Coercive policing is conducted mostly by means of commands, and officers usually cannot use force unless they have first issued an order. Yet, despite widespread concern about force and coercion in policing, commands are both underregulated and misunderstood. Officers have no clear legal authority to give many common commands, almost no departmental guidance about how or when to issue them, and almost no legal scrutiny for many commands they give....
Policing
Every state has a set of transparency statutes that bind state and local governments. In theory, these statutes apply with equal force to every agency. Yet, in practice, law enforcement agencies enjoy a wide variety of unique secrecy protections denied to other government entities. Legislators write police-specific exemptions into public records laws. Judges develop procedural approaches that they apply exclusively to police and prosecutorial records....
The widespread use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) by law enforcement agencies calls into question how those departments store and publicly release the large amounts of video footage they amass under public access laws. This Note identifies a changing landscape of public access law, with a close look at the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and its state analogues, as the result of the Capitol Insurrection and the national Movement for Black...
Issues relating to disability are undertheorized in the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Across the lower courts, although disability features prominently in excessive force cases, typically involving individuals with psychiatric disabilities, it features less prominently in other areas of Fourth Amendment doctrine. Similarly, scholars have yet to substantively address how the Fourth Amendment’s vast scope of police discretion...