Search and Seizure Jurisprudence: Community Perceptions of Police Legitimacy in the United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 125-142
Author(s):  
S. Hakan Can ◽  
Durant Frantzen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
Community Perceptions ◽  
Perceptions Of Police

The Effect of a Narrated Video of an Arrest on Civilians’ Perceptions of Police

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Giaimo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Perceptions Of Police

Trust of the police is at a 22-year low in the United States (Jones, 2015). Many police departments hold community discussions in an attempt to educate civilians and increase trust in the police (Star, 2017). This research explores whether an in depth, play-by-play explanation of force used during a video of a violent arrest can increase civilians’ perceptions of the police. Participants either watched a video of a violent arrest with narration or the same video with no narration. The narrator explained the tactics used by the police officers and how the tactics were used to avoid escalation of the violence during the arrest. After viewing one of the videos, both groups filled out the Perceptions of Police (POP) scale to indicate the participants’ feelings about the police. The type of video watched did not influence POP scores, however two interactions were significant. These results suggest that the police should focus on other methods of gaining the trust of Americans.

American Perspectives on Self-Incrimination and the Compelled Production of Evidence

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
Mark Berger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Fifth Amendment ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Intimate Relation ◽  
Government Authority

The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that no person may be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. The Boyd decision in 1886 recognised an intimate relation between the privilege against self-incrimination and the restrictions on search and seizure in the Fourth Amendment and created a virtually impenetrable barrier to government demands that a suspect or defendant be compelled to produce evidence against himself. However, since that time the Supreme Court has progressively restricted the scope of Fifth Amendment protection in relation to the compelled production of evidence. This has been achieved by requiring all citizens to appear before grand juries; by denying Fifth Amendment protection to entities; by holding that the compelled production of evidence does not breach the Fifth Amendment unless the very act of production is self-incriminatory; and by denying the privilege in relation to required records. The Supreme Court's stance reflects a recognition of the complexity of contemporary law enforcement problems and may be seen as an attempt to balance the state's interest in the successful prosecution of crime against the citizen's interest in being free from state intrusion. The effect of the Supreme Court's reforms has been to broaden government authority to compel offenders to assist in their own prosecutions whilst limiting Fifth Amendment protection to incrimination through the accused's own testimony or its equivalent.

Testing a Social Schematic Model of Police Procedural Justice

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin T. Pickett ◽  
Justin Nix ◽  
Sean Patrick Roche
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Procedural Justice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Schematic Model ◽  
Relational Justice ◽  
Social Schema ◽  
Perceptions Of Police ◽  
Police Procedural ◽  
Vicarious Experiences

Procedural justice theory increasingly guides policing reforms in the United States and abroad. Yet the primary sources of perceived police procedural justice are still unclear. Building on social schema research, we posit civilians’ perceptions of police procedural justice only partly reflect their personal and vicarious experiences with officers. We theorize perceptions of the police are anchored in a broader “relational justice schema,” composed of views about how respectful, fair, and unbiased most people are in their dealings with others. Individuals’ experiences with certain nonlegal actors and neighborhood environments should directly affect their relational justice schema and indirectly affect their evaluation of police. Nevertheless, experiences with police, especially mistreatment by officers, should also affect perceived police procedural justice and may moderate the effects of relational justice schema endorsement. We test our hypotheses in two studies with national samples. The findings strongly support a social schematic model of perceived police procedural justice.

Trust and legitimacy: Policing in the USA and Europe

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 254-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom R. Tyler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Voluntary Compliance ◽  
Police Authority ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Compliance With The Law ◽  
Willingness To Cooperate

This paper argues for the value of new approaches to policing in the United States and Europe. These new approaches focus upon building police legitimacy among members of the public with the goal of encouraging widespread voluntary compliance with the law, acceptance of police authority and deference to police decisions, as well as a general willingness to cooperate with the police to fight crime.

Constitutional Law in 1920–1921. II: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1920

1922 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-244
Author(s):  
Edward S. Corwin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Evidential Value ◽  
Relevant Evidence ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Decisions ◽  
The Government ◽  
Search Warrant ◽  
The Right

The “self-incrimination” clause of the Fifth Amendment was brought forward in five cases, in three of which it was attended by the “search and seizure” provisions of the Fourth Amendment. The most important of these cases was Gouled v. the United States, in which the court was asked to pass upon the admissibility in evidence, first, of a paper obtained surreptitiously by officers of the government from the office of the accused; and secondly, of papers, described to be of “evidential value only,” which were taken from the office of accused under a search warrant. The court, declaring that the constitutional provisions involved must receive “a liberal construction, so as to prevent stealthy encroachment upon ‥‥ the rights secured by them,” held that the government had no right to the possession of any of these papers nor to the use of them as evidence. At the same time, it was held that if the government had had the right to seize the papers in question, for instance, as so much contraband property, and had done so under a warrant sufficient in form, “then it would have been competent to use them to prove any crime against accused as to which they constituted relevant evidence.”

Police-Generated Killings: The Gap between Ethics and Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 106591292110095
Author(s):  
Ben Jones
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
The United States ◽  
Deadly Force ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Legal Sanctions ◽  
Protection Of Life

This article offers a normative analysis of some of the most controversial incidents involving police—what I call police-generated killings. In these cases, bad police tactics create a situation where deadly force becomes necessary, becomes perceived as necessary, or occurs unintentionally. Police deserve blame for such killings because they choose tactics that unnecessarily raise the risk of deadly force, thus violating their obligation to prioritize the protection of life. Since current law in the United States fails to ban many bad tactics, police-generated killings often are treated as “lawful but awful.” To address these killings, some call on changes to departmental policies or voluntary reparations by local governments, yet such measures leave in place a troubling gap between ethics and law. I argue that police-generated killings merit legal sanctions by appealing to a relevant analogy: self-generated self-defense, where the person who engages in self-defense started the trouble. The persistent lack of accountability for police-generated killings threatens life, police legitimacy, and trust in democratic institutions. The article closes by identifying tools in law and policy to address this challenge.

scholarly journals Representations of Policing Problems and Body-Worn Cameras in Existing Research

2021 ◽  
pp. 105756772110208
Author(s):  
Christel Backman ◽  
Cecilia Hansen Löfstrand
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Relations ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
Double Blind ◽  
Blind Review ◽  
Scholarly Publications ◽  
Problem Representations

In this article, we analyze scholarly publications on body-worn cameras (BWCs) to shed light on scholars’ grounding assumptions about BWC technology and the policing problems assumed to be amended by it. We conducted a systematic search and a double-blind review, including 90 peer-reviewed journal articles, and analyzed how scholars warrant their studies, their findings and their recommendations. We found that BWC research largely investigates the effectiveness of BWCs worn by police officers in the United States and build upon a set of dominant policing problem representations: the police crisis in the United States and the police use of force, lack of oversight and control of police officers, citizen dissatisfaction and lack of police legitimacy, and police officer resistance toward BWC use. Assumptions underlying all four problem representations is that BWC technology will amend these problems and is legitimate and useful if the public supports it. Taken together, this enhances the representation of BWC technology as a self-evident means of improving community relations and police legitimacy in the United States. Finally, we provide recommendations for future research on BWCs, particularly the need for research departing from altogether different problem representations.

scholarly journals The Blueing of America: The Bridge Between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror

2006 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald G. Ashdown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Crack Cocaine ◽  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The United States ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Level 3 ◽  
War Protest

The reaction to the Vietnam War protest years, the presidency of Richard Nixon, and ultimately that of Ronald Reagan, ushered in a conservative revolution in the United States that still endures. Republican Presidents during this period have appointed eleven Justices to the United States Supreme Court,1 seven of whom serve on the Court today.2 Coinciding with this historical phenomenon was the proliferation of drug usage in the country: first marijuana, hallucinogenic drugs, and amphetamines during the counterculture years of the late ’60s and ’70s, and later powder and then crack cocaine. When prosecutorial emphasis shifted, especially at the federal level,3 to meet the increased fascination with narcotics, courts in the country became deluged with drug cases, many if not most of which presented Fourth Amendment search and seizure issues. This, of course, was because the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule could make the corpus of the crime unavailable to the prosecution.

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