Publication Date
2021
Volume
70
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Within policing, few legal principles are more widely known or highly esteemed than the “objective reasonableness” standard that regulates police uses of force. The Fourth Amendment, it is argued, is not only the facet of constitutional law that governs police violence, it sets out the only standard that state lawmakers, police commanders, and officers should recognize. Any other regulation of police violence is inappropriate and unnecessary. Ironically, though, the Constitution does not actually regulate the use of force. It regulates seizures. Some uses of force are seizures. This Article explains that a surprising number of others—including some police shootings—are not. Uses of force that do not amount to seizures fall entirely outside the ambit of Fourth Amendment regulation. And when a use of force does constitute a seizure, the Fourth Amendment is a distressingly inapt regulatory tool. There is, in short, a fundamental misalignment between what the Fourth Amendment is thought to regulate and what it actually regulates, and there are good reasons to doubt the efficacy of that regulation even when it applies. Put simply, the Fourth Amendment is a profoundly flawed framework for regulating police violence. The Constitution is not the only option. Police reformers have offered state law and police agency policies as promising regulatory alternatives. What has largely evaded academic attention, however, is the extent to which state courts and police agencies simply adopt or incorporate the constitutional standards into state law or agency policies. In this way, the Fourth Amendment’s flaws have spilled over into the sub-constitutional regulation of police violence. This Article details the substantial shortcomings in constitutional jurisprudence, describes the problem of Fourth Amendment spillage, and argues that the divergent interests underlying the various regulatory mechanisms should lead state lawmakers and administrative policymakers to divorce state law and administrative policies from constitutional law. In doing so, it advances both academic and public conversations about police violence.
Recommended Citation
Seth W. Stoughton, How the Fourth Amendment Frustrates the Regulation of Police Violence, 70 Emory L. J. 521 (2021).
Comments
Originally published by Emory Law Journal in 2021.