.22The damage that American policing does to people of color and their communities has received more attention over the past three decades for several reasons. Part of the explanation is changes in law enforcement: the expansion of police forces since the 1980s; more aggressive use of stop-and-frisk; crackdowns on low-level, quality-of-life offenses; and the spread of militarized equipment and tactics, including through the proliferation and increased use of SWAT teams.23 Increased public awareness of police violence has also played a role; the key contributors here have been the Black Lives Matter movement and the advent of smartphones and social media.24 But some part of the reason that police violence and its disproportionate use against people of color has loomed larger may also be a success to which law enforcement agencies themselves contributed: the dramatic, transformational decline of crime in the 1990s. As threats of private violence became less omnipresent in poor neighborhoods of color, threats of police violence—which had always been there, in the background—became more jarringly inexcusable.25As devastating a toll as crime now takes in the United States, it did far more damage thirty years ago. Between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, the national homicide rate dropped by roughly forty percent, and the decline was even larger in the neighborhoods and demographic groups hardest hit by crime. The rates of other crimes saw similar drops.26 The sociologist Patrick Sharkey notes that for Black men, the homicide drop was the largest public health achievement of the past several decades, shrinking the racial disparity in life expectancy and preserving roughly one thousand years of life for every one hundred thousand Black men. Sharkey has also documented the ways in which the decline of crime changed the fabric of life in poor neighborhoods, allowing public spaces to be reclaimed and alleviating the constant, debilitating fear of violent attack. Combined with changes in law enforcement, the crime decline of the 1990s altered the nature of the physical insecurity experienced in poor communities of color, particularly by young people, “from the threat of violent peers to the threat of abusive police.”27The plummeting crime rates of the 1990s were followed by more modest reductions in homicides and aggravated assaults in the early years of the twenty-first century. Homicide rates began to rise, though, around 2014, and then surged in cities across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021.28 Some major American cities recorded more homicides in 2021 than in any prior year.29 And just as the crime decline in the 1990s was particularly pronounced in poor neighborhoods and predominantly Black neighborhoods, fatal shootings have risen most dramatically in recent years in those same neighborhoods.30 In Los Angeles, for example, Black Americans are nine percent of the population but constituted thirty-six percent of homicide victims in 2021; in New York City, the figures are twenty-four percent and sixty-five percent, respectively.31 Rates of other violent crimes do not appear to have risen as much as homicides, and the nationwide homicide rate in 2020 and 2021 remained well below its peak in the 1980s. Still, a significant amount of the progress made in reducing fatal attacks in the 1990s and early 2000s seems to have slipped away, at least temporarily and possibly for longer. Just as there was nothing unavoidable about the high crime rates of the 1980s, there is no guarantee those rates will not return.The causes of the crime drop in the 1990s are still debated, and so are the explanations for the rising homicide rates of the past several years. Some of the credit for the crime drop, though, almost certainly should go to improvements in policing: either to the expansion of police forces in the 1990s, or to changes in how the police operated, or most likely to both factors. The evidence is threefold. First, a growing body of research links increased police presence to decreases in crime, especially homicides. Some of this research examines the effects of changes in the size of local police forces; others look at the effects of temporary surges in police presence because of, for example, terrorist alerts.32 Second, the crime drop during the 1990s was roughly twice as large in New York City as elsewhere in the country, and the most plausible explanation for the difference is the especially large changes in the quantity of and quality of policing in New York City during that period.33 Third, there is strong evidence for the effectiveness of particular police strategies that became more widespread in the 1990s, especially tactics that focus on areas where a large number of crimes take place and other examples of “problem-oriented policing.”34American law enforcement didn’t just get better at controlling crime in the last decades of the twentieth century. It also improved in other ways, albeit unevenly, and too often transiently. At the beginning of the 1970s, for example, police departments in the United States were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Many departments, particularly in big cities, grew more diverse in the 1980s and 1990s, often through hiring plans adopted in response to lawsuits. By the early 2000s, some large police forces were majority minority—this was true, for example, in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—and the percentage of female officers had grown as well. Smaller departments made less progress, though. Moreover, as court-ordered hiring plans have expired over the past twenty years, diversification has stalled even in larger departments, and some past gains have been undone.35Diversifying law enforcement agencies is not a panacea—there are no panaceas in police reform—but accumulating research suggests that minority and female officers are less likely to use unjustified force, especially against people of color.36 White male officers partnered with minority or female officers also change their patterns of policing for the better. And diverse departments are less insular, more open to outside ideas, and better connected to the communities they serve, all of which makes them more likely to adopt other reforms.37One particular way in which police diversity has facilitated other reforms is by countering the strident hostility of police unions toward efforts to reduce police violence, increase police and racial in law Police unions are not always of but even today they do more to than to for making law enforcement fairer, more effective, and less reason for that is that the of police unions and than police officers of Black and Latino officers have often championed reforms by police and the presence of officers of color may in some have police unions to moderate their most of those reforms over the past half century have been community policing and policing, both of which spread widely in the 1980s and 1990s, as and just as every police in the country to “community policing,” in part because it became a for At its though, community policing was more than a It was a of law enforcement from a and toward a that on and with the public and with other policing had major some of which will be And because community policing was with of it was hard to It though, because it often greatly increased public with the police and made people fear of crime to real reductions in when people felt they out and and to become with more people most community policing also police departments, and it focus beyond crime allowing them to a of other by the communities they It well with policing, which called on officers to work and on an basis, with other agencies and the public to of particular local but not policing to responsible for a disproportionate amount of but not the were officers. community policing, the focus on to and a body of evidence these with significant crime there are that and other forms of policing have helped some cities the national and reduce homicides in community policing and policing also increased attention to low-level, of such as and the Part of the idea was that when these of were left neighborhoods toward people on the and rates of serious this was the of Police on quality-of-life could be too, and the that these were in effective at reducing serious crime, but not as dramatically as policing and only when the community and particular in particular crackdowns on quality-of-life as community policing and policing, did not reduce the other of the from quality-of-life policing, policing the of in which the police with community groups and other agencies to particular groups of people responsible for a disproportionate of a first and most of which was in the 1980s and called because their most was often threats of consequences at the and groups violence in a particular But the also of social to the same people, and more recent of this more than policing. is growing that these when right, their moreover, community policing and policing their in poor were and not just because they were of from of officers in neighborhoods hit hardest by crime. policing and policing police to adopt what the had called the of law kind of policing in to from the of law enforcement in had called the which and the which when community policing and policing were to against life they on the In community policing and policing officers to for neighborhoods to a of other than law enforcement: and so that they had not up to be social but it out they often were at other agencies to more attention to marginalized several different community policing and policing have lost much of their over the past two The terrorist attacks of to calls for more aggressive forms of law enforcement, and and local in the early 2000s many departments to community policing and policing as forms of these the crackdowns on and in New York City, helped to community against them in many against the of police And it became increasingly that, even at their community policing and policing had some was that these attention to police This was not in the of either of could have with the public and agencies outside law enforcement to reduce police But they Police the of police violence, especially police because they did not the of the This was because the victims were of marginalized groups and or because did not still does on police killings or other forms of police violence, and the advent of body and of these were to It those and the Black Lives Matter movement to give the of police killings the attention it had long lethal police violence against Black Americans and Latinos has over the past half century. for the of the victims, the of killed by a police in the United States during the 1980s, and the drop was particularly Black Americans and The decline in police killings over the course of that to have been to new the use of lethal against In the three decades, in the age-adjusted rate of police killings of Black Americans and Latinos remained roughly constant while the rate for white Americans as a the age-adjusted for Americans also In some though, rates to From through 2019, police killings in areas and but by thirty percent in the thirty largest American cities, because of new on use of violence in some cities has dropped especially In Los Angeles, for example, significant of by the police appear to have been in half between and 2019, and police shootings appear to have by forty by officers increased in 2021 but remained far than in past In on the other of by the police have dropped by percent over the past fifteen years, but the rate of police shootings has not a similar Police shootings in between and in and again in and and then dropped over the several years, by to roughly the Los and have been of efforts at police reform over the past two decades, so the of by police in these cities over the past are in some reductions in of in both cities and significant reductions in police shootings in Los but in others progress on police shootings in also the in patterns of police violence, as in crime across the United States. The Police by the and the number of of per thousand arrests for hundreds of American police departments from to the from fifteen to the United States as a had New York rate of police almost Americans have been killed by the police in had New York homicide people have violently that same Police can and have but the victories have been and often

The United States Constitution, as well as national values, centre on individual (human) rights. Conservatives, liberals, and independents agree that police officers must at times resort to physical force if they are to carry out fully their official responsibilities. As well, there is no question the lawful use of force by police officers frequently escalates to unlawful behaviour (police brutality), and that this must be controlled. Despite this shared attitude, however, public opinion and government policy diverge in their approach to deterring police brutality. Most recent official and unofficial policies are based on the plausibility of prevention through creation of civilian review boards, recruitment tests, counselling, and training and retraining of officers. None of these measures seems to work well in reducing police brutality, although society is answerable to the kind of police it chooses to have, whether it be by deliberation, power struggle, or total neglect, the fact is police brutality is an issue of great concern to individual officers, police administrators, and more importantly, the victims (society). This paper focuses on the deterrence effect of requiring police officers to purchase individual occupational liability insurance, on a fundamental belief of deterrence philosophy and documented examples that a high rate of police brutality stems in large part from lack of monetary liability/accountability on the part of the individual police officer. Police brutality occurs in part because some (both normal and emotionally disturbed) officers have opportunities to commit this unlawful behaviour, and in part, because they are not deterred from committing it, and because the judiciary chose to ‘water down’ the doctrine of sovereign immunity. It's time to require all police officers to have personal liability insurance. This calls for Congressional action. Without solid reform, police brutality will have no incentive to do anything other than continue to worsen.

Most scholars and courts assume that the Eleventh Amendment emerged from a sudden 'shocked' public reaction to the Supreme Court's decision in Chisholm v. Georgia. The Supreme Court's decision in Hans v. Louisiana has been subject to particular criticism for extending the doctrine of sovereign immunity beyond the text of the amendment and the particular subject matter before the Court in Chisholm. This article contends that the modern emphasis on Chisholm v. Georgia as the generative source of the Eleventh Amendment is historically incorrect. Public debate regarding the key issues behind the Eleventh Amendment had been underway long before the Court handed down its decision in Chisholm and the actual opinions had little impact on public discussion due to their being generally unavailable until months after the decision was handed down. The critical issue involved the concept of compelling a state to defend itself in federal court at the behest of an individual. That debate preceded Chisholm and would not reach critical mass until the state of Massachusetts responded to its own suit in Vassal. All sides in this debate accepted the idea that the national government could invoke sovereign immunity against similar suits. Denying states the same immunity called into question whether they remained sovereign entities and retained the non-delegated sovereign rights and powers that Federalists had promised in the state ratifying conventions. More was at stake than mere betrayal, or even fiscal liability. Whether the states remained sovereign entities under the Constitution affected the basic rules of constitutional construction for, according to the Law of Nations, delegations of power from a sovereign are to be strictly construed. Allowing suits against states thus implicated the principle of limited federal power across all areas of delegated authority. The key to understanding the Eleventh Amendment is the text's focus on the proper judicial construction of delegated power in Article III - a demand that federal courts respect the retained rights of the people in the states and apply the background rule of strict construction.

Civil liability is a concern of all police agencies. Since civil suits represent substantial potential negative consequences to criminal justice agencies, legal protections from law suits would seem to be of great importance to those working in the criminal justice system. Recently the Supreme Court of the United States decided the case of Saucier v. Katz (2001). This case addressed the issue of police immunity from a civil suit alleging use of excessive force. This article seeks to provide an examination of the case and the issues surrounding immunity.

Swencionis &amp; Goff identified five situations that tend to increase the likelihood that an individual police officer may behave in a racially disparate way: discretion, inexperience, salience of crime, cognitive demand, and identity threat. This article applies their framework to the realities of police work, identifying situations and assignments in which these factors are likely to influence officers’ behavior. These insights may identify opportunities for further empirical research into racial disparities in such contexts and may highlight institutional reforms and policy changes that could reduce officers’ vulnerability to risks that can result in racially unjust actions.

Cardiovascular disease accounts for as much as one third of the differential in life expectancy between blacks and whites in the United States.1 A multifactorial process likely leads to these disparate outcomes (see the Figure), including differences in biology, differential awareness, knowledge, beliefs, and preferences for care for cardiovascular disease, and varying distribution of risk factors (including hypertension, obesity, and life stresses that include poverty and discrimination). Furthermore, blacks in the United States have a greater burden of cardiovascular disease2 and face greater challenges accessing health care, with lower rates of health insurance coverage, less access to a regular primary care doctor, and more frequent use of emergency departments for care.3 Then, once they have accessed the healthcare system, blacks often receive a poorer quality of care than do whites.4–6 Thus, it is no surprise that black patients’ outcomes, whether measured by functional status or mortality, are worse,7,8 and the study in this issue of Circulation by Skinner and colleagues9 adds further weight to this body of evidence. Model of possible pathways toward racial disparities in cardiovascular outcomes. Article p 2634 The results from Skinner et al9 support the notion that segregated health care is not equal and that it has a negative impact on the life expectancy of all patients receiving care in facilities with high proportions of black patients. Their results indicate that patients (both white and black) hospitalized for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) between 1997 and 2001 at …

As we reach the midpoint of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we are also at the midpoint in the timeline of the American Heart Association (AHA) strategic plan to reduce coronary heart disease, stroke, and risk by 25% by the year 2010.1,2 Encouraging evidence demonstrates important gains toward that goal, with decreases in coronary heart disease and stroke mortality, as well as reductions in certain risk factors such as cigarette consumption and untreated hypercholesterolemia. Still, troubling evidence indicates that other ominous risk factors—physical inactivity, overweight and obesity, diabetes, and hypertension—are on the rise,3 especially among adolescents and young adults, and these may contribute to the next wave of the cardiovascular epidemic. And there is undeniable evidence that not all Americans have shared equally in the improved cardiovascular outcomes. Individuals in specific subgroups defined by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geography have a disproportionate burden of myocardial infarction, heart failure, stroke, and other cardiovascular events. These individuals also have a worse outcome after these events, including higher mortality rates, and a higher prevalence of unrecognized and untreated risk factors places them at greater likelihood of experiencing these events. Differences such as these arise not only from disparities in access to care and quality of care but also from disparities in awareness and access to knowledge. Disparities in cardiovascular prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes have been documented in a number of publications from the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS),4–6 the Institute of Medicine,7 and the Kaiser Family Foundation,8 and reports of continuing racial and ethnic disparities appear regularly in cardiovascular scientific journals.9,10 If this unacceptable situation fails to be rectified, it is unlikely that the AHA’s 2010 goals or the DHHS Healthy People 2010 goals can be achieved. In the autumn …

The police officers who blocked the Gretna Bridge may have in fact violated several rights guaranteed by the Constitution. However, this Comment focuses on only one-the right to the freedom of travel. This Comment argues that the City of Gretna should be held civilly liable for its actions; and, that the individual police officers who blocked the bridge should be held both civilly and criminally liable for their actions. By blocking the bridge, the officers intentionally deprived New Orleans residents of their right to the freedom of travel. Part II contextualizes this argument by providing a history of the poverty and racism long faced by many New Orleans residents. To a large extent, poverty and health shaped New Orleanians' evacuation and survival strategies; and, examining the reasons behind the strategies employed by different sectors of the population is fundamental to understanding why so many New Orleans residents did not or could not evacuate. Racism further complicated these strategies. The history of police brutality in and around New Orleans indicates that routine abuse may have been an aggravating factor in Katrina's aftermath. In addition, both the media and government officials perpetuated negative stereotypes about New Orleans residents, which prolonged evacuation and rescue efforts and greatly exacerbated evacuees' suffering. The Gretna Bridge incident is just one illustration of how, in the wake of Katrina, poverty and racism collided to produce unjust consequences for residents who were simply struggling to survive. Part III reviews the fundamental right to travel under the Due Process Clause and discusses this right in the context of emergency situations. Part IV considers the possible civil and criminal consequences under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and 18 U.S.C. § 242 for depriving individuals of their right to travel. Finally, Part V applies the fundamental right to travel and the remedies afforded under § 1983 and § 242 to the Gretna Bridge incident. This section argues that the City of Gretna should be held civilly liable for the officers' actions and that the individual police officers who blocked the Gretna Bridge should be held both civilly and criminally liable for their actions.