By Josephine Wonsun Hahn, Ram Subramanian, and Tiffany Sanabia  

  Low-level offenses, especially misdemeanors, constitute a majority of the nation’s criminal dockets, including in New York City. A Brennan Center report examining minor offense enforcement trends finds that the city’s minor offense system has shrunk since 2010. But enforcement still falls hardest on communities that have high proportions of people of color and experience elevated levels of poverty. Minor offense criminal justice reform has so far not made a dent in the troubling racial disparities in cases across the city.  Brennan Center researchers interviewed police, prosecutors, court officials, city government officials, criminal justice advocacy organizations, community-based service providers, and community leaders — people who contribute to public safety efforts in neighborhoods most impacted by minor offense enforcement — to better understand what may be driving interactions with the city’s minor offense criminal justice system and perpetuating racial disparities. Study participants, as well as previous research, point to particular drivers often referred to as social determinants of justice: social disadvantages such as poverty, housing instability, poor mental health, and substance use; poor conditions and a lack of resources in the most impacted communities; and the criminal justice system’s persistent inability to address social problems and community needs. While recent increases in public disorder in New York City may invite simplified punitive responses that expand enforcement, such responses are unlikely to fundamentally change the conditions under which minor offenses — including those related to nuisance and disorder — grow. No strong empirical evidence exists demonstrating the effectiveness of punitive enforcement in either changing disorderly behavior or reducing crime. In particular, one 2019 meta-analysis contradicts the assumed causal connection between disorder and crime; another finds that aggressive order-maintenance enforcement that targets individual disorderly behaviors does not significantly reduce crime, whereas community and problem-solving approaches do. Such approaches involve people in the community to help identify problems and solutions — and can include non–criminal justice responses, such as referrals to community-based service providers. In any event, a punitive-only approach  also comes at too high a financial and human cost. Minor criminal offenses, most of which do not result in a jail sentence, can cause people to lose their jobs and homes, become unemployable, or be burdened with unpayable fines and fees. These compounding burdens make it even harder for people already struggling to exit the revolving door of the criminal justice system.5 Promising strategies already exist in New York City to address root causes of crime and disorder via programs with targeted interventions and resources within communities with high numbers of minor offense cases. These mostly small-scale experiments provide examples of the choices the city can make to help prevent crime while also reducing the cycle of criminal justice system involvement that helps fuel racial disparities. New York City can build on these strategies and programs to both shrink overly punitive responses and address some of the drivers of criminalized behavior in precincts with high caseloads. Although the programs and practices discussed below are based in New York City, many will be relevant to policymakers across the country. Some cities, counties, and states have adopted similar practices that divert people charged with minor offenses — many of whom face substance use, trauma, and mental health problems — from the justice system. Like New York City, other jurisdictions are looking to community-based strategies for solutions outside the criminal justice system. However, these innovations remain limited in scale and scope. Rules governing eligibility shut too many people out, often focusing on only a narrow slice of the population charged with minor offenses — typically a small subset of youth, people with mental illness, people who use drugs, people arrested and charged for the first time, or people arrested and charged with nonviolent offenses.6 There also may be structural limitations based on geography, funding, or capacity. To achieve a smaller, more responsive system that better addresses underlying needs and racial disparities, state and local policymakers, with support from nonprofit organizations and private philanthropy, should consider a range of effective strategies that target communities with elevated minor offense enforcement — neighborhoods in New York City that are home to predominantly Black and Latino populations. These starting steps include: ƒ scaling up successful diversion programs; ƒ building crisis response systems to address mental health and substance use; ƒ expanding supportive housing programs; and ƒ investing in crime-prevention models in which law enforcement, residents, city agencies, and others work together to build public safety and address community needs    

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2024. 17p.

By Zoë Robinson and Stephen Rushin

The law enforcement lobby represents one of the most important and undertheorized barriers to criminal justice reform. We define the law enforcement lobby as the constellation of entrenched actors within the justice system—particularly police unions, correctional officer unions, and prosecutor associations—that exert an outsized role in policy development. The law enforcement lobby operates largely without coordinated opposition, resulting in capture of criminal justice policymaking and skewed policy outcomes that often institutionalize injustice and subordination. The strength of the law enforcement lobby also presents a challenge to the growing defunding and abolition movements. Nevertheless, the law enforcement lobby remains at the periphery of contemporary scholarly conversations about the democratization and design of criminal justice institutions.

This Article describes and evaluates the influence of the law enforcement lobby on criminal justice policy. It argues that the law enforcement lobby raises unique problems that extend beyond traditional lobbying concerns, including the ability to influence life and liberty, the power to perpetuate racial subordination, and a pervasive power over the operation of democratic institutions.

Drawing on the growing calls for democratization and power-shifting in the criminal justice system, this Article offers a range of recommendations to curtail the strength of the law enforcement lobby. First, the Article argues for reforms that “level up” of the power of competing interests that can counter the power of the law enforcement lobby in criminal justice policymaking. In doing so, the Article focuses specifically on reforms that imbed contestation in policymaking by communities most impacted by the criminal justice system. Second, the Article concurrently proposes mechanisms to “level down” the power of the law enforcement lobby, including realistic restrictions on the lobbying capacity of law enforcement interest groups that draws on First Amendment Speech Clause doctrine that permits restriction of public employee speech. Taken together, these reforms could facilitate broader transformation of the American criminal justice system.

107 Minnesota Law Review 1965 (2023), 73p.

By Anne McNamara

During the height of the Civil Rights movement, the Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio crafted the policing power to stop and search an individual without a warrant, without probable cause, and if the officer possesses a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Thirty years later, in Whren v. United States, the Court willfully blinded itself to the subjective motivations of an officer who initiate a Terry stop, requiring only a claim of some lawful reason to initiate a stop to adhere to the Fourth Amendments protections. Despite overwhelming evidence that the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence disparately affects Black people, the Court continuously asserts that the Equal Protection Clause (EPC)—not the Fourth Amendment—is the proper constitutional avenue for relief from race-motivated policing. Even a defendant who successfully overcomes the EPC’s practically insurmountable requirement of proving discriminatory intent is not afforded the exclusionary rule’s protection. Ultimately, the Court’s use of EPC as its suggested remedy provides little concrete relief for individuals subjected to pretextual stops. Against this backdrop of racially influenced law enforcement, the advent and development of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) has fundamentally altered American policing over the past decade. FRT is an algorithmic code, created by private companies, capable of recognizing a person’s facial identity by comparing it to other faces that are located in a centralized database. Some critics of the police’s use of FRT warn of its disparate impact on people of color who already face higher instances of police surveillance. Further, critics caution that FRT algorithms have higher error rates in identifying people of color, that databases used are often overly saturated with people of color, and that the police’s unregulated, unrestrained use of FRT reinforces preconceived notions of “Black criminality.” Historically, federal courts have been reluctant to condemn police implementation of technological advances as violative of the Fourth Amendment. While the police are prohibited from using publicly unavailable technology to surveil the details of an individual’s home, technology deployed by law enforcement in a public space often escapes constitutional constraints. In some instances, however, defendants successfully challenge police use of advanced technology for surveillance purposes through the lens of mosaic theory, which assesses police behavior in the aggregate to determine whether prolonged periods of surveillance constitutes an invasion of privacy impermissible under the Fourth Amendment. In light of the Court’s silence regarding FRT, a handful of cities and states have enacted laws that curb or completely ban police use of FRT. On the federal level, the preceding Congress proposed two bills: one seeking to require probable cause for police to deploy the technology, the other seeking to implement a complete federal ban of FRT and to disincentivize state and local use by withholding certain funding. This Note first surveys the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that created a legal justice system that is willfully ignorant of an officer’s potential racial motivations.18 Then, this Note discusses the police’s implementation of FRT and how it further infringes upon Black people’s liberties and dignities under the guise of “neutral” technology. Next, this Note explores the Court’s reasoning in evolving technology and surveillances cases—with a particular emphasis on mosaic theory—and discusses state and proposed federal statutory approaches to FRT regulation. Then, this Note argues that the most dangerous uses of FRT are the least likely to be recognized and curbed by the Supreme Court due to its longstanding refusal to allow the constitution to check unrestrained police behavior, leaving Black people defenseless against FRT’s role in increasing the structural inequalities embedded in our legal system. This Note concludes by calling for a comprehensive federal ban on police use of FRT that adequately incentivizes state and local law enforcement to enact similar bans.

SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. LVI:731 , 26p.

By Eisha Jain

This Essay argues that racial reckoning in policing should include a racial reckoning in the use of criminal records. Arrests alone—regardless of whether they result in convictions—create criminal records. Yet because the literature on criminal records most often focuses on prisoner reentry and on the consequences of criminal conviction, it is easy to overlook the connections between policing decisions and collateral consequences. This Essay employs the sociological framework of marking to show how criminal records entrench racial inequality stemming from policing. The marking framework recognizes that the government creates a negative credential every time it creates a record of arrest as well as conviction. Such records, in turn, trigger cascading consequences for employment, housing, immigration, and a host of other areas. The credentialing process matters because it enables and conceals race-based discrimination, and because a focus on the formal sentence often renders this discrimination invisible. This Essay considers how adopting a credentialing framework offers a way to surface, and ultimately to address, how race-based policing leaves lasting marks on over-policed communities.

Stanford Law Review Online, Volume 73, 2021. 18p.

By Jessica M. Eaglin

Much public debate circles around grassroots activists’ demand to “defund the police,” raised in public consciousness in the summer of 2020. Yet confusion about the demand is pervasive. This Essay adopts a literal interpretation of “defund” to clarify and distinguish four alternative, substantive policy positions that legal reforms related to police funding can validate. It argues that the policy debates between these positions exist on top of the ideological critique launched by grassroots activists, who use the term “defund the police” as a discursive tactic to make visible deeper transformations in government practices that normalize the structural marginalization of black people enforced through criminal law. w. By recognizing this socially contextualized meaning to the call to defund the police, this Essay offers two important insights for the public in this current moment. First, it urges the public to confront the structural marginalization of black people when evaluating legal reforms that may impact police budgets. Second, the Essay encourages the public to embrace the state of confusion produced by the demand to “defund the police” when considering social reforms going forward.

Stanford Law Review Online Volume 73 (2020-2021), 21p.

By The College of Policing (UK)

Key points Successfully identify stalking or harassment „ Think stalking first using the stalking mnemonic FOUR. Are the behaviours Fixated, Obsessive, Unwanted and Repeated? „ In cases of harassment, review and reconsider why the case does not meet the description of stalking. Investigate thoroughly „ Establish any pattern of behaviour and relevant history, reported or otherwise. „ Follow all lines of enquiry, whether they point towards or away from the suspect. „ In cases of stalking or harassment it is likely there will have been use of technology to facilitate the behaviour, and reasonable lines of enquiry must be pursued. Care for the victim „ Be compassionate and understanding in your approach. „ Do not make judgements about a victim’s behaviour – focus on the evidence. „ Remember that safeguarding the victim and reducing risk take priority over a criminal justice outcome. „ Recognise that victims may be traumatised and in need of specialist support. „ Remember that victims may be entitled to an enhanced service under the Code of Practice for Victims of Crime. „ Keep the victim updated on relevant stages of the investigation (eg, arrest, charge or release).

This advice will assist investigators responsible for a case once it has been transferred following the initial police response. This may be investigators working within public protection or CID, or in some forces, local policing investigators who retain stalking or harassment cases following an initial response

London: College of Policing (UK), 2024. 33p.

May Contain Mark-Ups

Designing Out Crime from Products and Systems Edited by Ronald V. Clarke & Graeme R. Newman

The book “Designing Out Crime from Products and Systems,” edited by Ronald V. Clarke and Graeme R. Newman, provides a comprehensive overview of how effective design can significantly reduce crime. It explores various successful initiatives from around the world, focusing on modifying products and systems to make them less susceptible to criminal exploitation. The book covers a wide range of topics, including the role of government and the corporate sector in crime prevention, the fundamentals of crime-proofing design, and specific case studies such as the U.K. vehicle licensing system and the security coding of electronic products. By analyzing these examples, the editors highlight the importance of incorporating crime prevention into the design process from the outset, rather than relying on reactive measures. One of the key themes of the book is the concept of“situational crime prevention,” which involves altering the environment or the design of products to reduce opportunities for crime. The editors argue that many crimes can be prevented by making relatively simple changes to the design of everyday objects and systems. For instance, the book discusses how the introduction of tamper-proof packaging for pharmaceuticals significantly reduced incidents of product tampering. It also emphasizes the need for collaboration between designers, manufacturers, and policymakers to create products that are both functional and secure. Overall, the book serves as a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding how design can be used as a tool for crime prevention

Criminal Justice Press, 2005, 265 pages