AALS Academy Program

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A slew of recent videos have forced the public to confront a truth hidden in plain sight: African Americans are uniquely subjected to police violence.

The hard question is what to do. Officers act under a duty to serve and protect the community even at risk to their personal safety. Yet this emphasis on security can obscure the importance of legality: law enforcement’s duty to obey the rule of law and the rights of the people they police. State institutions have struggled to enforce these rule-of-law constraints. The Supreme Court has weakened exclusionary protections for the public, and constitutional criminal procedure is peculiarly unable to address the core problem of the distribution of policing across communities. Furthermore, practical reform has been piecemeal, and often ends up targeting the community it is supposed to protect.

This panel identifies systematic ways in which constitutional law and police practice increase the intrusiveness of policing on the street while simultaneously undermining the credibility of minority complaints about police practices. Panelists address novel approaches to the institutional limits appropriate to constrain police authority by reimagining both the practice of policing and police accountability.