Tracey L. Meares

Randomization and the Fourth Amendment

Randomized checkpoint searches are generally taken to be the exact antitheses of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment. In the eyes of most jurists, checkpoint searches violate the central requirement of valid Fourth Amendment searches – namely, individualized suspicion. We disagree. In this article, we contend that randomized searches should form the very lodestar of a reasonable search. The fact is that the notion of “individualized” suspicion is misleading; most suspicion in the modern policing context is group-based and not individual specific. Randomized searches by definition are accompanied by a certain level of suspicion. The constitutional issue, we maintain, should not turn on the question of suspicion-based versus suspicionless police searches, but on the level of suspicion that attaches to any search program and on the evenhandedness of the program. In essence, we argue for a new paradigm of randomized encounters that satisfy a base level of suspicion and that will provide the benefits of both privacy-protection (by ensuring a minimum level of suspicion) and evenhandedness (by cabining police discretion), the very values we wish to protect through the Fourth Amendment.

How the Criminal Justice System Educates Citizens

There are at least two central pathways through which the modern democratic state interacts with citizens: public school systems and criminal justice systems. Rarely are criminal justice systems thought to serve the educational function that public school systems are specifically designed to provide. Yet for an increasing number of Americans, the criminal justice system plays a powerful and pervasive role in providing a civic education, in anticitizenry, that is the reverse of the education that public schools are supposed to offer. We deploy curriculum theory to analyze three primary processes of the criminal justice system—jury service, incarceration, and policing—and demonstrate the operation of two parallel curricula within them: a symbolic, overt curriculum rooted in positive civic conceptions of fairness and democracy; and a hidden curriculum, rooted in empty or negative conceptions of certain citizens and their relationship to the state.

Praying for Community Policing

Copyright

Desistance and Legitimacy: The Impact of Offender Notification Meetings on Recidivism Among High Risk Offenders

Legitimacy-based approaches to crime prevention assume that individuals will comply with the law when they believe that the law and its agents are legitimate and act in ways that are “fair” and “just.” Currently, legitimacy-based programs are shown to lower aggregate levels of crime; yet, no study has investigated whether such programs influence individual offending. Using quasi-experimental design and survival analyses, this study evaluates the effectiveness of one such program—Chicago’s Project Safe Neighborhoods’ (PSN) Offender Notification Forums—at reducing individual recidivism among a population of returning prisoners. Results suggest that involvement in PSN significantly reduces the risk of subsequent incarceration and is associated with significantly longer intervals that offenders remain on the street and out of prison. As the first study to provide individual-level evidence promoting legitimacy-based interventions on patterns of individual offending, out study suggests these interventions can and do reduce rates of recidivism.

Broken Windows, Neighborhoods, and the Legitimacy of Law Enforcement or Why I Fell in and out of Love with Zimbardo

Objective: Wilson and Kelling (1982) introduced Zimbardo’s “broken windows” into the lexicon a little over 30 years ago. This article explores broken windows from a legal policy perspective, with the aim of putting forth a framework for integrating what we know (or think we know) about the potential effects of broken windows policing into our goals for improving high-crime neighborhoods. Methods: A narrative review was carried out of key social science research on the broken windows perspective. Results: The first part of the article explains the appeal of broken windows to legal theorists interested in challenging criminal law policy based on a law and economics approach. The second part reviews maturing broken windows research and evaluations of broken windows policing. The third part explains the contours of an analysis that addresses the value of broken windows policing from a legal policy perspective. Conclusion: While I remain a tentative fan of broken windows policing, I argue that the modest outcomes of broken windows policing do not justify the problems these policies create from a procedural justice context. The policy literature ignores this trade-off, and a curriculum framework that emphasizes how the criminal justice system educates citizens may offer a promising alternative.

Street Stops and Police Legitimacy in New York

Police-initiated citizen encounters in American cities often are non-neutral events. Encounters range from routine traffic stops to police interdiction of pedestrians during their everyday movements through both residential and commercial areas to aggressive enforcement of social disorder offenses. As a crime detection and control strategy central to the “new policing,” these encounters often are unproductive and inefficient. They rarely result in arrest or seizure of contraband, and often provoke ill will between citizens and legal authorities that discourages citizen cooperation with police and compliance with law. In this chapter, we describe the range of potentially adverse reactions or harms that SQF or ‘street’ policing may produce. We next link those harms to a broader set of normative concerns that connect dignity, harm and police legitimacy. In the third section we review the evidence that connects citizen views of police – as well as their experience with police – to their perceptions of the legitimacy of the police and criminal legal institutions generally. We also review the evidence that links those perceptions to how citizens behave with respect to law, and identify the consequences of adverse reactions of citizens to harsh forms of street policing. We discuss alternative frameworks for regulation and democratic control of the new policing to link police legitimacy with guardianship of communities.