CRIMINAL JUSTICE
finishit
EXCESSIVEFORCEBIASANDCRIMINALJUSTICEREFORM.pdf
27
EXCESSIVE FORCE, BIAS, AND CRIMINAL
JUSTICE REFORM: PROPOSALS FOR
CONGRESSIONAL ACTION
Maurice R. Dyson*
INTRODUCTION: A NATIONAL EPIDEMIC OF
TARGETED HARASSMENT & KILLINGS .......................27
1. A ROUTINE OCCURRENCE ...................................................29
2. MYOPIC MENTALITY & DIVISIVE RHETORIC ...................30
3. COUNTERARGUMENTS TO THE POPULAR
RHETORIC ..........................................................................33
4. EVEN WHEN THE OFFICER IS A MINORITY, IT IS
STILL INSTITUTIONALLY ENFORCED RACIAL
OPPRESSION ......................................................................34
5. BRAINWASHED & WHITE WASHED: SOCIETAL &
MEDIA PERCEPTIONS OF RACE & CRIMINALITY ......35
6. THE COLOR OF OUR MENTAL SKY: PROTECTIVE
FATHERS & ENDANGERED SONS ..................................38
7. CRIMINALIZING OUR YOUTH: SROS & POLICING IN
SCHOOLS ............................................................................43
8. POLICE BIAS & RACIAL IDENTITY ......................................47
9. POLICING RACIAL IDENTITY IN THE LAW .......................51
10. THERE IS A PLACE & NEED FOR LEGAL REFORM ........59
11. A PROPOSED LEGISLATIVE SOLUTION ...........................60
CONCLUSION ..............................................................................74
INTRODUCTION: A NATIONAL EPIDEMIC OF
TARGETED HARASSMENT & KILLINGS
Police violence in America is a modern-day crisis. Even our
own allies such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahamas, France,
* Professor of Law, Thomas Jefferson Law School; Harlan Fiske Stone
Scholar, J.D. Columbia University School of Law; Scholars Fellow, Teachers
College, Columbia University; Kluge Scholar, A.B. Columbia College, Columbia
University.
28 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Germany have all
issued travel-alert warnings to their citizens visiting the U.S.,
due to the police violence being witnessed here.1 Yet, what the
rest of the world seems to know and acknowledge, has apparently
escaped our Congress and, indeed, our elected leaders who have
failed to take action. While various communities may suffer from
the abuses of excessive police practices, it is America’s people of
color, particularly Blacks and Latinos, that are targeted
disproportionately for police harassment and violence.2
Significantly, in 2015: (1) unarmed Black people were “killed at
5x the rate of unarmed whites,” (2) “37% of unarmed people killed
by police were Black” despite being “only 13% of the U.S.
population,” and (3) “[p]olice killed at least 102 unarmed black
people,” nearly two people each week.3 According to the U.S.
Bureau of Justice Statistics, Hispanics are over-represented when
it comes to traffic searches and arrests, as statistics show:
Hispanics, for example, make up 17.6 percent of the U.S.
population but represent 23 percent of all searches and
nearly 30 percent of arrests. Among minorities, the rate of
police killings for Latinos is second to those of African-
Americans. As of today, an estimated 94 Latinos have been
killed by police in 2016 alone, making up 16 percent of the
585 police-involved killings this year. In contrast, people who
are black or African-American are only 13.3 percent of the
U.S. population, but 144 black Americans have been killed by
police in 2016. At 25 percent, those deaths represent a
disproportionate number of officer-involved fatalities
compared to the population. It’s worth noting a person can
1. See Angela Walters, Overseas Travel Warnings About USA Mount, USA
TODAY (Apr. 11, 2016, 2:09 PM), http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/
2016/08/11/travel-warnings-united-states/88458238/.
2. See Police Killed more than 100 Unarmed Black People in 2015, Unarmed
Victims, MAPPING POLICE VIOLENCE, http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ (last
visited Mar. 18, 2017) [hereinafter MAPPING POLICE VIOLENCE] (“Only 10 of the 102
cases in 2015 where an unarmed black person was killed by police resulted in
officer(s) being charged with a crime, and only 2 of these deaths (Matthew Ajibade
and Eric Harris) resulted in convictions of officers involved. Only 1 of 2 officers
convicted for their involvement in Matthew Ajibade’s death received jail time. He
was sentenced to 1 year in jail and allowed to serve this time exclusively on
weekends.”). However, Tulsa Sherriff’s Deputy Robert Bates, who was convicted of
second-degree manslaughter in Eric Harris’s case, was sentenced to four years.
Ariana Pickard & Corey Jones, Former Reserve Deputy Robert Bates Sentenced to
Four Years in Prison for Death of Eric Harris, TULSA WORLD (June 1, 2016, 12:00
AM), http://www.tulsaworld.com/homepagelatest/former-reserve-deputy-robert-bates-
sentenced-to-four-years-in/article_ec042b6d-11d2-5ee1-95d9-cf9e5ee78aba.html.
3. MAPPING POLICE VIOLENCE, supra note 2.
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 29
be both Latino and black. And sometimes a victim’s race may
not be disclosed at all, creating potential for incidents
involving both Latinos and black Americans to be
underreported . . . . Many national databases are dependent
on self-reported statistics from local and state agencies,
making them potentially incomplete.4
1. A ROUTINE OCCURRENCE
The headlines paint a more tragic portrait of Latinos and
Blacks killed by police fire, including Pedro Villanueva, a 19-year-
old man who was gunned down by the California Highway
Patrol,5 and Melissa Ventura, a mother of three who was killed
by police responding to a domestic disturbance.6 Then there was
Anthony Nuñez, a reportedly suicidal 18-year-old in San Jose who
was shot and killed by the police.7 From Raul Saavedra-Vargas,
Vincent Ramos, and Amadou Diallo, to Patrick Bell, Tamir Rice,
Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Dontre Hamilton,
Renisha McBride, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner,
Trayvon Martin, Dante Parker, Tanisha Anderson, Akai Gurley,
Marlene Pinnock, Rumain Brisbon, Jerame Reid, Tony Robinson,
Philip White, Darrien Hunt, Eric Harris, Philando Castile, Alton
Sterling, Terence Crutcher, Keith Lamont Scott, and countless
others. The clash between police, authority, and race has also
proven to be a virulent, fatalistic, widespread phenomenon in the
U.S. that appears to be the same familiar story over and over:
The videos are circulated, becoming viral to the point where
news outlets cannot ignore them. Protests and
demonstrations ensue, and it doesn’t seem to matter how
nonviolent they are because somebody will find reasons to
4. Kenya Downs, Why Aren’t More People Talking About Latinos Killed by
Police?, Race Matters, PBS NEWS HOUR, (July 14, 2016, 1:21 PM) (quoting Eric
Rodriquez, Vice President of the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Litigation,
with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR)), http://www.pbs.org/
newshour/rundown/black-men-werent-unarmed-people-killed-police-last-week/.
5. Id. (“[T]wo undercover . . . officers, dressed in plain clothes, chased an
unarmed . . . Villanueva. Their unmarked car pursued his pickup truck for 5
miles to a dead-end street. As Villanueva made a U-turn back toward their
direction, the officers opened fire. Villanueva was shot several times and died at
the scene. A passenger was shot in the arm but survived.”).
6. Id. (“[R]eport[edly], the woman opened the door holding a knife as
authorities arrived. She was then shot by both deputies and died en route to the
hospital.”).
7. Id. (“[Nuñez] had already attempted to shoot himself when he turned the gun
on . . . police officers who had arrived to talk him down. He was then shot and killed
by the officers.”).
30 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
label them acts of terrorism or worse. Sometimes there are
indictments. Always there are inquiries. Satisfaction from
the bereaved is sought, demanded. Demotions or other
internal sanctions are often the worst that happens to those
responsible. And that’s that. Until the next incident. Or the
next video surfaces, with even more graphic and irrefutable
evidence. Then the ritual begins again. And that question:
What can we do?8
We have yet to take a serious look at what the nation can do
to resolve this disturbingly tragic issue. As a browning nation, of
which Latinos, Chicanos, and Hispanics will collectively comprise
the majority by the year 2050, we have an urgent need to resolve
this concern for future generations because Black and Latino
people suffer disproportionately at the hands of the police.
Organizations like the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), Voto
Latino, and even Black Lives Matter (BLM), are raising
awareness because police killings of Latinos go underreported
and the use of excessive force in Latino communities is often
ignored. As one commentator noted:
In American history, racial conflict has largely played out in
black and white. But the history is much more complicated,
[leaving] out Native Americans, as well as Asians and
Hispanics . . . . Americans don’t see any kind of historical
context when Latinos are victims of state violence, despite
the fact that there is historical context there.9
2. MYOPIC MENTALITY & DIVISIVE RHETORIC
That historical context is one of racial suppression that
manifests itself today time and time again. We have become a
nation desensitized, sanitized, and complacent to the evils of
racism. Further, in an era of Trump, racism in America has
found its voice. We are eager to move on to the next news cycle,
the next headline. It would appear ours is a country in the throes
of a backlash against having a black president, where racist
tweets are retweeted over and over unless they are deleted, and
8. Gene Seymour, Opinion, In America, Is a White Life Still Worth More than
a Black One?, CNN: SOC. COMMENT. (July 7, 2016, 5:48 PM), http://www.cnn.
com/2016/07/07/opinions/police-shooting-minnesota-seymour/index.html.
9. Downs, supra note 4 (quoting Aaron Fountain, a Historian of youth
activism at Indiana University) (internal quotations omitted).
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 31
even then are still retweeted to incite racial tension.10 These go
beyond the racist emails circulated about President Obama,
which derogatorily depicted him eating watermelon in the White
House,11 and Donald Trump questioning his legitimacy and
intelligence, by claiming he was born in Kenya and demanding
his birth certificate and college transcript.12 Recall former
Representative Joe Walsh’s tweet calling for war on Obama and
the BLM Movement. His comments that the Dallas-sniper event
signaled this was war, and that Obama and BLM “punks” should
look out as “real America” is coming for them, are not only
abysmal—they are symptomatic of a binary, myopic mentality.13
Another emblematic example of this mentality is the Lt.
Governor of Texas, who called the BLM protesters “hypocrites”
for protesting the police and then seeking their protection during
the sniper attack.14 He too did not appreciate the distinction
between legitimate police protest and misconduct and the duty of
the police to protect. The distinction between anti-police killing
and brutality, and anti-police, is wholly lost on the Lt. Governor,
who would later walk back some of his comments only after
10. See, e.g., Former Congressman Tells Obama and BLM ‘Punks’ to ‘Watch
Out,’ News, SNOPES.COM (July 8, 2016) [hereinafter ‘Watch Out’] (citations
omitted), http://www.snopes.com/2016/07/08/former-congressman-tells-obama-
and-blm-punks-to-watch-out/; Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), TWITTER (Sept.
6, 2014, 3:06 AM), https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/508194635270
062080 (showing that Trump’s “birther” tweet was retweeted more than 10,000
times).
11. See MARTIN. A. PARLETT, DEMONIZING A PRESIDENT: THE “FOREIGNIZATION”
OF BARACK OBAMA 81 (2014) (“In 2009, Dean Grose, Mayor of Los Alamitos,
California, resigned after forwarding an email depicting the White House lawn as a
watermelon patch, under the title ‘No Easter Egg hunt this year’—further suggesting
Obama’s racial difference and anti-Christian administration.”).
12. See Trump, supra note 10 (“Attention all hackers: you are hacking everything
else so please hack Obama’s college records (destroyed?) and check ‘place of birth.’”).
13. See Watch Out, supra note 10 (defending his tweet, saying that he was not
declaring actual war on Obama, but merely that “[t]here’s a war on against our cops
in this country, and I think Obama has fed that war and [BLM] has fed that war . . .
[their] words and . . . deeds . . . have gotten cops in this country killed”).
14. See Jessica Chasmar, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick Calls Black Lives Matter
Protestors Who Ran from Gunfire ‘Hypocrites,’ WASH. TIMES (July 8, 2016), http://
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/8/dan-patrick-texas-lieutenant-governor-ca
lls-blm-pr/ (“‘All those protestors . . . ran the other way expecting the men and women
in blue to turn around and protect them. What hypocrites,’ he said in a[n] . . . interview
with Fox News.”); see also Mary Tuma, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick Slams Obama Over
Support for Police: In Response, POTUS Reiterates Support for Law Enforcement,
Daily News, AUSTIN CHRON. (Jul 14, 2016, 8:30 PM) (citations omitted), http://
www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2016-07-14/lt-gov-dan-patrick-slams-obama
-over-support-for-police/.
32 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
receiving much criticism.15 But it is too late. The truth of their
poisonous hate has been revealed. Before Walsh’s tweet was
deleted, before the Lt. Gov.’s comments were retracted, before a
spontaneous Donald Trump was placed on a tight script and
teleprompter, the ugly truth of racism and hate in America was
made known, and it was not caused by Blacks and Latinos
blaming Whites for their problems. Rather, America has not
learned its lessons from the history of its own racism. When
Milwaukee County’s African-American Sheriff, David Clarke,
mentioned the “good news” of exonerated officers involved in
Freddie Grey’s death at the Republican National Convention
(RNC),16 and proclaimed that there was no shred of evidence that
police target Blacks on CNN,17 the ignorance could not be more
clear. This blanket assertion appears to be unfounded,
particularly since the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) findings
regarding the Baltimore Police Department’s racial targeting of
Blacks.18
15. See Editorial, Dan Patrick’s Response to Ambush Was a Tutorial on What Not
to Say in Crisis, DALLAS MORNING NEWS (July 11, 2016) (citations omitted),
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/2016/07/11/editorial-texas-officials-
responses-dallas-ambush-offer-tutorial-say; Tuma, supra note 14.
16. Ryan Grim, Republican Convention Roars Approval of Baltimore Officer’s
Acquittal in Freddie Gray Death: A Somber Moment Is Turned into an Applause Line,
HUFFINGTON POST (July 13, 2016, 10:39 PM), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
entry/republican-convention-freddie-gray_us_578d85c5e4b0c53d5cfab360.
17. Leinz Vales, Wisconsin Sheriff on Recent Baton Rouge Shootings: I
Predicted This, Crime & Justice, CNN (Jul. 18, 2016, 9:37 PM), http://www.
cnn.com/2016/07/18/us/wisconsin-sheriff-david-clarke-i-predicted-this/ (describing
a “heated interview with CNN’s Don Lemon,” in which Clarke denied that police
are “more aggressive toward black males than white males,” stating that “[t]here
is no[] data” to support such a claim, and that “[t]he President has been lying
about it’”).
18. SPECIAL LITIG. SECTION OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS DIV., U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE,
INVESTIGATION OF THE BA. CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT 3 (2016),
https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/883381/download (“After engaging in a thorough
investigation, initiated at the request of the City of Baltimore and BPD, the [DOJ]
concludes that there is reasonable cause to believe . . . . BPD engages in a pattern or
practice of: (1) making unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests; (2) using
enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of
stops, searches and arrests of African Americans; (3) using excessive force; and (4)
retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally-protected expression. This
pattern or practice is driven by systemic deficiencies in BPD’s policies, training,
supervision, and accountability structures that fail to equip officers with the tools
they need to police effectively and within the bounds of the federal law.”); Press
Release, Office of Pub. Affairs, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, (Aug. 10, 2016) (internal
quotations & citations omitted), https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-
announces-findings-investigation-baltimore-police-department (“We found that BPD
has engaged in a pattern or practice of serious violations of the U.S. Constitution and
federal law that has disproportionately harmed Baltimore’s African-American
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 33
But perhaps the racial chasm in our society was already
clear when Sheriff Clarke ripped the BLM movement as “Black
Lies Matter,” or when the Police Benevolence Association (PBA)
named him its Man of the Year.19 Do these officials realize their
either/or mentality, their unqualified support of all police, and
their derogatory comments on protestors or anyone who shows
even slightly less than full-throated support is lumping whole
groups together? The irony is that while their narrow cognitive
paradigm sees only in terms of either/or as to BLM, these same
people are quick to call for nuance when they ask us to
disassociate bad-apple actors on the police force from the good
ones.
3. COUNTERARGUMENTS TO THE POPULAR RHETORIC
However, what critics fail to understand is that the bad-
apple distinction becomes less and less persuasive when a
national phenomenon emerges. Furthermore, they miss the point
that there is a reality where far too many good officers turn a
blind eye toward, or fall silent about, the bad cops on the force.
The camaraderie, the loyalty, and the “silent blue wall” of
complicity engendered by their closeness to their brothers and
sisters in blue impedes their ability to speak out against, to
prosecute and to remove, bad apples until it is too late.
Furthermore, the culture and the law themselves do not favor
transparency.20 They do not recognize that Black men are more
community and eroded the public’s trust in the police . . . .”).
19. See Jennifer Fermino et al., Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke is
PBA’s Person of the Year, N.Y. DAILY NEWS (Aug. 26, 2016, 12:22 AM), http://
www.nydailynews.com/new-york/milwaukee-county-sheriff-david-clark-pba-man-
year-article-1.2765494.
20. See, e.g., In re Whitley v. N.Y. Cty. Dist. Attorney’s Office, 955 N.Y.S.2d
42, 43 (N.Y. App. Div. 2012) (citations omitted) (“[The police department]
correctly determined that disclosure of the requested documents would have
interfered with petitioner’s then-pending criminal appeal and any subsequent
proceedings in the underlying criminal case.”); In re Legal Aid Soc’y v. N.Y.C.
Police Dep’t, 713 N.Y.S.2d 3, 7–8 (N.Y. App Div. 2000) (citations omitted) (“We
are persuaded that . . . disclosure of records to a defendant in a pending criminal
prosecution . . . would not only ‘interfere with the orderly process of
disclosure’ . . . , it would also create a substantial likelihood of delay in the
adjudication of that proceeding . . . , thereby effecting a chill on that
prosecution . . . .”), appeal denied, 745 N.E.2d 389 (N.Y.); In re Pittari v. Pirro,
696 N.Y.S.2d 167, 169 (N.Y. App. Div. 1999) (citing N.Y. PUBLIC OFFICER’S LAW
§ 87(2)(e)(i) (McKinney 2008 & Supp. 2014)) (finding that the petitioner’s
Freedom of Information Law “requests, made while the criminal proceeding was
still pending . . . , were properly denied pursuant to . . . § 87(2)(e)(i),” a statute
that “exempts from disclosure those records ‘compiled for law enforcement
34 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
targeted than others.21 Some find inane arguments as to why
protesting against police killings is somehow anti-law
enforcement or anti-white.22 Moreover, some bad apple officers
seem to always find some justifications for the killings that could
have been avoided. Some good apple cops will find ways to cover
up or look the other way from the horrific acts of bad apples on
the force in allegiance to that silent blue wall. As John F.
Kennedy observed, “[T]he only thing necessary for the triumph of
evil is for good men to do nothing.”23
4. EVEN WHEN THE OFFICER IS A MINORITY, IT IS
STILL INSTITUTIONALLY ENFORCED RACIAL
OPPRESSION
Far too many on the force are silent, and the bad apple
response we hear each time in this narrative seems to belie the
disturbing fact that there is a larger systematic problem in the
exercise of force and power across America. This is the case
whether the officer is Caucasian, Asian, Mexican, or African-
American. That violence to the body happens even when it is tan,
beige, or burnt sienna. It happens by police who are Black,
White, Asian, and Hispanic. I’ve witnessed this truth myself. As
an example, one day, in the intersection of Babylon Avenue and
Sunrise Highway in Merrick, New York, White and Latino police
officers stopped our car right there on the street, and forcibly
removed my mother, stepfather, brother, and me. They held us
at gunpoint spread-eagle against the car. Well, actually, it was
just my brother Neal and me who were held spread-eagle across
purposes and which, if disclosed, would . . . interfere with law enforcement
investigations or judicial proceedings’”), appeal denied, 723 N.E.2d 567 (N.Y.).
21. Paul Butler, Black Male Exceptionalism? The Problems and Potential of
Black Male-Focused Interventions, 10 DU BOIS. REV. 485, 490–91 (2013) (citations
omitted), scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2323&cont
ext=facpub (“One conservative commentator suggested that referring to African
American males as an ‘endangered species was misleading, in part because Whites
are often the victims of crimes perpetrated by Black males.’ [While another
commentator] argued that social science research on African American men is
usually put in ‘crisis terms’ . . . [, and] was critical of an ‘unquestioned assumption of
endangered masculinity’ . . . .”).
22. See Neil Munro, Cop Deaths Double in 2016, Amid Obama’s Anti-Cop
Rhetoric, BREITBART NEWS (July 20, 2016), http://www.breitbart.com/2016-
presidential-race/2016/07/20/cop-deaths-double-2016-amid-obamas-anti-cop-rhetoric/.
(construing police-violence critique as responsible for anti-law-enforcement
shootings).
23. John F. Kennedy, President, U.S., Address Before the Canadian
Parliament in Ottawa (May 17, 1961) (citations & internal quotations omitted)
(transcript available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8136).
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 35
the car hood, while the rest of my family were ordered to freeze. I
recall so vividly at the age of fifteen what this rookie white cop
looked like trembling with nerves as he held a gun to the back of
my brother’s head while the gun shook in his hand, pressed
precariously against my brother’s brain.
My brother Neal, being 6’2”, got the brunt of it because he
was certainly making this cop nervous just by being born
genetically tall and by being a brown man in the wrong place at
the wrong time. Apparently, our car and the group of us
supposedly matched the description of another vehicle also
carrying people of the same hue as us. The actual suspects were
involved in robbing a store. But we were the unlucky ones to be
stopped. Indeed, I recall how lucky my brother and I were: he,
that the cop never nervously pulled the trigger as he held his gun
against the back of my brother’s skull, and I, that I did not have
to watch, standing so close next to him, his brain matter splatter
all over me.
I saw the terror in his eyes, and tears running down his
cheek as he tried to sob without moving. I saw my mother
pleading that Neal stay absolutely still and not move, but being
just as utterly powerless to do anything as I was. We were frozen
by fear and force all at once, frozen like vulnerable ice statues
awaiting a blistering fate based entirely on a circumstance not of
our own choosing and entirely outside our control. In a blink of
an eye, in a split of a millisecond, and with the seeming
arbitrariness of a coin flip, the fate of my brother’s life was in the
trembling hands of this cop’s ever-shaking trigger finger. In each
second that seemed like an eternity, I knew his life could be
easily snubbed out, and that they would find a way to justify it.
After twenty-five minutes of a harrowing, terrifying
nightmare in broad daylight, the police finally let us go, without
an apology, without remorse, but just disgust that we apparently
wasted their time merely by being who we were—not criminals,
but innocent human beings stripped of our dignity. I knew the
fragility of life, the randomness of it, and the frightful thought
that, at any moment, our lives as de facto second-class citizens
could be extinguished senselessly.
5. BRAINWASHED & WHITE WASHED: SOCIETAL &
MEDIA PERCEPTIONS OF RACE & CRIMINALITY
It is a strain on the head and heart to feel that one day, this
fear, distrust, hate, or resentment for the “other” would come for
36 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
me. I saw the White onlookers stare at us with disapproval yet
pleasing satisfaction that we had been apprehended for their
supposed protection, policing the spaces we too had called home
but to which we did not belong. They never second-guessed our
innocence with their contemptible grimaces. After all, we were
just another confirmed stereotype of criminality. We were the
confirmation of Nixon’s intentionally-racist campaign to flood the
nightly news with Black criminality to subvert sympathy for
Black protesters against the Vietnam War.24 Nixon had two
principal enemies: the antiwar left and Black people, according to
former Nixon Domestic Policy Chief John Ehrlichman. He stated:
You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t
make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by
getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana
and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily,
we could disrupt those communities . . . . We could arrest
their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and
vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we
know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.25
Like this candid confession, we were the images of criminality
vilified night after night, standing in that intersection. Whenever
someone types “three black teenagers” as the search query on
Google, we are the images of police mug shots that appear, which
stands in stark contrast to the J. Crew-looking ads when the
words “three white teenagers” are entered instead. In their
minds, I imagine the matching description was not unlike the
description that comes to mind when one types “three black
teenagers” into Google.26 Latinos and Blacks are vilified in the
mainstream press that permeates the American psyche, and I
believe I paid the price for that mass mental conditioning.
When we asked the cops what was the matching description
sent over their APB, the police couldn’t be bothered to say a word
24. See Tom LoBianco, Report: Aide Says Nixon’s War on Drugs Targeted
Blacks, Hippies, CNN: POLITICS (Mar. 24, 2016, 3:14 PM), http://www.cnn.com/
2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/.
25. Id.
26. Jessica Guynn, ‘Three Black Teenagers’ Google Search Sparks Outrage,
USA TODAY (June 9, 2016, 1:10 PM; updated June 10, 2016, 11:06 AM), http://
www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/06/09/google-imae-search-three-black-
teenagers-three-white- teenagers/85648838/ (“Google image searches for ‘three
black teenagers’ and ‘three white teenagers’ get very different results, raising
troubling questions about how racial bias in society and the media is reflected
online.”).
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 37
and ordered us to stop blocking the intersection in which they had
stopped us. Was this experience traumatic? Yes—absolutely
unforgettable, but I recognized we were, undoubtedly, one of the
lucky few. If only Anthony Nuñez, Raul Saavedra-Vargas,
Vincent Ramos, Terence Crutcher, and Keith Lamont Scott were
so lucky. Officers need to learn to de-escalate conflict, and—only
if necessary—reach for the taser rather than the gun. Imagine in
each scenario how much life could have been preserved if simply
this were done. Imagine that Amadou Diallo would have still
been alive if the officers of the New York Police Department, who
were exonerated, took time to use a taser, rather than the guns
that shot at him forty-one to forty-six times.
For Amadou
They claimed they saw him reach for a weapon 41 shots they fired, 19 took him to up to heaven
Was it a ricochet effect or merely a cop’s accidental trip That compelled them to empty their glock nine clip? 48 hours of media silence helped fine tune their tale
To justify how they took the life of another unarmed black male. Sharpton is raising hell again down in front of federal court
As Mayor Gooliani practices damage control— a savvy media stunt.
But snapshots of angry raised black fists, and grieving mother’s cries
Don’t survive evening news sound bites and public relation lies
Change of venue are defense attorneys’ choice of menu
Anything will do to remove justice from her racial milieu, To pluck vindication from Harlem’s bosom,
Safe away from juries that are Black, Ethiopian or Muslim To a crisp white judge and jury in rural upstate
That moves to acquit murder and redeem the fate Oh how we contort tragedy into fanciful fiction Only when the victim is of a darker complexion Behold my brethren see this tragic scene repeat,
In every Black ghetto & American street,
In these lamenting streets of sorrow Rest assured, each year, more Black bodies will follow
For no resting peace awaits for fallen Amadou Diallo27
27. Maurice R. Dyson, For Amadou, in VOICES OF THE APOCRYPHA:
COLLECTED POEMS 28, 28 (2009); see Amadou Diallo, N.Y. TIMES, https://www.
38 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
6. THE COLOR OF OUR MENTAL SKY: PROTECTIVE
FATHERS & ENDANGERED SONS
In light of the killing of Amadou Diallo and the long line of
cases of police killings, with Terence Crutcher and Keith Lamont
Scott being the most recent at the time of this writing, the parent
of a child of color has to teach that there are very real limitations
and dangers to police encounters, while at the same time
reminding them that those limitations are just obstacles that can
and will be overcome with perseverance. I was reminded of Dr.
King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, where he spoke of the
rampant racism and how he feared such bigotry and hatred
would distort his daughter’s mental sky:
[W]hen you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your
speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-
old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park
that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears
welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is
closed to colored children, [you begin to] see the depressing
clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental
sky . . . .28
That was not just poetic prose designed to convince the white
clergy in the South—it was the wisdom of a protective father
letting his daughter know there were real limits. Yes, the child
has a clear canvas on which to paint; and as King’s letter alludes,
it is as if there is a clear-blue expansive sky of wonder and the
excitement of possibility and potentiality. It was a sky without
clouds, ominous dark tones, or piercing lighting that would
darken to the mentality of the downtrodden.
No, the clear mental sky that we would say is most often
associated with growing up white is a sky that has not been told
that it will fall, a sky that has no reason to believe it would be
second guessed with clouds, vilified with lightening, or poisoned
with the hateful gale-force winds of bigotry. It was a mental sky
in which, with just a little imagination, one could fly. As the late
nytimes.com/topic/person/amadou-diallo (“The officers . . . acknowledged firing 41
shots that night, but said they thought that Mr. Diallo was carrying a gun. Mr.
Diallo, who came to America more than two years before from Guinea and worked as
a street peddler in Manhattan, was hit by 19 bullets while standing in the doorway of
his Bronx apartment building.”).
28. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ Politics,
ATLANTIC (Apr. 16, 2013), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/
martin-luther-kings-letter-from-birmingham-jail/274668/.
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 39
Muhammad Ali once proclaimed insightfully, “The man who has
no imagination has no wings.”29 Ali was not just a great man, but
also an example. As pastor Cosby noted at Ali’s funeral, “Before
James Brown said ‘I’m Black and I’m proud,’ Muhammad Ali said
‘I’m Black and I’m pretty.’”30 He was not a New Black that shuns
race pride or, for that matter, denies or downplays the role of
white subjugation.31 But he embraced a mental sky that could
soar beyond his circumstance. I suppose it was this mental sky
that my parents wanted for me so I could soar with wings further
than they could. I was not raised to be Black or White. I was
raised with spiritual principles of humanity, brotherhood, loving,
and giving back to one’s community and that community was
those who were downtrodden.
For the early part of my life, before formal schooling took
hold, my parents tried to instill in me a sense of limitless
possibility, while still being grounded in my history and culture.
I realized for many growing up that was simply not the case. I
recall the passage in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time where
he was an inquisitive and daring child.32 As a child, he began to
think beyond the limit of race only to have the stern father slap
the “Black back into him,” so to speak. It was a parent’s
nightmare that their child, not knowing their place in a racist
world, would cross some invisible but very real racial line and
transgress a boundary where Blacks were not welcome.
At first, I thought how cruel of Baldwin’s father to do that to
his son, much as the son also initially thought. How cruel to
smack and unilaterally, violently, and unceremoniously impose
such limits in his child’s mind, to poison his mind. In other
words, how dare he distort and cloud his child’s preciously
innocent mental sky. But as Baldwin would explain, that abrupt,
violent wake-up smack was done in love to protect the child from
29. Muhammad Ali Dies, His Inspirational Quotes, ORIJO REP. (June 4, 2016),
http://www.orijoreporter.com/muhammad-ali-dies-his-inspirational-quotes/.
30. Before James Brown Said ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ BBC: NEWSHOUR (June
10, 2016), http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03xyxr1.
31. There are various conceptions of the “New Black,” but often it is characterized
by an under emphasis if not outright denial of the role of white racism as an
oppressive barrier to social mobility, or a de-emphasis of one’s African-American
heritage in preference for a broader self-identifying label. See, e.g., Jason Parham,
The Curious Case of the “New Black”: A Conversation, GAWKER (Oct. 14, 2014, 11:00
AM) (citations omitted), http://gawker.com/the-curious-case-of-the-new-black-a-
conversation-1649462578.
32. See JAMES BALDWIN, THE FIRE NEXT TIME 104–05 (Vintage Int’l ed., 1993)
(1962).
40 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
crossing that invisible, but palpable, color line.
The Fire Next Time is reminiscent today of what every Black
parent has to warn their child about whenever they step outside
the safety of their home to encounter the dangers of a racialized
police state. It is a police state where officers use tear gas and
rubber bullets in White or affluent neighborhoods to subdue
suspects, while they shoot first with lethal force in Black ones.33
It is a police state where body cameras fall off of officers in Black
towns, where self-serving and convenient narratives are created
before or after the videos surface to fine-tune a justification.34 It
is a police state where grand juries refuse to indict,35 or where
prosecutors, working with the police, present prejudicial evidence
to a grand jury.36 That same color line that W.E.B. Dubois
33. See Aviva Shen, Police Said They Shot a Man Because He Pointed a Gun
at Them: Video Shows He Had His Hands Up, THINKPROGRESS (July 10, 2016),
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/10/3796941/alva-braziel/ (“Another black
man was shot and killed by Police in Texas . . . . Houston Police said Alva Braziel
was waving a gun around and pointed it at them when they opened fire. But
surveillance footage from a nearby gas station suggests otherwise. The video . . .
shows Braziel walk out toward an intersection. When the squad car arrives, he
appears to put his hands in the air and turn around, standing still for a few
seconds before police shoot him . . . . Police protocol in most U.S. cities
encourages officers to use lethal force if they feel someone is threatening them,
but there are often many other tools and opportunities to de-escalate the
situation. For example, in a majority-white neighborhood of Houston . . . , an
armed suspect fired seven rounds at police officers. Yet police managed to end
the standoff with gas and other non-lethal means without killing the man.”).
34. See Coroner Says Man Shot by BRPD Multiple Times in Chest, Back;
Officer Body Cameras Fell Off, WBRZ (July 5, 2016, 4:11 PM) [hereinafter
WBRZ], http://www.wbrz.com/news/coroner-says-man-shot-by-brpd-multiple-
times-in-chest-back-officer-body-cameras-fell-off/ (“The East Baton Rouge
Coroner’s Office says [Alton Sterling] . . . died from multiple gunshot wounds to
the chest and back. State Rep. C. Denise Marcelle, who had a conversation with
Police Chief Carl Dabadie, confirmed . . . that both body cameras that the officers
involved in the shooting were wearing fell off during the incident. According to
BRPD Cpl. L’Jean Mckneely, the cameras are still in the pilot program and the
footage is still useful.”).
35. See Ben Norton, No Charges: Grand Jury Refuses to Indict Policeman in Fatal
Shooting of 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice, SALON (Dec. 28, 2015, 1:45 PM),
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/28/no_charges_grand_jury_refuses_to_indict_policeme
n_in_fatal_shooting_of_12_year_old_tamir_rice/ (“A grand jury declined . . . . to indict
the police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park in
November, 2014 . . . . This ruling comes just one week after a grand jury also refused
to indict anyone involved in the death of Sandra Bland in police custody in Texas.
The decision echoes those made by grand juries about the police killings of other
unarmed black Americans.”).
36. See Kate Levine, Who Shouldn’t Prosecute the Police, 101 IOWA L. REV. 1447,
1449–50, 1450 nn.7–8 (2016) (citing Brian Beutler, The NYC Cop Who Strangled Eric
Garner to Death Is Free Thanks to a Legal Flaw. Here’s How Voters Can Fix It, NEW
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 41
indicated would be the quintessential question of the twentieth-
century could very well be the difference between life and death.
Although it seemed that slap was cruel and unwarranted to
outside eyes, to the protective father who needs to impose the
realities of a racist world, it was a message that said: I need you
REPUBLIC (Dec. 3, 2014), http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120478/eric-garner-
police-officer-shouldve-been-investigated-independently; Paul Butler, Opinion, The
System Must Counteract Prosecutors’ Natural Sympathies for Cops, N.Y. TIMES (Apr.
28, 2015, 12:26 PM), http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/12/04/
do-cases-like-eric-garners-require-a-special-prosecutor/the-system-must-counteract-
prosecutors-natural-sympathies-for-cops; Paul Cassell, Who Prosecutes the Police?
Perceptions of Bias in Police Misconduct Investigations and a Possible Remedy,
WASH. POST: VOLOKH CONSPIRACY (Dec. 5, 2014), http://www.washingtonpost.com/
news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/05/who-prosecutes-the-police-perceptions-of-bias-
in-police-misconduct-investigations-and-a-possible-remedy; Erwin Chemerinsky,
Opinion, Police Dodge Accountability for Deaths, ORANGE COUNTY REG. (Dec. 7,
2014, 12:00 AM), http://www.ocregister.com/articles/police-644400-officers-jury.html;
Sally Kohn, First Mike Brown, Then Eric Garner: Prosecutors Can’t Be Trusted to Try
Cops, Justice Denied, DAILY BEAST (Dec. 3, 2014, 2:55 PM), http://www.thedaily
beast.com/articles/2014/12/03/the-eric-garner-case-should-have-gone-to-trial.html;
Kate Levine, The Ultimate Conflict: Local Prosecutors Should Not Decide Whether to
Criminally Charge Police Officers Like Ferguson’s Darren Wilson, Jurisprudence: The
Law, Lawyers and the Court, SLATE (Sept. 11, 2014, 2:50 PM),
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/09/local_prosecut
or_bob_mcculloch_should_not_be_the_one_to_decide_whether_to.html; Howard
Wasserman, Prosecuting Police: The Role of the Grand-Jury Pool, PRAWFSBLAWG: L.
& POL. (Dec. 4, 2014, 5:41 PM), http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2014/12/
prosecuting-police-the-role-of-the-grand-jury-pool.html); see also id. at 1450 n.10
(citing Erwin Chemerinsky, The Role of Prosecutors in Dealing with Police Abuse:
The Lessons of Los Angeles, 8 VA. J. SOC. POL’Y & L. 305, 309–13 (2001); Alexa P.
Freeman, Unscheduled Departures: The Circumvention of Justice Sentencing for
Police Brutality, 47 HASTINGS L.J. 677, 719 (1996) (“Local Prosecutors who ordinarily
work closely with the police face an impossible conflict of interest between their
desire to maintain working relationships and their duty to investigate and prosecute
police brutality.”); Susan N. Herman, Double Jeopardy All over Again: Dual
Sovereignty, Rodney King, and the ACLU, 41 UCLA L. REV. 609, 630 (1994) (“[I]f
multiple prosecutions were prohibited in all cases, unscrupulous state actors could
immunize a favored defendant (perhaps a fellow state or city employee, like a sheriff
or police officer) from further prosecution by instituting a sham state prosecution.”);
Jon V. Jacobi, Prosecuting Police Misconduct, 2000 WIS. L. REV. 789, 791; Laurie L.
Levenson, The Future of State and Federal Civil Rights Prosecutions: The Lessons of
the Rodney King Trial, 41 UCLA L. REV. 509, 511 (1994) (“The Rodney King beating
trials have prompted discussion on a number of issues, including the appropriate
forum in which to pursue criminal prosecutions against police officers for violating
citizens’ constitutional rights. There has been a renewed call for federal prosecutors
to take the lead in these prosecutions.”); Laurie L. Levenson, High-Profile
Prosecutors & High-Profile Conflicts, 39 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 1237, 1255–56 (2006);
Laurie L. Levenson, Police Corruption and New Models for Reform, 35 SUFFOLK U. L.
REV. 1, 22 (2001) (“[P]rosecutors often enjoy too close of a relationship with local
police and are therefore reluctant to turn against those with whom they have
worked.”)).
42 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
to learn this now, learn from my own hand, so that you do not
have to learn at the hand of the white man. His hand was a slap,
but the hand of a white man could mean a coffin if you did not
know your place. But is this act of parental concern one that does
a disservice even if it is motivated by compassion and informed by
a real-world context? We live in a country that has the slim,
vanishing veneer of freedom for Latino and Black people. As
actor Jesse Williams stated in accepting BET’s Humanitarian
Award for his civil-rights activism:
[T]his award—this is not for me. This is for the real
organizers all over the country—the activists, the civil rights
attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the teachers,
the students that are realizing that a system built to divide
and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do. It’s
kind of basic mathematics—the more we learn about who we
are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize. Now,
this is also in particular for the black women . . . who have
spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before
themselves. We can and will do better for you. Now, what
we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that
police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm, and not kill
white people every day. So what’s going to happen is we are
going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or
we will restructure their function and ours. Yesterday would
have been young Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday so I don’t want
to hear anymore about how far we’ve come when paid public
servants can pull a drive-by on [a] 12-year-old playing alone
in the park in broad daylight, killing him on television then
going home to make a sandwich. Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so
much better . . . to live in 2012 than . . . 1612 or 1712. Tell
that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to
Dorian Hunt. Now the thing is, though, all of us in here
getting money—that alone isn’t gonna stop this. Alright, now
dedicating our lives . . . to getting money just to give it right
back for someone’s brand on our body when we spent
centuries praying with brands on our bodies, and now we
pray to get paid for brands on our bodies. There has been no
war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of.
There has been no job we haven’t done. There is no tax they
haven’t levied against us—and we’ve paid all of them. But
freedom is somehow always conditional here. “You’re free,”
they keep telling us, but she would have been alive if she
hadn’t acted so . . . free. Freedom is always coming in the
hereafter, but you know what, though, the hereafter is a
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 43
hustle. We want it now. And let’s get a couple things
straight, just a little sidenote—the burden of the brutalized is
not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, alright—
stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance,
for our resistance, then you better have an established record
of critique of our oppression . . . . We’ve been floating this
country on credit for centuries, and we’re done watching and
waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and
abuses us, burying black [and Latino] people out of sight and
out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our
entertainment like oil—black gold, ghettoizing and
demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our
genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding
our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is . . . just
because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.37
7. CRIMINALIZING OUR YOUTH:
SROS & POLICING IN SCHOOLS
The words ring true for people of color across America and it
is indeed correct to note that now is the time to mobilize political
support for the kind of reforms proposed herein. Because police
presence and their self-appointed surrogates (such as George
Zimmerman and anti-immigrant militia)38 often exacerbate,
rather than alleviate, racial tensions, time is of the essence. Even
more pressing is the fact that policing conditions more greatly
affect our youth of color as well.
Young people of color bear the burden of oppressive policing
tactics in school. The troubling phenomenon of school resource
37. Jesse Williams, Acceptance Speech at 2016 BET Awards (June 26, 2016),
quoted in Megan Lasher, Read the Full Transcript of Jesse Williams’ Powerful
Speech on Race at the BET Awards, Entertainment: Awards, TIME (June 27,
2016), http://www.time.com/4383516/jesse-williams-bet-speech-transcript/.
38. See, e.g., Tim Murphy, The Meltdown of the Anti-Immigration Minuteman
Militia: Why the Self-Appointed Border Patrollers Are Nowhere to Be Seen, MOTHER
JONES (Aug. 4, 2014, 5:00 AM) (quoting Chris Davis, a “Texas-based militia
commander”), http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/minuteman-movement-
border-crisis-simcox; Adam Weinsten et al., The Trayvon Martin Killing, Explained:
The Latest on How a Teenager Armed with Skittles and Iced Tea Got Gunned Down
by an Overeager Neighborhood Watch Captain, MOTHER JONES (Mar. 18, 2012, 12:42
PM), http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/what-happened-trayvon-martin-
explained (“Trayvon Martin—an unarmed 17-year-old African American student—
was confronted, shot, and killed near his home by George Zimmerman, a
neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida . . . [T]he case has drawn national
outcry and sparked hot debate over racial tensions, vigilantism, police practices, and
gun laws.”).
44 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
officers (SROs) that are heavily populated in urban-minority
schools is quixotic when one considers the incidents at majority-
white suburban schools like Columbine and Sandy Hook.39 Even
the statistics coming out of the Bureau of Justice acknowledge
that, while students of color disproportionately feel threatened at
school, “White students are more likely to report having access to
a loaded gun” than all other students.40 Most communities of
color are keenly aware of this fact (as would be anyone who
watches the news), so the question of being suspect as a racial
minority with a heavy law-enforcement presence already looms
larger than it ever should in the mind of teens of color. This
reality permeates the mind, attitude, culture, and very essence
for students of color who have to navigate the difficulties of
adolescence and racial identity.
There is the tension one must modulate, between acting hard
as a means of survival among peers and falling prey to racial
profiling and harassment. The latter often occurs as the result of
being perceived to be a threat by SROs. Consequently, the fear of
arrest, juvenile court, and the criminal justice system are often
not far behind. Will SROs reinforce the radicalized space of Black
males for instance, treating them always as a threat that must be
checked? Will Black and Latino male students in a
predominately-minority school be forced to act White, for fear
that the failure to do so might result in targeting through racial
profiling by the SRO?
Even still, it is not clear in every instance that the
performance of racial-identity work, even if possible, could have
made any difference in some of the long list of victims previously
mentioned. After all, an officer confusing a gun for his own
taser, or mistaking an unarmed man’s pill bottle as a gun, does
not bode well for the dubious argument that racial identity can be
39. See Richard Florida, Gun Violence Is an Everywhere Issue: Americans Can
No Longer Pretend that Shooting Deaths Are a Problem Relegated to the Inner
City, ATLANTIC: CITYLAB (Dec. 15, 2012) (citations omitted), http://www.citylab.
com/politics/2012/12/gun-violence-everywhere-issue/4176/ (“[M]ore than 80
percent of America’s 21 worst mass killings . . . took place in suburban towns or
rural areas, including each and every one of . . . the five ‘worst school massacres
in U.S. history.’ More than two-thirds of the 61 mass shootings that occurred
between 1982 and 2012 . . . can also be traced to a suburban or rural location.”).
40. SARAH E. REDFIELD & JASON P. NANCE, AM. BAR. ASS’N, SCHOOL-TO-PRISON
PIPELINE: PRELIMINARY REPORT 33 & n.167 (2016) (citing SIMONE ROBERS ET AL.,
BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, INDICATORS OF SCHOOL CRIME AND SAFETY: 2012, at
154 tbl.14.4 (2013) (showing the percentage of students ages 12–18 who reported
having access to a loaded gun in 2007, 2009, and 2011)).
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 45
effectively navigated to foreclose violent racially predicated
conflict. Simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time with
the wrong skin hue is an operative factor in these tragedies and it
raises a deeply troubling, but important, revelation.
It would seem no amount of covering, reverse covering, or
racial-identity-performance work will completely stop these
tragedies from occurring. Already, national headlines are made
about the excessive use of force and tragedies involving students
of color and SROs.41 The hyper-criminalized context of public
schools in minority neighborhoods that may serve as a major
feeder to alternative schools, jails, and the juvenile-justice system
we know as the school-to-prison pipeline cannot be
underestimated.42 One commentator illustrated the devastating
impact of the school-to-prison pipeline:
Two million children are sent to juvenile detention every
year;
70% of students involved in in-school arrests or referred to
law enforcement are Black or Latino;
State prisons add inmates at a rate three times faster
than our nation adds people;
60,000 Americans 18 and younger are living in detention
facilities each year at a cost of $88,000 per year;
75% of juveniles in detention are for non-violent offenses;
66% of those detained never return to school;
By a 5 to 1 margin there are more youths incarcerated
in the United States than any other nation.43
41. See, e.g., Press Release, Univ. of Tex. Sch. of Law, Three Students File
Lawsuit Alleging Excessive Use of Force by Abilene ISD School Resource Officer
(Apr. 28, 2016), https://law.utexas.edu/clinics/2016/04/28/lawsuit-force-against-
schoolchildren/ (“Three schoolchildren, through their parents, filed a lawsuit in
federal court . . . alleging that a [SRO] . . . violently assaulted them on three
separate occasions without justification, while they were attending school . . . . [by]
us[ing] a ‘pain compliance’ maneuver called an arm-bar against a six-year-old
kindergarten student, a chokehold against a twelve-year-old student, and repeatedly
slam[ming] a fifteen-year-old student against the wall and to the ground.”).
42. See School to Prison Pipeline Must Be Dismantled, Stakeholders Tell ABA,
ABA News Archives, A.B.A. (Feb. 7, 2015, 9:59 AM) (citations omitted),
http://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2015/02/school-to-
prisonpip.html.
43. Id.
46 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
In the tragic aftermath of school shootings at Columbine and
Sandy Hook Elementary School, “The use of in-school police
known as SROs has been on the rise with no sign of stopping.”44
Approximately $150 million in grants was awarded to states to
hire new law enforcement officers and fill SRO vacancies in
school districts through President Obama’s Community Oriented
Policing Services (COPS) Office for the COPS Hiring Program
(CHP).45 While the nation’s public schools become browner in
demographics, the dearth of research on the program’s efficacy
and its effect on educational outcomes should give us pause,
especially given the significant investment of federal and state
dollars.
Simply placing law enforcement in schools of color without
proper culturally- and racially-sensitive training, or without
changing the paradigm of racial bias in the law enforcement
community spells a recipe for tragic disasters we have seen time
and time again. If police could mistake a black wallet for a gun in
a building vestibule in deciding to exercise lethal force with forty-
one shots, why should we not conclude that the same might
happen to a student using a black cell phone in the school
cafeteria?
One can see then that this is not merely a remote,
hypothetical concern. Oklahoma County, and other jurisdictions,
hire correctional officers to fill SRO positions in schools.46 It is no
easy feat to mediate between this world of SROs and that of
honors teachers’ expectations, where appearing “hard” can also
inflict social costs upon cultivating relationships with those
teachers that might be necessary for college recommendations. It
44. One can find a significant increase in the number of SROs on the nation’s
public-school campuses. See AMANDA PETTERUTI, JUSTICE POLICY INST.,
EDUCATION UNDER ARREST: THE CASE AGAINST POLICE IN SCHOOLS 1 (2011)
(citations omitted), http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/
educationunderarrest_fullreport.pdf (“According to the [DOJ], the number of [SROs]
increased 38 percent between 1997 and 2007. Some cities, like New York City,
employ more officers in schools than many small cities’ entire police force.”).
45. See Jason P. Nance, Students, Police, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline, 93
WASH. U. L. REV. 919, 952 & n.161 (2016) (citing THE WHITE HOUSE, NOW IS THE
TIME: THE PRESIDENT’S PLAN TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN AND OUR COMMUNITIES BY
REDUCING GUN VIOLENCE 11 (2013), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/
default/files/docs/wh_now_is_the_time_full.pdf (“COPS Hiring Grants, which help
police departments hire officers, can already be used by departments to fund [SROs].
[Also, t]he Administration is proposing a new Comprehensive School Safety Program,
which will . . . . give $150 million to school districts and law enforcement agencies to
hire [SROs], school psychologists, social workers, and counselors.”)).
46. See PETTERUTI, supra note 44, at 2.
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 47
seems reformers, policymakers, scholars, and lawyers have little
practical idea about what our youth must actually negotiate to
survive, if not thrive, in the public school context.
8. POLICE BIAS & RACIAL IDENTITY
It would seem that our police and criminal justice system
have been reduced to stayed doctrines with inadequate
recognition of the racial bias that has permeated it. For instance,
one night after leaving my parked car in Baldwin, New York, I
was in the process of closing my door when I felt it rip away from
my hands and saw it summersault into the air. Glass shards
scoured my arm and legs. I was within an inch of my life being
snuffed out by a young, white, intoxicated woman named
Stephanie. When she finally stopped and got out of her car, she
asked, “What are we going to do?” No apologies, no realization
that I was almost killed. I was stunned, yet I had composed
myself to draw up an answer, “We need to call a police officer.”
She immediately started dumping Budweiser cans into the
garbage can.
With no police officer on site and no cell-phone cameras at
the time to document the incriminating evidence and behavior, I
was disadvantaged. But exactly how much of that disadvantage
was due to my being a person of color did not become apparent
until the cop arrived. Having told the officer what I just
witnessed, he blew me off. In light of what I saw, I told him the
fact that this woman just blew my door off a parked car on an
isolated street at 1:30 a.m. by coming too close to the right side of
the road should be evidence that her judgment was impaired and
seriously off.
I kindly asked the officer to give her a breathalyzer to which
he responded, “Shut the fuck up you dirty spic, (a derogatory
term reserved for Hispanics). Don’t tell me how to do my job,
you’ve been watching too much Law and Order!” To this officer, I
was not Black or biracial but rather viewed as another Hispanic
on the street. Until that time, I had not heard that derogatory
term used outside of my school playground, let alone from an
officer, but it summed it all up. To this officer, at that moment,
even though I was the victim; even though I was the one who had
not been drinking; even though I was the one who was almost
killed; and even though I was a well-groomed young man, who
had a bright future at Columbia ahead of him, I was seen as the
pariah. My face was all the confirmation he needed to see to
48 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
conclude I was nothing more than a dirty spic in this social and
political context that was not of my making. I was not myself,
but an interpretation imposed upon me by ignorance.
As one commentator has noted:
[R]ace must be understood as a sui generis social
phenomenon in which contested systems of meaning serve as
the connections between physical features, races, and
personal characteristics. In other words, social meanings
connect our faces to our souls. Race is neither an essence nor
an illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-
reinforcing process subject to the macro forces of social and
political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions.47
We often entertain the fantasy that we are a colorblind
society and by extension that rationale would apply to our
criminal justice and policing practices. But that is indeed a
fantasy. We see race, even if we do not acknowledge it or are
unconscious of it, as implicit biases.48 We all see race and
ethnicity. Those supposedly colorblind individuals see race the
same as the actual colorblind, and even the blind see one’s color
in terms of race.49 Even our government sees and classifies us in
terms of race. Society has taken its cue from the politically
constructed and legally imposed racial categories. American
constitutional law justifies granting heightened protection
against discrimination to certain classes of individuals based on
historical discrimination of that class.50 Yet, the law’s
47. Ian F. Haney López, The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations
on Illusion, Fabrication and Choice, 29 HARV. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 1, 7 (1994).
48. See PAMELA M. CASEY ET AL., NAT’L CTR. FOR STATE COURTS, HELPING
COURTS ADDRESS IMPLICIT BIAS: RESOURCES FOR EDUCATION app. B, at B-2
(2012), http://www.ncsc.org/~/media/Files/PDF/Topics/Gender%20and%20Racial%20
Fairness/IB_report_033012.ashx (“Unlike explicit bias (which reflects the attitudes or
beliefs that one endorses at a conscious level), implicit bias is the bias in judgment
and/or behavior that results from subtle cognitive processes (e.g., implicit attitudes
and implicit stereotypes) that often operate at a level below conscious awareness and
without intentional control.”) (emphasis in original).
49. See OSAGIE K. OBASOGIE, BLINDED BY SIGHT: SEEING RACE THROUGH THE
EYES OF THE BLIND 60 (2014) (“Put simply, race is understood and experienced
by blind people as it is by those who are sighted: visually.”). Professor Obasogie
started his research, the full extent of which is published in his book, by
interviewing 110 individuals who were born blind. See id. at 3. The professor
mentioned that some of the individuals he interviewed took offense at the notion
that sighted people think blind people are unaware of race, and that not being aware
of race somehow made blind people morally superior. See id. at 58, 63.
50. See Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 360–61 (1978) (quoting
Weber v. Aetna Cas. & Sur. Co., 406 U.S. 164, 175 (1972)) (plurality opinion)
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 49
classification of race as an immutable characteristic to justify
heightened scrutiny seems to contradict our understanding of
race as a primarily social construct.51
The law has yet to harmonize this contradiction within our
society. This leaves us with a persistent dilemma—how can we
move to a society of racial equality while perpetuating race
recognition? The role of colorblindness has been a fantasy in
American law and society as a panacea for solving all racial
difficulties.52 But as courts and commentators have long
recognized, when the law has excluded others based on their race,
the law then has a duty to ensure it rectifies those wrongs to
those races excluded, whether it is a court order for desegregation
or classroom diversity.53 Race as a prevailing social construct in
(“[R]ace, like gender and illegitimacy . . . is an immutable characteristic which its
possessors are powerless to escape or set aside. While a classification is not per se
invalid because it divides classes on the basis of an immutable characteristic . . . it is
nevertheless true that such divisions are contrary to our deep belief that legal
burdens should bear some relationship to individual responsibility or wrongdoing.”);
Loving v. Virginia, 381 U.S. 1, 11 (1967) (quoting Korematsu v. United States, 323
U.S. 214, 216 (1944); Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81, 100 (1943)) (“Over
the years, this Court has consistently repudiated ‘(d)istinctions between citizens
solely because of their ancestry’ as being ‘odious to a free people whose institutions
are founded upon the doctrine of equality . . . . At the very least, the Equal Protection
Clause demands that racial classifications . . . be subjected to the ‘most rigid
scrutiny’ . . . , and, if they are ever to be upheld, they must be shown to be necessary
to the accomplishment of some permissible state objective, independent of the racial
discrimination which it was the object of the Fourteenth Amendment to eliminate.”).
51. Compare Bakke, 438 U.S. at 360–61, with Megan Gannon, Race Is a Social
Construct, Scientists Argue: Racial Categories Are Weak Proxies for Genetic Diversity
and Need to Be Phased Out, SCI. AM. (Feb. 5, 2016),
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/
(“Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct
without biological meaning . . . . [M]odern genetics research is operating in a
paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human
genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly
defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between
ancestry and genetics . . . .”), and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Opinion, Race and Racial
Identity Are Social Constructs, N.Y. TIMES: ROOM FOR DEBATE (Sept. 6, 2016, 5:28
PM), http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-is-racial-identity/
race-and-racial-identity-are-social-constructs (“Race is not biological. It is a social
construct.”).
52. See E. Christi Cunningham, The “Racing” Cause of Action and the Identity
Formerly Known as Race: The Road to Tamazunchale, 30 RUTGERS L.J. 707, 727–
29 (1999) (citations omitted); Reginald Leamon Robinson, “Expert” Knowledge:
Introductory Comments on Race Consciousness, 20 B.C. THIRD WORLD L.J. 145,
160–63 (2000) (citations omitted).
53. See, e.g., Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563, 568 (1974) (citations omitted) (“It
seems obvious that the Chinese-speaking minority receive fewer benefits than the
English-speaking majority from respondents’ school system . . . . ‘Where inability to
50 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
our society is a necessary context for there to be true
accountability in rectifying the racial academic-achievement
gap.54 Race exists because race persists.
I have come to understand that race is neither hereditary
nor an inheritance that is passed down.55 How could it be? Both
speak and understand the English language excludes national origin-minority group
children from effective participation in the educational program offered by a school
district, the district must take affirmative steps to rectify the language deficiency in
order to open its instructional program to these students.’”), abrogated by Bakke, 438
U.S. 265; Keyes v. Sch. Dist. No. 1, Denver, Colo., 413 U.S. 189, 213–14 (1973)
(citations omitted) (“[R]espondent School Board having been found to have practiced
deliberate racial segregation in schools attended by over one-third of the Negro
school population, that crucial finding establishes a prima facie case of intentional
segregation in the core city schools . . . . If respondent Board fails to rebut
petitioners’ prima facie case [on remand], the District Court must . . . decree all-out
desegregation of the core city schools.”); see generally Swann v. Charlotte-
Mecklenburg Bd. of Educ., 402 U.S. 1 (1971); Brown v. Bd. of Educ. of Topeka,
Kan., 349 U.S. 294 (1955); Brown v. Bd. of Educ. of Topeka, Shawnee Cty., Kan.,
347 U.S. 483 (1954); see also ROBERT MAYNARD HUTCHINS, THE HIGHER
LEARNING IN AMERICA 18 (Transaction Publishers ed. 1995) (1936) (“Our notion
of democracy leads us to the view that everybody is entitled to the same amount
and to the same kind of education.”); Sylvia Hurtado, Linking Diversity and
Educational Purpose: How Diversity Affects the Classroom Environment and
Student Development, in DIVERSITY CHALLENGED: EVIDENCE ON THE IMPACT OF
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION 187, 187 (Gary Orfield & Michal Kurlaender eds., 2001),
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED456199.pdf (“[In] 2010, one out of every three
Americans [was] Latino, African American, Asian American, or Native
American . . . . This demographic shift suggests that the role of higher education
will remain essential in training a work force that can both economically sustain
communities and forge relationships across the diverse populations that make up
American society. Educating a diverse student body remains central to this
educational purpose.”).
54. See George W. Bush, President, U.S., Remarks at the National Institute of
Health: President Bush Discusses No Child Left Behind & “Reading First” (May
12, 2004) (transcript available at https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
news/releases/2004/05/20040512-8.html) (“[A]s part of the new accountability
system, the No Child Left Behind Act, we break out based upon race. It’s really
essential we do that. It’s really important. If you don’t do that, you’re likely to
leave people behind. And that’s not right. There’s . . . an achievement gap in
America that will be closed. It must be closed, and will be closed. It won’t be
closed unless you’re honest about the achievement gap, unless you’re able to see
clearly who needs help . . . .”); George W. Bush, President, U.S., Remarks at
Hyde Park Elementary: President Bush Discusses the “No Child Left Behind
Act” in Florida (Sept. 9, 2003) (transcript available at https://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/09/20030909-3.html) (“[W]e want to
know whether or not Hispanic students are learning, whether or not the African
American students are learning. We want to know if every child is
learning . . . .”).
55. See, e.g., López, supra note 47, at 38 (“Race is not hereditary; our parents do
not impart to us our race. Instead, society attaches specific significance to our
ancestry and appearance, and in that system of meanings lie the origins of our
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 51
of my brothers identify themselves quite differently, with one
asserting his white identity and the other claiming both aspects
of his biracial identity, even though we all grew up in the same
household. In contrast to an essentialist outlook, which “assumes
that the experience of being a member of the group . . . is a stable
one, one with a clear meaning, a meaning constant through time,
space, and different historical, social, political, and personal
contexts,”56 my context was fluid and evolving.
9. POLICING RACIAL IDENTITY IN THE LAW
As historian Barbara Fields once wrote, “[I]f race lives on
today, it does not live on because we have inherited it from our
forebears of the seventeenth century or eighteenth or nineteenth,
but because we continue to create it today.”57 As the foregoing
discussion has shown, our law and policing practices enforce
segregated racial spaces between communities. But this is not
all. As this section explains, we are seeing the regulation of
racial identity and the use of racial classifications, not only in the
courts to undermine racial equality, but also in policing practices
and prosecutions within the criminal justice system.
While recognition of the impact of race is important on the
one hand, enforcing monoracial categories of identity in
contradiction to the reality in our society is a different matter,
particularly when those classifications are used for nefarious
purposes. This is significant, because—as previously noted—this
may also lead to the underreporting of police violence in Latino
and Black communities or those which are comprised of both. It
is ironic that some of the courts, including the U.S. Supreme
Court, frown upon the use of race to provide remedies to
discrimination in education, but it seems perfectly fine to take
race into account explicitly when it comes to identifying and
tracking people in the U.S. and in our criminal justice system.
Today we can see racial segregation in prisons as a remedy to
gang presence in prisons,58 and the racial assignment of police
race.”).
56. Trina Grillo, Anti-Essentialism and Intersectionality: Tools to Dismantle
the Master’s House, 10 BERKELEY WOMEN’S L.J. 16, 19 (1995).
57. Barbara J. Fields, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of
America, VERSOBOOKS.COM (July 8, 2016), http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/27
63-slavery-race-and-ideology-in-the-united-states-of-america.
58. See Bob Walsh, The California Crisis: Why Racial Segregation in Prisons Isn’t
About Race, CORRECTIONSONE.COM (Aug 26, 2014), https://www.correctionsone.com/
officer-safety/articles/7497711-Why-racial-segregation-in-prisons-isnt-about-race/.
52 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
officers based on neighborhood racial demographics, even though
there appears to be little empirical support for the belief of better
policing of Black communities by Black officers.59 One study
found that, “In general, White officers . . . were more likely to
arrest suspects than Black officers, but Black suspects were more
likely to be arrested when the decision maker was a Black
officer.”60 These policing practices that rest on racial
classifications simply mirror what our legal system enforces in
terms of racial identity and classification.
Indeed, the federal government has used census data not
only for recording, counting, and reporting, but also for nefarious
purposes such as locating, and rounding up, Japanese-Americans
for internment during World War II.61 The legislative use of
racial categories is rampant in the law. One need only look at
federal affirmative-action plans, state-redistricting plans,
assistance to minority businesses in low-income areas,
enforcement of federal antidiscrimination statutes, education
grants, public health programs, mortgage lending, low-income-
housing tax credits, voting rights, Equal Credit Opportunity Act
enforcement, employment rights, food stamp and veteran-benefit
apportionment, and monitoring and enforcement of desegregation
plans in public schools. The same monoracial classifications also
apply in family law regarding adoptions and custody
determinations.62
59. Robert A. Brown & James Frank, Race and Officer Decision Making:
Examining Differences in Arrest Outcomes Between Black and White Officers, 23
JUST. Q. 96, 96 (2006), http://www.uncfsu.edu/Documents/Criminal-Justice/
Brown2.pdf.
60. Id.
61. See Haya El Nasser, Papers Show Census Role in WWII Camps, USA TODAY:
NATION (Mar. 30, 2007, 1:33 AM), http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-
03-30-census-role_N.htm; JR Minkel, Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave up
Names of Japanese-Americans in WW II—Government Documents Show that the
Agency Handed over Names and Addresses to the Secret Service, SCI. AM. (Mar. 30,
2007), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/.
62. See Julie C. Lythcott-Haims, Note, Where Do Mixed Babies Belong? Racial
Classification in America and its Implications for Transracial Adoption, 29
HARV. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 531, 531–32 (1994) (citations omitted) (“The transracial
adoption debate in this country centers around the controversial practice of ‘race-
matching,’ whereby adoptable children wait in foster homes or institutions,
sometimes for years, until parents of the same race as the child can be found . . . .
[R]ace matching cannot work . . . because millions of children are born not merely of
one race. Instead, they comprise two, three, or more races and ethnicities. As such,
they do not fit neatly into one category.”) (emphasis in original); see also DeWees v.
Stevenson, 779 F. Supp. 25, 26, 28–29 (E.D. Pa. 1991) (upholding denial of white
foster parents’ petition to adopt biracial child because parents believed race had
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 53
In this regard, it seems not much has changed since the
nineteenth-century’s system of determining race by a census
taker’s “visual inspection.”63 Although self-identification has
transplanted the old fashioned census taker’s observations for
recording race based on phenotype,64 there nonetheless remains
no impact in developing the child’s identity and, thus, they had not demonstrated
the “particular sensitivity, awareness and skills . . . necessary for a successful
trans-racial adoption of a young child,” and further noting that, “[i]n making
adoption decisions, state agencies cannot ignore the realities of the society in
which children entrusted to them for placement will be raised, or the affect [sic]
on children of those realities as documented by professional studies”); In re
R.M.G. & E.M.G, 454 A.2d 776, 791–93 (D.C. 1982) (discussing relevant
considerations for determining suitability of child’s adoptive parents, such as
exposure to child’s race, noting that race is relevant to identity formation, and,
therefore, suggested that the same-race parent was probably more suitable); In
re L.L., 459 N.W.2d 489, 496–97 (Iowa 1990) (upholding termination of black
father’s parental rights to his biracial child, and placing child with white foster
parents, noting that “the foster parents are . . . sensitive to this issue. They live
in a racially mixed neighborhood, and L.L. will attend a racially mixed school”).
63. See Christine B. Hickman, The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial
Categories, African Americans, and the U.S. Census, 95 MICH. L. REV. 1161, 1186
(1997) (citations omitted) (“By 1890, the [census] enumerators were instructed to
categorize . . . among different artificially constructed categories of Black . . . .
‘The word ‘black’ [was] used to describe those persons who ha[d] three-fourths or
more of black blood; ‘mulatto,’ those persons who ha[d] three-eighths to five-
eighths black blood; ‘quadroon,’ those persons who ha[d] one-fourth black blood;
and ‘octoroon,’ those persons who ha[d] one-eighth or any trace of black blood.’
The enumerators were instructed to become, in effect, clairvoyant gene
counters.”); see also Kenneth E. Payson, Comment, Check One Box: Reconsidering
Directive No. 15 and the Classification of Mixed-Race People, 84 CAL. L. REV.
1233, 1252 (1996) (citations omitted); Naomi Zack, American Mixed Race: The
U.S. 2000 Census and Related Issues, 17 HARV. BLACKLETTER L.J. 33, 34 (2001)
(“Racial categorization first appeared in the 1850 census, when under the general
group of free persons, whites were not counted by race under ‘Color’ and mulattos
were counted separately from blacks.”). The 1850 revision itself relied on census
takers’ perceptions of race as black, white, or mulatto according to physical
appearance. See Lisa Pomeroy, Comment, Restructuring Statistical Policy
Directive No. 15: Controversy over Race Categorization and the 2000 Census, 32
U. TOL. L. REV. 67, 71 (2000) (citations omitted) (“The 1850 revisions proclaimed
that a respondent’s appearance would be used to determine blood quantum
levels.”).
64. See Pomeroy, supra note 63, at 68 & n.15 (citing Revisions to the
Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity, 62 Fed.
Reg. 58782, 58785 (Oct. 30, 1997) [hereinafter Revisions]) (“[T]he Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) revised the classification standards for the 2000
Census. The OMB’s revisions specifically state that a census participant’s racial
selection is to be based on individual choice, and . . . . [that] the One Drop Rule is
no longer used by the U.S. Census Bureau for racial classification, unless a
census participant chooses the rule as a guideline for self-identification.”); Zack,
supra note 63, at 36 (“In question nine, the phrase ‘considers himself/herself to
be’ clearly bases racial categorization on self-identification.”).
54 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
significant discretion with the census to define one’s race.65
Through its Office of Management and Budget, the federal
government issued Directive No. 15 in 1977, to standardize “race”
in the public and private sectors.66 While the Census Bureau has
since revised its race categories, this standardized method is still
in use and continues to define racial identity.67
Unlike President Obama’s proclamation at a Howard
University commencement speech that there is no one way to
identify one’s race or ethnicity, it would seem that the federal
government would rather define race in narrow, straightjacket
terms than allow individuals to define themselves.68 Census
statistics that employ these racial categories help organize,
define, and perpetuate how people develop their racial identity
and its relation to others.69 Similar to the ways that the
assignment of police, and policing practices in communities and
prisons perpetuate racial classifications, the U.S. Census Bureau
65. See Tanya Katerí Hernández, The Interests and Rights of the Interracial
Family in a “Multiracial” Racial Classification, 36 BRANDEIS J. FAM. L. 29, 30
(1998) (citations omitted) (“The public dissemination of census data invites
battles over how human beings will be known. One census battle that has been
at the forefront of the public debate is the demand for a ‘multiracial’
category . . . . The stated aim of [which] is to obtain a more specific census count
of the number of mixed-race persons in the [U.S.]. Yet, the recent governmental
recommendation to count mixed-race persons, by authorizing for the first time
the checking of more than one racial category, is viewed as unacceptable to
Multiracial Category Movement (MCM) spokespersons, because of the absence of
an actual multiracial category. Thus, an OMB decision to permit multiple box
checking as a mechanism for counting mixed-race persons will not terminate the
MCM census battle.”).
66. See Directive No. 15, Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics
and Administrative Reporting (May 12, 1977) [hereinafter Directive No. 15],
reprinted in Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and
Ethnicity, 59 Fed. Reg. 29831, 29834 app. (June 9, 1994) [hereinafter 1994
Standards] (“This Directive provides standard classifications for recordkeeping,
collection, and presentation of data on race and ethnicity in Federal program
administrative reporting and statistical activities.”).
67. See Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on
Race and Ethnicity, 81 Fed. Reg. 67398, 67398 (Sept. 30, 2016); see also Revisions,
supra note 64, at 58782; 1994 Standards, supra note 66, at 29832–34.
68. See Directive No. 15, supra note 66 (“The basic racial and ethnic
categories . . . are defined as follows: a. American Indian or Alaskan Native . . . .
b. Asian or Pacific Islander . . . . c. Black . . . . d. Hispanic . . . . [and] e.
White . . . . .”) (emphasis in original).
69. See Naomi Mezey, Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the
National Imagination, 97 NW. U. L. REV. 1701, 1710 (2003) (“[T]he census . . .
helped define and popularize the categories by which Americans would assess
and judge both the emerging nation and themselves.”).
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 55
tracks, categorizes, and helps to perpetuate race as well.70
Compounding the problem is that for far too long multiracial
classification has been plagued with inaccuracy as our society is
increasingly diverse and multiracial. As noted earlier, this could
lead to underreporting of crimes against Latino and other mixed
individuals. This inaccuracy dates at least as far back as the
seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries in the upper South.71
In an effort to discourage interracial mating and with the
increasing need to link free mulattoes with enslaved mulattoes
and Blacks, laws were designed to preserve “White privilege,” and
thus the one-drop rule was born. The lower south, however,
opted to treat mulattoes as a distinct third racial class, above
Blacks.72 Perhaps in an attempt to address this historical
inaccuracy, the 2000 Census now permits the identification of one
or more races as an indication of racial identity.73 Nonetheless,
race is part of our government operations when it comes to
tracking and classifying people of color or forcing them to choose
categories it imposes that are anything but colorblind. Both the
courts and Congress police racial identity and classification much
in the same way law enforcement officers police communities and
prisons based on these racial categories. In short, our laws,
criminal justice system, and society are anything but colorblind.
Yet, when it comes to helping to eliminate the legacy of
racism, there is another story entirely. Presumably, the
collection of racial data is supposed to help us allocate resources
and measure effectiveness of outreach programs, and can be used
to determine if racial profiling or adverse effects are resulting
from a given policy. Such racial classifications can help
70. See HEATHER M. DALMAGE, TRIPPING ON THE COLOR LINE: BLACK–WHITE
MULTIRACIAL FAMILIES IN A RACIALLY DIVIDED WORLD 143 (2000) (“As the U.S.
Census Bureau tracks individuals according [to] race, it creates race.”).
71. See Hickman, supra note 63, at 1186–87 (citations omitted) (“Even the Census
Bureau admitted that the data collected under the [visual-perception] method was ‘of
little value,’ and, with an almost audible sigh of relief, . . . stated that the data was
especially misleading ‘as an indication of the extent to which the races have
mingled.’”); see also Payson, supra note 63 (citations omitted) (“From 1790 to 1840,
the census distinguished only White and Negro. In 1850, Negro was divided into
Mulatto and Black. In 1860, Indian and Chinese categories were added, with
Japanese added in 1870.”).
72. See Payson, supra note 63 (citations omitted).
73. Zack, supra note 63, at 35 (citations omitted) (“During the early 1990s,
advocates for the federal recognition of mixed race identities succeeded to the extent
that the ‘check only one box’ rule for race was rescinded in the Census 2000. This
appeared to be the beginning of official recognition of mixed race in the United
States.”).
56 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
determine whether special-language ballots are needed in a
certain voting district, how much block-grant funding should be
granted to minority schools, or whether agricultural subsidies or
USDA loan and assistance programs disproportionately
discriminate against Black farmers. Indeed, collecting data based
on racial categories could be a powerful tool to identify and prove
systematic racism wherever it occurs. It can also be used to
determine whether there is impermissible racial profiling by
police.
Nevertheless, our courts have often turned a blind eye to
systematic racism or institutionalized discrimination in favor of
an impossibly-heightened bar where one must find a discernible
smoking gun of intentional discriminatory purpose in the mind of
the policymaker for legal redress to be possible. This is known as
the “intent doctrine” of Washington v. Davis.74 There, the Court
noted that, in addition to proving a discriminatory effect, a
plaintiff must prove discriminatory motive on the state actor’s
part to receive redress under the Constitution.75 So, the lesson is:
any policy actor wishing to hide their discriminatory purpose
could simply refuse to memorialize the reasons for their decision
in any writing that could be remotely interpreted as
discriminatory. This lesson seems to have been learned all too
well by prosecutors who use peremptory strikes to eliminate
minority jurors for any reason besides race that can constitute
cause without running afoul of the 14th Amendment’s equal
protection clause or Batson v. Kentucky.76 But even this
presupposes that the racial pretext for juror dismissal is
intentional racism when, in fact, the same result could obtain
when there is unconscious racial bias.77 In one study, for
74. 426 U.S. 229 (1976).
75. See id. at 239, 246 (“[While i]t is . . . true that the Due Process Clause of the
Fifth Amendment contains an equal protection component prohibiting the [U.S.]
from invidiously discriminating between individuals or groups . . . . [,] our cases have
not embraced the proposition that a law or other official act, without regard to
whether it reflects a racially discriminatory purpose, is unconstitutional solely
because it has a racially disproportionate impact . . . . Nor on the facts of the case
before us would the disproportionate impact of Test 21 warrant the conclusion that it
is a purposeful device to discriminate against Negroes and hence an infringement of
the[ir] constitutional rights . . . .”) (emphasis in original).
76. 476 U.S. 79 (1986). In a 7–2 decision, the Court held that the state is not
permitted to use its peremptory challenges to automatically exclude potential
members of the jury because of their race. See id. at 81, 97–98.
77. See Jennifer K. Robbennolt & Matthew Taskin, Judicial Notebook: Jury
Selection, Peremptory Challenges and Discrimination, MONITOR ON PSYCHOL., Jan.
2009, at 18, http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/jn.aspx (citations omitted).
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 57
instance, juror race influenced attorney and lay participants’
peremptory strikes even though few participants mentioned race
as a factor, which is consistent with “the psychology of social
judgment, social desirability and unconscious bias.”78 Consider
also Fisher v. Texas.79 There, the Court allowed the use of race,
presumably because it had in actuality little effect.80
Consequently, race is designed to be, metaphorically speaking,
stuck between a rock and a hard place. That is, if race is too
outcome determinative, it is illegal, yet if race is too minimal in
effect, it can be seen as wholly unnecessary. The Goldilocks bed
of constitutionality rests somewhere in between two extremes.
But is it really two extremes?
Again, the minimal affect race had in Texas’s admission plan
was the principle justification that the Supreme Court used to
uphold it. If it were otherwise, white privilege would be too far
put upon. Perhaps in Fisher, Justice Kennedy, as the once
affirmative action skeptic, realized that Chief Justice Roberts’s
semantically attractive, but practically naïve, argument that
“[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop
discriminating on the basis of race” is rendered meaningless in
the subtle reality of institutionalized racism.81 Instead, our
society would do well to abide by Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s
maxim: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to
speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the
Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of
centuries of racial discrimination.”82 Sotomayor’s maxim is an
important lesson for our criminal justice system where, because
institutional racism pervades, greater transparency and candid
dialogue is needed to address its unfortunate effects.
This law’s hostility to race exists because courts are often
78. Robbennolt & Taskin, supra note 77.
79. 136 S. Ct. 2198 (2016), aff’g 758 F.3d 633 (5th Cir. 2014), on remand from 133
S. Ct. 2411 (2013).
80. Id. at 2212 (citations omitted) (“[P]etitioner argues that considering race was
not necessary because such consideration has had only a ‘“minimal impact” in
advancing the [University’s] compelling interest’ . . . . [But], the record does not
support this assertion[; rather, it] show[s] that consideration of race has had a
meaningful, if still limited, effect on the diversity of the University’s freshman
class.”).
81. See Parents Involved in Cmty. Schs. v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 551 U.S.
701, 748 (2007) (plurality opinion).
82. See Schuette v. Coal. to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration &
Immigration Rights & Fight for Equal. by Any Means Necessary (BAMN), 134 S. Ct.
1623, 1676 (2014) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (plurality opinion).
58 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
admonished to not engage in racial balancing, an impermissible
social engineering they say.83 Yet little do they commit to
initiatives designed to reverse centuries of social engineering
enforced by slavery, the convict-leasing program, Black codes,
sharecropping, Jim Crow, voter intimidation, police killings,
discriminatory testing, tracking, zoning, redlining, restrictive
covenants, segregation plans, mass expulsions, and mass
incarceration. These types of social engineering, which are
enforced by law, are done just to avoid any accountability to
racial justice. These are general societal ills according to
conservative elites, but this stance simply denies the truth that
these ills have been the direct result of an exclusionary monopoly
of white power over the state in criminal penal codes and civil-
rights matters. That is the America in which I live. It is my
home, yet this country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of supposed liberty
will only pretend to accommodate me until I begin to make
substantive demands that threaten the social and economic order
of the racial status quo. Nowhere is this seen more clearly in
recent times than with the rise of the so-called white-nationalist
83. See Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S. 467, 494 (1992) (“Racial balance is not to be
achieved for its own sake. It is to be pursued when racial imbalance has been caused
by a constitutional violation.”); see also City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S.
469, 507 (1989) (plurality opinion) (citing Local 28 of Sheet Metal Workers’ Int’l Ass’n
v. Equal Emp’t Opportunity Comm’n, 478 U.S. 421, 494 (1986) (O’Connor, J.,
concurring in part and dissenting in part) (plurality opinion)); Regents of Univ. of
Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 307 (1978) (plurality opinion). Moreover, the Court in
Grutter v. Bollinger expressly stated that “outright racial balancing” is “patently
unconstitutional.” 539 U.S. 306, 330 (2003) (citing Freeman, 503 U.S. at 494; City of
Richmond, 488 U.S. at 507). Allowing racial balancing as a compelling interest would
“effectively assur[e] that race will always be relevant in American life, and that the
‘ultimate goal’ of ‘eliminat[ing] entirely from governmental decisionmaking such
irrelevant factors as a human being’s race’ . . . will never be achieved.” City of
Richmond, 488 U.S. at 495 (citing Wygant v. Jackson Bd. of Educ., 476 U.S. 267,
319–20 (1986) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (plurality opinion) (“We should not lightly
approve the government’s use of a race-based distinction. History teaches the
obvious dangers of such classifications.”), reh’g denied mem., 478 U.S. 1014). An
interest “linked to nothing other than proportional representation of various
races . . . would support indefinite use of racial classifications, employed first to
obtain the appropriate mixture of racial views and then to ensure that the [program]
continues to reflect that mixture.” Metro Broad., Inc. v. Fed. Commc’ns Comm’n, 497
U.S. 547, 614 (O’Connor, J., dissenting) (citing City of Richmond, 488 U.S. at 507)
(“We cannot deem to be constitutionally adequate an interest that would support
measures that amount to the core constitutional violation of ‘outright racial
balancing.’”), reh’g denied mem., 497 U.S. 1050, and overruled by Adarand
Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200, 226–27 (1995) (quoting City of Richmond,
488 U.S. at 493 (plurality opinion); Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81,
100–01 (1943)).
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 59
alt-right movement in the Trump era.84 This reality, however, is
not the true spirit of diversity. As William Chace once put it:
Diversity . . . is not polite accommodation. Instead, diversity
is, in action, the sometimes painful awareness that other
people, other races, other voices, other habits of mind, have
as much integrity of being, as much claim upon the world, as
you do. No one has an obligation greater than your own to
change, or yield, or to assimilate into the mass . . . . Being
strong in life is being strong amid differences while accepting
the fact that your own self can be a considerable imposition
upon everyone you meet. I urge you to consider your own
oddity before you are troubled or offended by that of others.
And I urge you, amid all the differences present to the eye
and mind, to reach out and create the bonds that will sustain
the commonwealth that will protect us all. We are meant to
be here together.85
10. THERE IS A PLACE & NEED FOR LEGAL REFORM
Today, little is being done to change the status quo. Body
cameras are not worn, police engage in stop and frisk, prosecutors
still fail to turn over exculpatory evidence, unreliable scientific
evidence is used to convict, jury deliberations are subject to bias,
while peremptory challenges leave them more racially
unbalanced, the writ of habeas corpus has been crippled, and
police violence continues.86 Black people may be perceived as a
threat, even if they are not armed, under a white officer’s radical
84. See Jessica Roy, Neo-Nazi ‘Alt-Right’ Crowd Cheers the President-Elect with
‘Hail Trump,’ L.A. TIMES (Nov. 21, 2016, 4:58 PM), http://www.latimes.com/nation/
politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-updates-neo-nazi-alt-right-crowd-cheers-the-14797
74847-htmlstory.html (quoting Richard Spencer, President and Director of the
National Policy Institute) (“A newly released video shows a room full of people doing
the Hitler salute and yelling ‘Hail Trump!’ after listening to a speech about white
nationalism that invokes Nazi terminology . . . . White supremacists have credited
Trump’s win with sparking a new interest in their movement.”).
85. William M. Chace, The Language of Action, WESLEYAN, Fall 1989, at 36,
36.
86. See MICHELLE ALEXANDER, THE NEW JIM CROW: MASS INCARCERATION IN
THE AGE OF COLORBLINDNESS 16–18 (2010); Paul Butler, The System Is Working
the Way It Is Supposed to: Limits of Criminal Justice Reform, 104 GEO. L.J. 1419,
1474 n.366 (2016) (citing Stop-and-Frisk Data, Issues: Racial Justice, N.Y.C.L.
UNION, http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data (last visited Mar. 18,
2017)); WBRZ, supra note 34; see also Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390, 416–17
(1993), reh’g denied mem., 507 U.S. 1001; Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U.S. 72, 87–
88, 88 n.12 (1977) (quoting Fay v. Noia, 372 U.S. 391, 439 & n.44 (1963) )
(discussing the limitations of federal habeas review), reh’g denied mem., 434 U.S.
880), overruling in part Fay, 372 U.S. 391.
60 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
perception of reasonably foreseeable danger.87 While the
problems with the criminal justice system extend beyond the law
to culture, bias, and training, this should not mean there are no
legal reforms that can be addressed. For example, many scholars
now recognize that, despite the broader societal issues, there is a
place for legal redress.88 To this end, the law can still remain a
resourceful tool to curb racial profiling.89 Accordingly, below are
some concrete proposals that should be adopted by Congress to
address the systematic institutional racism that dominates our
criminal justice system. This Act is not intended as a panacea of
all solutions, but it would go far to redress many of the systematic
problems that arise in our criminal justice system.
11. A PROPOSED LEGISLATIVE SOLUTION
A PROPOSED ACT: THE STOP POLICE VIOLENCE &
CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM ACT
BE IT ENACTED:
(1) It shall be the duty of any police or peace officer to use at
all times and to ensure, to the extent practicable under the
circumstances, a proper functioning body camera and, or, dash-
87. See, e.g., Loch v. City of Litchfield, 689 F.3d 961, 966 (8th Cir. 2012)
(quoting Billingsley v. City of Omaha, 277 F.3d 990, 995 (8th Cir. 2002)) (“Even if
a suspect is ultimately ‘found to be unarmed, a police officer can still employ
deadly force if objectively reasonable.’”); Smith v. Freland, 954 F.2d 343, 347 (6th
Cir. 1992) (citing United States v. Sanchez, 914 F.2d 1355 (9th Cir. 1990), cert
denied, 499 U.S. 978 (1991)) (“Even unarmed, [the defendant] was not harmless; a
car can be a deadly weapon . . . . [R]ather than confronting the roadblock, he
could have stopped his car and entered one of the neighboring houses, hoping to
take hostages.”); Reese v. Anderson, 926 F.2d 494, 501 (5th Cir. 1991) (“Also
irrelevant is the fact that [the suspect] was actually unarmed.”).
88. See Rhonda V. Magee Andrews, The Third Reconstruction: An Alternative
to Race Consciousness and Colorblindness in Post-Slavery America, 54 ALA. L.
REV. 483, 502 (2003) (citations omitted); but see Butler, supra note 86, at 1466–
68, 1467 n.328, 1476 & n.381, 1477 & n.384 (citing Anthony E. Cook, Beyond
Critical Legal Studies: The Reconstructive Theology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in
CRITICAL RACE THEORY: THE KEY WRITINGS THAT FORMED THE MOVEMENT 85, 85–
87 (Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. eds., 1995) (citations omitted); Mari J. Matsuda,
Pragmatism Modified and the False Consciousness Problem, 63 S. CAL. L. REV. 1763,
1777 (1990); Allegra M. McLeod, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, 62 UCLA L.
REV. 1156, 1161, 1225–31 (2015); Katharine Q. Seelye, In Heroin Crisis, White
Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs, N.Y. TIMES (Oct. 30, 2015),
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/us/heroin-war-on-drugs-parents.html).
89. See Floyd v. City of N.Y., 959 F. Supp. 2d 540, 667 & n.783 (S.D.N.Y.
2013) (quoting Charles M. Blow, Opinion, The Whole System Failed Trayvon
Martin, N.Y. TIMES: OPINION PAGES (July 15, 2013), http://www.nytimes.com/
2013/07/16/opinion/the-whole-system-failed.html).
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 61
camera unit before engaging in police actions. No officer shall
take any action to intentionally turn off, disable, deactivate,
dislodge, dislocate, or otherwise render useless their camera unit,
to the extent practicable under the circumstances. No officer
shall take any action to intentionally remove, delete, obscure,
block, or to otherwise render useless the probative value of video
footage obtained, or that could have been obtained, from their
body or dash camera unit, to the extent practicable under the
circumstances. Whosoever commits an offense in violation of this
provision or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces, or procures
its commission is punishable in their individual capacities
without regard to qualified or absolute immunity, and shall be
subject to a fine of not less than five thousand dollars ($5,000
USD) nor more than one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000
USD), or by imprisonment in jail not less than three (3) years nor
more than ten (10) years, or by both such fine and imprisonment.
(2) If any police or peace officer violates the foregoing
provision outlined in Section (1) that results in a homicide or
significant disabling injury that imperils or impairs a major life
activity (as defined by 42 U.S. Code § 12102 et seq.) to a person
accosted, apprehended, harassed, or detained by said officer, a
rebuttable presumption hereby arises under the Federal Rules of
Evidence that the officer is culpable under the law. A police
officer shall be entitled to rebut such presumption through proof
beyond a reasonable doubt. Notwithstanding Section (1) above, if
a person that is accosted, apprehended, harassed, or detained by
said officer, expires or sustains a significant disabling injury that
imperils or impairs a major life activity (as defined by 42 U.S.
Code § 12102 et seq.) during or as a result of such police
encounter or while in police custody, a rebuttable presumption
hereby arises under the Federal Rules of Evidence that the officer
is culpable under the law. Criminal and civil vicarious liability,
both jointly and severally, shall attach to the officer and the
police department she or he belongs to in the event that the
officer involved is found guilty in a court of law of having violated
this provision. Whosoever commits an offense in violation of this
provision or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures
its commission is punishable in their individual capacities
without regard to qualified or absolute immunity, and shall be
subject to a fine of not less than one hundred thousand dollars
($100,000 USD) nor more than one hundred million dollars
($100,000,000 USD), or by imprisonment in jail not less than ten
years (10) years nor more than eighty (80) years, or by both such
62 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
fine and imprisonment. As expected, the officer shall not be
entitled to any severance, pension, or any compensation for police
service rendered on the force whatsoever from any third-party
individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal
entity, union, or group of individuals associated in fact, including
police unions, insurance companies, donors, or “super” PAC
entities organized under 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code
et seq. Any such compensation remitted in violation hereunder,
either directly or indirectly, shall be remanded forthwith to the
victims or the estate of said victims of any unauthorized use of
force prohibited under this Act. Furthermore, the police
department shall be subject to the mandatory withholding of any
federal financial assistance for no less than a period of five (5)
years, unless waived or modified by the U.S. Attorney General for
exigent circumstances. In order to ensure remedial correction of
any violation of this provision during this period of federal
financial assistance withholding, the U.S. Department of Justice
shall supervise and retain court jurisdiction over the police
department in order to implement and enforce any consent decree
or resolution agreement entered into in connection herewith. Any
consent decree or resolution that is subject to this provision shall
hereby create or shall be construed to create an express or
implied private right of action for the public to enforce in the
event there is evidence of substantial non-compliance or under-
enforcement of said decree or resolution. Notwithstanding the
foregoing, or in the absence of any consent decree or resolution,
any violation of this provision shall independently create, or shall
be construed to create an express or implied private cause of
action enforceable in Article III courts.
(3) It shall be the duty of a police or peace officer to de-
escalate a confrontation or an encounter, whenever possible, to
the extent practicable under the circumstances. It shall be
unlawful for any police or peace officer to discharge his or her
firearm or employ force designed to inflict serious bodily harm or
death without first employing a department-issued taser to
subdue a suspect, unless actual and imminent deadly force is
threatened to the officer under the circumstances. The
authorized use of taser force shall be reasonably calculated to
preserve human life, for both the suspect and officer. In the
absence of an actual and imminent threat of deadly force, and in
the event an officer fails to employ the use of a taser for a
reasonable period of time calculated to subdue the suspect before
the use of deadly force, a rebuttable presumption hereby arises
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 63
under the Federal Rules of Evidence that the officer is culpable
under the law, unless extenuating circumstances exist. A police
officer shall be entitled to rebut such presumption through proof
beyond a reasonable doubt. In the absence of deadly force or force
that would inflict serious bodily harm that is either used or
threatened against the officer under the circumstances, no officer
shall employ use of excessive force, a taser or deadly weapon for
mere failure to comply with an unlawful order, for a minor
statutory traffic misdemeanor or in the absence of committing a
crime, or a crime not punishable by no less than six-months
imprisonment. Criminal and civil vicarious liability, both jointly
and severally, shall attach to the officer and the police
department that she or he belongs to in the event that the officer
involved is found guilty in a court of law of having violated this
provision. Whosoever commits an offense in violation of this
provision or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces, or procures
its commission is punishable in their individual capacities
without regard to qualified or absolute immunity, and shall be
subject to a fine of not less than one hundred thousand dollars
($100,000 USD) nor more than one hundred million dollars
($100,000,000 USD), or by imprisonment in jail not less than ten
(10) years nor more than eighty (80) years, or by both such fine
and imprisonment. As expected, that officer shall not be entitled
to any severance, pension, or any compensation whatsoever for
service rendered on the police force from any third-party
individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal
entity, union, or group of individuals associated in fact including
police unions, insurance companies, donors, or “super” PAC
entities organized under 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code
et seq. Any such compensation remitted in violation hereunder,
either directly or indirectly, shall be remanded forthwith to the
victims or the estate of said victims of any unauthorized use of
force prohibited under this provision. Furthermore, the police
department shall be subject to the mandatory withholding of any
federal financial assistance for no less than a period of five (5)
years, unless waived or modified by the U.S. Attorney General for
exigent circumstances. In order to ensure remedial correction of
any violation of this provision during this period of federal
financial assistance withholding, the U.S. Department of Justice
shall supervise and retain court jurisdiction over the police
department in order to implement and enforce any consent decree
or resolution agreement entered into in connection herewith. Any
consent decree or resolution that is subject to this provision shall
hereby create or shall be construed to create an express or
64 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
implied private right of action for the public to enforce in the
event there is evidence of substantial non-compliance or under-
enforcement of said decree or resolution. Notwithstanding the
foregoing, or in the absence of any consent decree or resolution,
any violation of this provision shall independently create, or shall
be construed to create an express or implied private cause of
action enforceable in Article III courts.
(4) If any police or peace officer is called to respond to an
incident involving a confrontation or stand off with a person
having a mental disease or defect, or other cognitive disability or
impairment, and knows or has reason to know the person is
suffering from such a condition, the responding officer must cease
and desist all police action in forbearance, and in favor, of
personnel or specialists trained in emergency mental-hygiene-
crisis management to respond, engage, and if possible, apprehend
said person, unless there is irrefutable evidence, that the
individual possesses a deadly weapon and presents an actual and
imminent danger to their self or to third persons. In such a case,
the use of deadly force is authorized. In the absence of any
evidence the person possesses a deadly weapon or poses a deadly
threat to his or her self or to others, the officer shall only employ
the use of a department-issued taser to subdue the person in
accordance with the above and no deadly force shall be authorized
or deemed lawful under the circumstances. Criminal and civil
vicarious liability, both jointly and severally, shall attach to the
officer and the police department that she or he belongs to in the
event that the officer involved is found guilty in a court of law of
having violated this provision. Whosoever commits an offense in
violation of this provision or aids, abets, counsels, commands,
induces, or procures its commission is punishable in their
individual capacities without regard to qualified or absolute
immunity, and shall be subject to a fine of not less than one
hundred thousand dollars ($100,000 USD) nor more than one
hundred million dollars ($100,000,000 USD), or by imprisonment
in jail not less than ten (10) years nor more than eighty (80)
years, or by both such fine and imprisonment. As expected, that
officer shall not be entitled to any severance, pension, or any
compensation whatsoever from any third-party individual,
partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, union
or group of individuals associated in fact including police unions,
insurance companies, donors, or “super” PAC entities organized
under 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code et seq. Any such
compensation remitted in violation hereunder, either directly or
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 65
indirectly, shall be remanded forthwith to the victims or the
estate of said victims of any unauthorized use of force prohibited
under this Act. Furthermore, the police department shall be
subject to the mandatory withholding of any federal financial
assistance for no less than a period of five (5) years, unless
waived or modified by the U.S. Attorney General for exigent
circumstances. In order to ensure remedial correction of any
violation of this provision during this period of federal financial
assistance withholding, the U.S. Department of Justice shall
supervise and retain court jurisdiction over the police department
in order to implement and enforce any consent decree or
resolution agreement entered into in connection herewith. Any
consent decree or resolution that is subject to this provision shall
hereby create or shall be construed to create an express or
implied private right of action for the public to enforce in the
event there is evidence of substantial non-compliance or under-
enforcement of said decree or resolution. Notwithstanding the
foregoing, or in the absence of any consent decree or resolution,
any violation of this provision shall independently create, or shall
be construed to create an express or implied private cause of
action enforceable in Article III courts.
(5) Whosoever is in violation of any of the provisions set forth
in this Act that acts as a conspiratorial enterprise shall be subject
to liability under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt
Organization Act (RICO) 18 U.S.C.A. § 1962(c) (West 1984). As
such, any persons operating through the conspiracy, including,
but not limited to, conducting lawless activities, illegal searches
and seizures, fabricating documents, paying off witnesses,
suborning perjury, preparing false governmental reports,
fabricating evidence against various individuals, tampering with
crime scenes, testimony or evidence, concealing or obstructing
body camera and or dash-camera footage or conducting other
unlawful activities shall be deemed to act pursuant to an
unlawful RICO enterprise.
(6) The fact that a police or peace officer is of the same race,
ethnicity, national origin (or other protected category as provided
under 42 U.S.C. § 1981) as the victim of police misconduct
including, but not limited to, the use of excessive force, shall have
no probative value under the Federal Rules of Evidence and shall
not be construed against any party alleging discrimination or
retaliation on such basis or in favor of any parting contesting
such acts in any matter adjudicated before any court, tribunal or
administrative proceeding unless the context otherwise clearly
66 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
requires.
(7) All civilian-complaint review boards that are charged
with receiving or processing civilian complaints against a police
or peace officer must comprise an equal and proportionate
number of public members elected from the local community as
the number of officers represented on said board. All officers
subject to Section 9 of this Act shall be disqualified to serve on
such boards. All complaints lodged against the police and any
evidence the police department has in its possession in connection
therewith must promptly be made available to the public before
any internal departmental review commences or concludes its
investigation. In the event of any violation hereof, the police
department shall be subject to the mandatory withholding of any
federal financial assistance for no less than a period of five (5)
years, unless waived or modified by the U.S. Attorney General for
exigent circumstances. In order to ensure remedial correction of
any violation of this provision during this period of federal
financial assistance withholding, the U.S. Department of Justice
shall supervise and retain court jurisdiction over the police
department in order to implement and enforce any consent decree
or resolution agreement entered into in connection herewith. Any
consent decree or resolution that is subject to this provision shall
hereby create or shall be construed to create an express or
implied private right of action for the public to enforce in the
event there is evidence of substantial non-compliance or under-
enforcement of said decree or resolution. Notwithstanding the
foregoing, or in the absence of any consent decree or resolution,
any violation of this provision shall independently create, or shall
be construed to create an express or implied private cause of
action enforceable in Article III courts.
(8) All video-camera footage, including those obtained from
body cameras and police dash-board units, which document all
police actions involving a homicide, racial profiling or an
allegation of excessive use of force must be made available within
five (5) business days of filing a police-incident report to be posted
on a national online-video database for purposes of public
inspection and for a period of no less than ten (10) years after
which time it shall be archived and maintained at the U.S.
Library of Congress. In the event of any violation hereof, the
police department shall be subject to the mandatory withholding
of any federal financial assistance for no less than a period of five
(5) years, unless waived or modified by the U.S. Attorney General
for exigent circumstances.
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 67
In order to ensure remedial correction of any violation of this
provision during this period of federal financial assistance
withholding, the U.S. Department of Justice shall supervise and
retain court jurisdiction over the police department in order to
implement and enforce any consent decree or resolution
agreement entered into in connection herewith. Any consent
decree or resolution that is subject to this provision shall hereby
create or shall be construed to create an express or implied
private right of action for the public to enforce in the event there
is evidence of substantial non-compliance or under-enforcement of
said decree or resolution. Notwithstanding the foregoing, or in
the absence of any consent decree or resolution, any violation of
this provision shall independently create, or shall be construed to
create an express or implied private cause of action enforceable in
Article III courts.
(9) No department shall allow any police or peace officer that
has been adjudicated or disciplined for excessive use of force,
racial profiling, discrimination or harassment, unjustified
searches and seizures, unjustified homicide or who has been the
subject of repeated complaints or investigation of the same to
serve in active duty where use of a firearm is permitted or
required. As a matter of public safety and accountability, officers
found to be involved in any of the foregoing matters shall have
their names and photos included in a public online registry for
public inspection and to ensure transparency and compliance
with this provision. In the event of any violation hereof, the
police department shall be subject to the mandatory withholding
of any federal financial assistance for no less than a period of five
(5) years, unless waived or modified by the U.S. Attorney General
for exigent circumstances. In order to ensure remedial correction
of any violation of this provision during this period of federal
financial assistance withholding, the U.S. Department of Justice
shall supervise and retain court jurisdiction over the police
department in order to implement and enforce any consent decree
or resolution agreement entered into in connection herewith. Any
consent decree or resolution that is subject to this provision shall
hereby create or shall be construed to create an express or
implied private right of action for the public to enforce in the
event there is evidence of substantial non-compliance or under-
enforcement of said decree or resolution. Notwithstanding the
foregoing, or in the absence of any consent decree or resolution,
any violation of this provision shall independently create, or shall
be construed to create an express or implied private cause of
68 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
action enforceable in Article III courts.
(10) All police academies must ensure every graduating
cadet and every police department must ensure every officer has
received intensive instruction, training, or re-training on
collaborative-community policing, appropriate use of force,
conflict resolution, tactical training in the de-escalation of
conflict, mental-health-crisis management, cultural competency,
racial-sensitivity training, racial implicit bias as well as cognitive
and policing methods to overcome it. As with all professionals,
police and peace officers shall be subject to a credential-licensing
and continuing-education-credit requirement which shall be every
two years in order to renew their license to continue to serve as a
police or peace officer. The provisions hereunder shall also apply
to those serving as school-resource officers (SROs) in public
district, magnet and charter schools and those private schools
receiving federal financial assistance. At no time shall a juvenile
offender or minor be subject to solitary confinement which shall
constitute cruel and unusual punishment in prohibition of the
Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Due to the
inherent unreliability and repeated occurrence of false
confessions based upon implying false evidence exists, no officer
shall use the tactics of presenting or implying false evidence
exists to obtain confessions from minors during the interrogation
process. In the event of any violation hereof, the police
department shall be subject to the mandatory withholding of any
federal financial assistance for no less than a period of five (5)
years, unless waived or modified by the U.S. Attorney General for
exigent circumstances. In order to ensure remedial correction of
any violation of this provision during this period of federal
financial assistance withholding, the U.S. Department of Justice
shall supervise and retain court jurisdiction over the police
department in order to implement and enforce any consent decree
or resolution agreement entered into in connection herewith. Any
consent decree or resolution that is subject to this provision shall
hereby create or shall be construed to create an express or
implied private right of action for the public to enforce in the
event there is evidence of substantial non-compliance or under-
enforcement of said decree or resolution. Notwithstanding the
foregoing, or in the absence of any consent decree or resolution,
any violation of this provision shall independently create, or shall
be construed to create an express or implied private cause of
action enforceable in Article III courts.
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 69
(11) It shall be a police or peace officer’s continuing ethical
duty in order to maintain their policing-license credential (as
outlined in Sec 10 hereof) to report any police misconduct she or
he witnesses, or knows or has reason to know occurred to the
local civilian-review board and internal affairs promptly,
accurately, and completely. Whosoever commits an offense in
violation of this provision or aids, abets, counsels, commands,
induces, or procures its commission is punishable in their
individual capacities without regard to qualified or absolute
immunity, and shall be subject to a fine of not less than one
hundred thousand dollars ($100,000 USD) nor more than one
million dollars ($1,000,000 USD), or by imprisonment in jail not
less than five (5) years nor more than ten (10) years, or by both
such fine and imprisonment.
(12) It shall be the attorney’s continuing ethical duty,
pursuant to the disciplinary rules of professional responsibility,
whether acting as prosecutor or counsel for defendant, to ensure a
jury or a grand jury empaneled is racially balanced and diverse to
ensure a fair and impartial deliberation by one’s peers.
Peremptory strikes for whatever reason proffered that
substantially imbalance, reduce or eliminate all racial diversity
or representation from the jury when the defendant belongs to a
racial-minority group shall be construed as per se evidence of
impermissible racial discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth
Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause as well as the Procedural
and Substantive Due Process rights secured by the Fifth and
Fourteenth Amendments. Prosecutors shall ensure and pledge
not to withhold exculpatory evidence from defense counsel. The
Department of Justice shall conduct criminal prosecutions that
are fair in their process and outcome to ensure that testimony
about forensic evidence presented in court is scientifically valid in
order to ensure, not only that guilty individuals are convicted, but
that innocent individuals are not. In accordance with this
mandate, the Department of Justice shall adopt forthwith the
recommendations of the report of the Executive Office of the
President President’s Council of Advisors on Science and
Technology entitled “Forensic Science in Criminal Courts:
Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods”
(incorporated herein by reference). To ensure that those
incarcerated have a robust right to challenge through the writ of
federal habeas corpus any gross constitutional violations in state
convictions, the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act is hereby amended to grant Article III courts authority to
70 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
hear challenges to state convictions which represent a manifest
injustice under the Constitution. Whosoever commits an offense
in violation of this provision or aids, abets, counsels, commands,
induces, or procures its commission is punishable in their
individual capacities without regard to qualified or absolute
immunity, and shall be subject to a fine of not less than one
hundred thousand dollars ($100,000 USD) nor more than one
million dollars ($1,000,000 USD), or by imprisonment in jail not
less than five (5) years nor more than ten (10) years, or by both
such fine and imprisonment.
(13) All departments shall have the affirmative duty and
obligation to reduce the heightened militarization of police
actions as well as the police equipment and apparatus of military
grade. This provision shall codify into law Executive Order
13688, issued on January 16, 2015, by President Barack Obama
entitled “Federal Support for Local Law Enforcement Equipment
Acquisition” (EO), to identify actions that can improve Federal
support for the appropriate use, acquisition, and transfer of
controlled equipment by State, local, and Tribal law-enforcement
agencies (LEAs) to ensure the appropriate use of police
equipment.
(14) The use of all stop-and-frisk tactics, racial profiling, or
other methods of policing which lead to the disproportionate
harassment or incarceration of people of color shall be affirmed as
unlawful and terminated immediately forthwith. In the event of
any failure by government or any political subdivision thereof to
comply with this provision, the state and police department of
said jurisdiction shall be subject to the mandatory withholding of
any federal financial assistance for no less than a period of five
(5) years, unless waived or modified by the U.S. Attorney General
for exigent circumstances. In order to ensure remedial correction
of any violation of this provision during this period of federal
financial assistance withholding, the U.S. Department of Justice
shall supervise and retain court jurisdiction over the police
department in order to implement and enforce any consent decree
or resolution agreement entered into in connection herewith. Any
consent decree or resolution that is subject to this provision shall
hereby create or shall be construed to create an express or
implied private right of action for the public to enforce in the
event there is evidence of substantial non-compliance or under-
enforcement of said decree or resolution. Notwithstanding the
foregoing, or in the absence of any consent decree or resolution,
any violation of this provision shall independently create, or shall
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 71
be construed to create an express or implied private cause of
action enforceable in Article III courts.
(15) The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (which
houses approximately 62% of all federal prisoners) shall
incorporate the policies recently promulgated by the U.S. Justice
Department (incorporated herein by reference) that henceforth
terminate the governmental relationship with all for-profit
private prison-management companies. The federal government,
all states, and the political subdivisions thereof shall take
additional steps to effectively and promptly terminate its
relationship with said companies in the provision of supervisory
services (such as probation, pre-trial release) as well as in the
production of goods or commodities produced by inmate labor.
(16) All courts, including juvenile-justice courts, as well as
all correctional institutions shall adopt and implement strategies
that effectively promote rehabilitation rather than retributive
punishment among youth and inmates. Further, they shall
ensure, through monitoring and continual assessment, that such
strategies have made demonstrable progress on measurable
annual benchmarks to ensure the same. Alternative sentencing
and inmate counseling, training, and education shall be
reasonably calculated to produce a marketable skills and a
pathway to successful emotional, social and economic
reintegration in mainstream society with adequate post-release
support. In the event of noncompliance with any provision
hereof, the correctional institution shall be subject to the
mandatory withholding of any federal financial assistance for no
less than a period of five (5) years, unless waived or modified by
the U.S. Attorney General for exigent circumstances. In order to
ensure remedial correction of any violation of this provision
during this period of federal financial assistance withholding, the
U.S. Department of Justice shall supervise and retain court
jurisdiction over said institution in order to implement and
enforce any consent decree or resolution agreement entered into
in connection herewith. Any consent decree or resolution that is
subject to this provision shall hereby create or shall be construed
to create an express or implied private right of action for the
public to enforce in the event there is evidence of substantial non-
compliance or under-enforcement of said decree or resolution.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, or in the absence of any consent
decree or resolution, any violation of this provision shall
independently create, or shall be construed to create an express
or implied private cause of action enforceable in Article III courts.
72 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
(17) Except as otherwise provided herein, no police or peace
officer or agent acting either directly or indirectly on behalf of any
police department or law-enforcement agency shall make any
statement to the public, release prejudicial information or engage
in speculation or supposition about the character of any victim of
police misconduct that will prejudice, or tends to create prejudice,
in the minds of prospective jurors or take any steps that shall
prejudicially poison any potential-juror pool before the case is
adjudicated in a competent court of law. Whosoever commits an
offense in violation of this provision or aids, abets, counsels,
commands, induces, or procures its commission is punishable in
their individual capacities without regard to qualified or absolute
immunity, and shall be subject to a fine of not less than one
hundred thousand dollars ($100,000 USD) nor more than one
million dollars ($1,000,000 USD), or by imprisonment in jail not
less than five (5) years nor more than ten (10) years, or by both
such fine and imprisonment.
(18) All evidence mandated hereunder to be obtained,
collected and, or, stored under this Act shall be timely presented
in full to the Committee on The Elimination of Racial
Discrimination as the body of independent experts that monitors
implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) Treaty to which the
United States is a signatory.
(19) One-half (1/2) of any fine(s) imposed upon the federal
government, a state or any political subdivision thereof as a
result of a violation of this Act shall be directed to the local public
defender offices (and Innocence projects programs where DNA
evidence is the basis of the conviction) in the county that gave
rise to the violation. Such funds shall be used exclusively in cases
on behalf of the defendant, where the defendant alleges, in good
faith and as supported by credible and competent evidence, that
she or he is a victim of police or prosecutorial misconduct or any
act prohibited under this Act. The receiving office shall give a
true, accurate and complete accounting of the use of such funds
for public inspection and shall be subject to periodic audit by the
state comptroller or Attorney General’s office, whichever the case
may be.
(20) All police departments shall proactively and regularly
engage in the collaborative planning of community-policing
initiatives and coordinate joint efforts with local community
leaders to ensure the most effective, safe and respectful policing
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 73
of all communities. The police departments shall ensure
continual community outreach that is designed to build and
restore well-founded trust and cooperation between the police and
the local community. Further, the police department and local
community shall ensure through monitoring and continual
assessment that such cooperative strategies have made
demonstrable progress on measurable annual benchmarks to
ensure the same. It shall be unlawful under the rules and
regulations promulgated by the Federal Communications
Commission and in violation of the U.S. Constitution for states
and police departments to utilize, whether overtly or covertly,
social-media-surveillance software, cell-phone “stingray” devices
that capture private cell-phone calls, other secretive-surveillance
tools, tactics, or measures to target, track, surveil, profile, or
harass persons lawfully exercising their First Amendment right
to video record, advocate, petition, or protest against the
improper or excessive use of force exercised by some police
officers. It is understood such surveillance measures and tactics
undermine the spirit and intent of community trust and police
accountability that is the objective of this provision and Act.
Whosoever commits an offense in violation of this provision or
aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its
commission is punishable in their individual capacities without
regard to qualified or absolute immunity, and shall be subject to a
fine of not less than one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000
USD) nor more than one million dollars ($1,000,000 USD), or by
imprisonment in jail not less than five (5) years nor more than
ten (10) years, or by both such fine and imprisonment. In the
event of repeated and continued noncompliance with any
provision hereof, the state and police department shall also be
subject to the mandatory withholding of any federal financial
assistance for no less than a period of five (5) years, unless
waived or modified by the U.S. Attorney General for exigent
circumstances. In order to ensure remedial correction of any
violation of this provision during this period of federal financial
assistance withholding, the U.S. Department of Justice shall
supervise and retain court jurisdiction over said institution in
order to implement and enforce any consent decree or resolution
agreement entered into in connection herewith. Any consent
decree or resolution that is subject to this provision shall hereby
create or shall be construed to create an express or implied
private right of action for the public to enforce in the event there
is evidence of substantial noncompliance or under-enforcement of
said decree or resolution. Notwithstanding the foregoing, or in
74 Loyola Law Review [Vol. 63
the absence of any consent decree or resolution, any violation of
this provision shall independently create, or shall be construed to
create an express or implied private cause of action enforceable in
Article III courts.
CONCLUSION
These are constructive changes that can make a difference
on policing and race in America. These changes are needed to
curb the raw violence exacted against black and brown bodies
that reinforce racism and racial oppression in America. The
thoughtful author Ta-Nehisi Coates says that race is the “child of
racism, not its father.”90 Race is certainly the handiwork of those
who have socially constructed its meaning to disempower,
ridicule, humiliate, and kill. It has taken on a life that has had
inescapable repercussions that must be confronted head on in our
society. In many households across America, the conversation
about police violence is not merely intellectual or a societal
critique from the luxury of afar. It is a necessary and solemn
conversation in families of color to protect sons and daughters,
nieces and nephews from potential police encounters. Their
warnings, like those issued by foreign governments as travel
alerts to those visiting the U.S., have sadly become a necessary
fact of life.91 It is the reality King had to confront with his
daughter, that Baldwin had to confront with his father, and that
Coates as a father is forced to confront with his son, writing to
him:
[R]acism is a visceral experience, . . . it dislodges brains,
blocks airways, rips muscles, extracts organs, cracks bones,
breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You
must always remember that the sociology, the history, the
economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land,
with great violence, upon the body.92
90. TA-NEHISI COATES, BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 7 (2015).
91. See Walters, supra note 1 (“Government travel advisories are common for
war-torn, disease-ravaged nations, but a growing number of countries are warning
their citizens about taking trips to the [U.S.] . . . . The concerns include mass
shootings, police violence, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT attitudes and the Zika
virus.”).
92. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Letter to My Son, “Here Is What I Would Like for You to
Know: In America, It Is Traditional to Destroy the Black Body—It Is Heritage,”
ATLANTIC: POL. (July 4, 2015), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/
07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/ (“The destroyers are merely
men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and
legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies. It is hard to face this. But
2017]Excessive Force, Bias, & Criminal Justice Reform 75
Likewise, America must never look away from this reality. If
meaningful change is to occur, America must address its deeply
entrenched, often racially oppressive, policing practices and
culture with transparency, humility, and understanding. The
time for change has come and it is long overdue.
all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling,
white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a
visceral experience . . . .”) (emphasis in original).
Copyright of Loyola Law Review is the property of Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
