Policing

This paper argues that policing is legitimate only when it serves the telos of public order without becoming a form of domination itself. In Telic terms, the telos of order is authorship-freedom: the protection of the background conditions under which people can live authored lives across time. From that basis, the paper develops three minimum ethical requirements for policing: preserve resolution capacity, track exposure truthfully, and account for shared dependence. It then identifies recurrent structural failure modes of policing under pressure, (...) including humiliation, overreach, narrative management, self-protective opacity, selective protection, and two-tier enforcement, with concealment treated as the universal accelerant of legitimacy collapse. The proposed design response combines temporal separation, auditable mandate geometry, tiered auditing, rapid preliminary findings, Internal Affairs as routine integrity machinery, and an independent serious-case backstop body with real powers and anti-capture safeguards. Equality is treated as a design constraint: one law, one standard, made visible through common gates, bright-lines, and disparity-sensitive auditing. The paper closes by linking policing integrity to democratic warning and override structures, arguing that legitimate policing requires force that is bounded, review that is credible, and accountability that cannot be laundered through procedure. (shrink)

(Under contract with Oxford University Press, Oxford Legal Philosophy series.) -/- This book is a legal and ethical study of state entrapment: that is, entrapment by law-enforcement agents or their deputies. -/- It approaches entrapment via three questions: definition (What makes an act one of entrapment?), permissibility (Under what conditions, if any, is entrapment permissible?), and implications (When someone has been entrapped, what remedy, if any, is appropriate? More broadly, how should the law respond?). It explains these questions, looks at (...) how the law and scholars have answered them, gives our answers to them, and is structured according to them. It treats these questions as distinct, and that of definition as prior (in a sense that it clarifies) to the others. -/- The methodology deployed combines applied analytical philosophy with approaches to comparative legal studies that are predominantly analytical and historical. The main focus, in terms of scope, is upon common-law jurisdictions in the Anglophone world. (shrink)

A review of Michael Sierra-Arévalo's "The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing".

There are two distinct perspectives one can take when considering the necessity constraint on defensive force: (1) which defensive option among those averting a threat would minimize harm to attackers (specifically, those potentially liable to defensive harm); and (2) which of these options would minimize harm to bystanders (specifically, those not liable to defensive harm)? This article introduces the concepts of narrow necessity for perspective (1) and wide necessity for perspective (2), following similar terminology for proportionality analysis. Currently, the ethics (...) of defensive force literature lacks these concepts. Adopting them establishes a parallel structure for the proportionality and necessity constraints, so that both have narrow and wide perspectives. This proposal has the advantage of clarifying the scope of the necessity constraint, while also explaining paradigm violations of necessity that raise problems for competing proposals. (shrink)

Calls to defund the police gained prominence with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and take various forms. Depending on what will be defunded, the idea has attracted support from different parts of the political spectrum. The politicized nature of the debate often cuts short reflection on how best to assess proposals to defund the police. This article takes up that task. It begins by developing a typology of defund measures: abolitionist cuts, abolitionist reallocation, disaggregative cuts, and disaggregative reallocation. It (...) then outlines a framework to evaluate policing and defund measures, drawing on criteria from the ethics of defensive force. Since policing relies on force, it faces a high justificatory bar and must satisfy the principles of just aim, proportionality, and necessity. The state should not fund unjustified forms of policing that violate those principles. Different violations, though, demand different policy responses. (shrink)

To Protect and Serve is Norm Stamper’s second book, following Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing (2005), and is a welcome contribution to the debate between those who advocate violence against the police and those who insist that no reform is necessary. Radley Balko’s The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2013) inadvertently provided the context of the civil unrest in Ferguson ignited by the shooting of Michael Brown (...) in 2014 and the controversy surrounding the “Ferguson effect” provides the context for Stamper’s treatise on the problems faced – and caused – by contemporary U.S. law enforcement. Stamper is one of the few senior police officers singled out for praise by Balko, for the most part on the basis of his activism against police prejudice and militarisation subsequent to his retirement as Seattle’s police chief in 2000. (shrink)

This Article explores the connections between ideas about American democracy and ideas about the police. I argue that criminal procedure jurisprudence and scholarship on the police over the past half-century have roughly tracked, in a delayed fashion, developments in democratic theory over the same period. The most important of these developments were, first, the emergence during the 1950s of the pluralist theory of democracy, an unusually rich and resonant account that emphasized the roles of elites, interest groups, and competition in (...) sustaining American democracy; and second, beginning in the 1960s, the gradual shift away from this theory and toward accounts of democracy emphasizing popular participation, community, and deliberation. Democratic pluralism helps make sense of several interrelated hallmarks of criminal procedure and police studies in the Warren and Burger Court eras: the focus on the group psychology of the police; the concern with police discretion and the reliance on judicial oversight; the emphasis on personal dignity; the attraction to second wave police professionalism; the embrace of modernity; the centrality of consensus; and the disregard of institutional structure. The subsequent shift away from pluralism finds reflection in several themes in contemporary criminal procedure: the enthusiasm for community participation; the premium placed on transparency; the distrust of elites and expertise; the preoccupation with legitimacy; and the retreat from modernity. Other features of criminal procedure jurisprudence and scholarship today - the continued treatment of the police as a breed apart, the persistent de-emphasis of institutional structure, and the relative inattention to issues of equality - reflect important points of continuity between pluralism and the theories that supplanted it. Our ideas about policing could benefit from a more rounded understanding of democracy - an understanding sensitive to those aspects of democracy that have to do less with collective self-rule than with traditions of resistance to illegitimate hierarchy, and mindful of the core insights of democratic pluralism, 1960s-style participatory democracy, and eighteenth-century political economy. I investigate, in a tentative fashion, how such an understanding of democracy might affect our thinking about five important issues in contemporary law enforcement: community policing, racial profiling, police privatization, police personnel practices, and public disclosure of law enforcement practices. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question of how videographic public announcements (VPAs)---i.e. videos that a wide swath of the public sees and knows that everyone else can see too--- have functioned to mobilize people politically, and how the presence of deepfakes in our information environment stands to change the dynamics of this mobilization. Existing work by Regina Rini, Don Fallis and others has focused on the ways that deepfakes might interrupt our acquisition of first-order knowledge through videos. But I point (...) out that even where every audience member takes a video to be veridical, where first-order knowledge acquisition is secure, an audience aware of deepfakes in their environment will not acquire higher order knowledge in the way that has erstwhile been characteristic for audiences of VPAs. Engaging with ideas from the literatures on public announcement logic, common knowledge, and convention, I enumerate a variety of ways in which we should expect this absence of higher order knowledge to throw up barriers to political mobilization. I go on to apply my analysis of VPAs to the mechanisms by which an uptick in publicly available videos of police brutality over the last decade, mediated by camera phones and social media, was responsible for the largest mass protests in US history in summer 2020. This makes vivid the stakes of the transformation in our mobilizing environment that I've claimed deepfakes effect: where we lose the common-knowledge-generating effects of VPAs, there are fresh obstacles to this sort of mass mobilization. (shrink)

Police deadly force falls disproportionately on vulnerable groups, such as Black Americans and persons with mental illness. This reality raises distributive justice concerns, yet there is little agreement on how such concerns should inform the ethics of defensive force and policing. This chapter seeks to clarify the debate by distinguishing between distributive justice at the micro-level (individual interactions) and macro-level (society broadly). Different moral considerations matter depending on the level. At the micro-level, culpability has particular importance. Diminished culpability makes one (...) less liable to defensive force. This principle, compared with the legal status quo, has the indirect effect of giving extra protections to members of vulnerable groups, who face a greater risk of violent harm than others who are equally culpable. At the macro-level, the consideration of vulnerability plays a more direct role in prescribing action. It is unfair that certain groups, due to factors beyond their control, are more vulnerable to violence. State institutions, including the police, have obligations to reduce the risk to the vulnerable. Together, micro- and macro-level principles complement each other in protecting the vulnerable without abandoning basic notions of justice in interpersonal interactions. (shrink)

One rule to emerge from the ethics of defensive force is the imminence requirement: a necessary condition to justify deadly force is reasonable belief that an innocent person faces imminent threat of grave harm, which such force aims to prevent. The law often applies this rule to civilians but not police. As a result, police have broader permissions to use deadly force, which they can use to prevent the escape of fleeing suspects perceived as dangerous, even if they pose no (...) imminent threat. This chapter reviews policy debates over fleeing suspects, bringing attention to and defending recent efforts to apply the imminence requirement to police. Two principles from law and ethics—equality before the law and the doing/allowing distinction (i.e., causing harm is worse than allowing it)—both represent presumptions against the status quo, which exempts police from the imminence requirement. Unable to overcome these presumptions, the status quo ultimately rests on shaky moral ground, especially given the lack of empirical evidence that it helps protect life and minimize grave harm. (shrink)

Police killings of individuals with mental illness have prompted calls for greater funding of mental health services to shift responsibilities away from the police. Such investments can reduce police interactions with vulnerable populations but are unlikely to eliminate them entirely, particularly in cases where individuals with mental illness have a weapon or are otherwise dangerous. It remains a pressing question, then, how police should respond to these and other vulnerable aggressors with diminished culpability. This chapter considers and ultimately rejects four (...) potential approaches from the ethics of defensive force literature. It looks to improve on them by developing the fusion account, which explains how vulnerability and diminished culpability fit together to provide moral grounds for extra protections from deadly force. The chapter’s final sections explore the policy implications of the fusion account for police administrators, officers, and the law. (shrink)

Police in the US disproportionately kill Black Americans. Social science offers different explanations for the disparities: (1) individual bias by officers, (2) disparate enforcement (more intensive policing in marginalized neighborhoods), or (3) the differential involvement hypothesis (certain racial groups engage in violent crime at higher rates). Those who see such disparities as a pressing injustice primarily favor (1) or (2), whereas those who defend the police against charges of bias tend to favor (3). It is beyond this chapter’s scope to (...) resolve whether (1), (2), or (3) best explains the disparities. All three factors likely play a role. Regardless of which explanation is true, all imply injustice by the state. That point holds even for the (3) differential involvement hypothesis, which ends up having the most dramatic implications for policy. If racial disparities are due to officer bias or how police deploy resources, police reform is the way to address the problem. The differential involvement hypothesis implies instead the need for broader societal changes since violent crime is closely tied to factors like poverty, unemployment, and lack of economic opportunity. In societies marked by structural racism, police reforms are likely insufficient to address racial disparities in police deadly force. (shrink)

The book begins by discussing the scope of the problem. In the US, there are over a thousand killings by police annually, which have far-reaching harms that go beyond just those whose lives are taken. Such killings, especially those involving questionable force, erode trust in police and democratic institutions charged with overseeing the police. In short, the status quo constitutes a threat both to life and democratic legitimacy. As a path forward, the Introduction outlines an ethical framework for evaluating police (...) deadly force grounded in the protection of life and prioritizing the vulnerable. It closes by discussing the book’s methodological approach, defining key terms, and giving an overview of each chapter. (shrink)

A fundamental principle guiding the book’s analysis is that police have an ethical obligation to prioritize the protection of life. This idea enjoys broad acceptance, including in law enforcement, as evident from its frequent appearance in use-of-force policies. But what exactly the principle means in practice remains murky. This chapter examines three puzzles that arise when trying to apply the principle: (1) justifying deadly force against grave but nonlethal threats, (2) balancing the right to life with other fundamental rights, and (...) (3) weighing different lives in scenarios where action aimed at saving one life puts another at greater risk. The ethics of policing literature offers two common proposals to navigate these challenges. First, enforcing the law is an independent justification for police to use deadly force. And second, police should prioritize lives as follows: first civilians, then officers, and lastly suspects. The chapter raises problems with both proposals. It offers in their place a morally richer understanding of prioritizing the protection of life, which proves better adept at making sense of these three puzzles. (shrink)

The idea that police should prioritize protecting life seems obvious. Many use-of-force policies already endorse the principle. But despite general support for this principle in and out of policing, figuring out what exactly it means in practice proves far more challenging. In Protecting Life, Ben Jones takes up that challenge and provides strategies for navigating it. High-profile, controversial killings in recent years remind us that too often police fall short in their obligations to protect life. The problem goes deeper than (...) a few bad apples. Law, policy, and training entrench practices that result in avoidable killings, which hit marginalized groups the hardest. Importantly, how police use deadly force is intertwined with questions of distributive justice. That insight differentiates Protecting Life in its approach to the ethics of police deadly force. It develops a framework to evaluate police deadly force at the individual and institutional level, with close attention to concerns voiced by Black Lives Matter on how policing contributes to structural injustices in society. The book's extensive engagement with social science research reveals ways to translate bedrock moral principles into policy. Ultimately, its conclusions push readers to rethink the state's obligations to those most vulnerable to police violence--particularly, disadvantaged racial groups and persons with mental illness. (shrink)

This chapter examines how evaluating defensive force in policing compares with other contexts, specifically individual self-defense and war. Across these domains are both continuities and differences. In each domain, three core principles—just aim, proportionality, and necessity—must be satisfied to justify defensive force. The aims justifying deadly force differ across domains, which leads to ambiguity for policing. Only the prevention of grave harm justifies deadly force in individual self-defense, whereas additional aims like military advantage can justify deadly force in war. The (...) law itself is ambiguous on whether additional aims beyond preventing grave harm, such as enforcing the law, can justify police deadly force. One clear area of overlap between policing and war is their institutional nature. Institutions that rely on force, I argue, incur special obligations to minimize the need for its use. So in the case of the police and the military, both have obligations to develop tactics, equipment, and training that help preserve life and avoid the need for deadly force. (shrink)

The book closes by emphasizing that we should not see efforts to reduce police killings as a zero-sum game in which officers necessarily lose. A number of leading police organizations have taken this position in recent policy debates. This perspective misses an important point: the police already lose under the status quo. Avoidable killings erode public trust while undermining the police’s ability to collaborate effectively with communities. As long as we remain stuck in this cycle, no one wins. It is (...) both in the police’s and public’s interest to support policy changes that promote prioritizing the protection of life, especially of the vulnerable. (shrink)

This chapter examines some of the most controversial incidents involving police—what it terms police-generated killings. In these cases, bad police tactics create a situation where deadly force becomes necessary, becomes perceived as necessary, or occurs unintentionally. Police deserve blame for such killings because they choose tactics that unnecessarily raise the risk of deadly force, violating their obligation to prioritize the protection of life. Since current law in the US fails to ban many bad tactics, police-generated killings often are treated as (...) “lawful but awful.” The chapter argues that police-generated killings merit legal sanctions by appealing to a relevant analogy: self-generated self-defense, where the person who engages in self-defense started the trouble. Lack of accountability for police-generated killings threatens life, police legitimacy, and trust in democratic institutions. The chapter closes by identifying tools in law and policy to address this challenge. (shrink)

This is a digest for the English-speaking circles of learning. This conspectus develops across five thematic stations, traversing the compass, conceptual apparatus, operational conduct, systemic fruits, and the foundational substrate that order and substantiate Carlos Imbrosio Filho’s inquiry.

Universities are no longer just centers of learning; they increasingly function as sites of surveillance. Systems of data tracking, monitoring, and cooperation with state authorities shape campus life, especially for immigrant and international students. For migrant students—particularly those who are undocumented or have unstable visa status—this scrutiny carries serious risks, including detention, deportation, or loss of legal standing. This surveillance is often invisible, operating through routine administrative processes and federal databases that monitor students’ movements and status. Although presented as necessary, (...) these practices reveal that universities are not neutral institutions but active participants in broader systems of control that regulate and constrain vulnerable populations. (shrink)

Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine assumes that there exists an underlying humanitarian duty to forcefully intervene in situations where innocent human lives are threatened with unjust violence. But what is the philosophical basis for the humanitarian moral obligation that underpins the R2P doctrine? I demonstrate that a third party should use forceful intervention (which might include lethal force) to protect an innocent human life in cases where the intervener has a duty to rescue the potential victim’s life and the use (...) of force is morally permissible. Then I argue that a potential intervener is permitted to kill the attacker when he has an impartial reason for doing so: the attacker is unjustly threatening an innocent person’s life. Impartial justification is important in such cases, I argue, because it affirms the equality of all humans: that one human is not worth intrinsically more than another. (shrink)

Written testimony regarding the FBI and the rule of law provided to the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight, in conjunction with hearing and oral testimony on April 2, 2025.

The police are required to establish probable cause before engaging in custodial interrogation. Much custodial interrogation relies on a fraudulent epistemic environment (FEE) in which the police knowingly use deception and dishonesty to gain an advantage over a suspect regarding a material issue, injuring the interests of the suspect. Probable cause, then, is a sort of evidentiary and epistemic standard that legally justifies the police’s use of deceptive and dishonest custodial interrogation tactics that are on par with fraud. However, there (...) are both deontological and consequentialist considerations that show why the police’s use of an FEE is often unjustified. Accordingly, the paper argues that even if the use of an FEE is based on probable cause, there are other (non-epistemic) reasons to think evidence with probative value (such as a confession) should be excluded when derived from an FEE and there is no acute threat of harm to others. (shrink)

Political power is always coercive, and is none more so in domestic politics than the criminal law and its associated power to punish. If this power is to be used in a just way, it must be done in a manner that all members of society can accept. This paper is an attempt to work out some normative parameters for an acceptable theory of punishment by examining its institutional role in a just, liberal state. In doing so, this paper treats (...) punishment theory as a topic in political philosophy, as opposed to moral philosophy. In this way, the account differs from most approaches to a theory of punishment, which are based on what we might call “personal morality.” In this paper, I focus on the role that punishment would play as an institutional part of a state governed by just rules and explore how the features of the institution could be justified to the citizens of the state in question. (shrink)

This paper refines and defends the grassroots demand of reallocating powers and responsibilities from police to other institutions: what I call the unbundling proposal. I begin by presenting the proposal and specifying what sorts of roles and responsibilities proponents argue should be allocated from police to other institutions. I then advance a series of arguments for why we should unbundle policing. The first two draw on straightforward principles of institutional design, claiming that we should reallocate responsibilities from police to other (...) institutions because (1) institutions with violent capacities should have narrow mandates, and (2) unbundling induces a better distribution of epistemic labor between institutions and fosters higher quality expertise. I then argue that policing institutions should be unbundled because they disproportionately burden marginalized people and perpetuate racial structural injustice. There, I advance some general principles about what is required when institutions undermine social justice, suggesting that in this case and others, we ought to turn to extra-institutional, reallocative measures. I close by addressing a series of objections to unbundling, including the concerns that (i1crime would increase, (2) nonpolice institutions would replicate the problems with existing policing regimes, and (3) unbundling is unfeasible in places with high rates of gun violence (like the United States). (shrink)

Jake Monaghan’s Just Policing is just what the burgeoning philosophical literature on policing needed. Rather than theorizing about the role of the police in an ideal society, Monaghan asks a more...

This article responds to contributions to an Author Meets Critics book symposium addressing the author's book Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in Chicago (New York University Press, 2024). It further develops the account I develop in my book regarding how restorative justice has emerged as a transformational social movement, and what such a movement can do to address harms that are not merely perpetuated by one individual against another but reproduced by an entire “justice” system. To accomplish (...) this, I explore the ways that several lived restorative justice initiatives on the South and West sides of Chicago both resist, but also transformatively engage, the U.S. criminal legal system. In light of this focus, in the first part of this response, I return to the controversy among contemporary restorative justice practitioners over the ability—or alleged inability—of restorative justice to transform systemic injustices. I reiterate that restorative justice must be understood holistically, taking into account what I argue are its distinctive moral and spiritual dynamics. Doing so, I contend, allows us to overcome a prison reform vs. prison abolition dichotomy that has emerged in scholarship and activism. In the second part of this response, I reflect on the colonial and racial dynamics that undergird work in the scholarly community’s restorative justice and lived religion spaces. (shrink)

Drawing on James Tully’s dialogical reconstruction of political theory as a critical activity, this chapter proposes to take the disconnect between theory and practice as an occasion to loosen the grip of a particular image of disobedience holding both liberals and their critics captive. Liberal political thought approaches civil disobedience as a problem of justification: namely, as a challenge of reconciling conflicting obligations to conscience and obligations to law where injustice causes the two to diverge. Recent criticisms of the liberal (...) paradigm seek to expand the boundaries of justifiable dissent, or propose new grounds of justification, but seldom question the very paradigm of political theory animating the hegemonic liberal approach itself. The project of resolving practical conflicts of democratic politics by handing down authoritative rules and procedures constitutes a “monological approach” to the study of politics. It figures the theorist as an authority standing over and above the problems of demos. Such an approach mystifies the ways political theory’s pronouncements are context bound and often serve as unreflective idealization of the status quo. Through a survey of the diverse ways the language of civil disobedience is used, and conscientious lawbreaking is practiced, this chapter seeks to disclose some of the ways a monological approach to dissent remains complicit in a racialized politics of law and order it often claims to challenge. (shrink)

Police killings of individuals with mental illness have prompted calls for greater funding of mental health services to shift responsibilities away from the police. Such investments can reduce police interactions with vulnerable populations but are unlikely to eliminate them entirely, particularly in cases where individuals with mental illness have a weapon or are otherwise dangerous. It remains a pressing question, then, how police should respond to these and other vulnerable aggressors with diminished culpability (VADCs). This article considers and ultimately rejects (...) three potential approaches from the ethics of defensive force literature. It looks to improve on them by developing what I call the fusion account, which explains how vulnerability and diminished culpability fit together to provide moral grounds for extra protections from deadly force. The article’s final sections explore the policy implications of the fusion account for police administrators, officers, and the law. (shrink)

In a society marked by liberal gun ownership laws, and an increasingly militarized police force, how should we think about cases where a homeowner shoots a person who has mistakenly knocked on the wrong door, or where a police officer shoots someone who is unarmed? The general tendency – by shooters, courts, and many observers – is to use the framework of self-defense. However, as I will argue, relying on the framework of self-defense is inappropriate in these cases, because theories (...) of self-defensive killing are built up around a very specific type of case, namely, a random, sudden, one-off encounter between roughly equally matched strangers. When a person who acts in self-defense has undertaken certain preparations to kill in self-defense – such as buying a gun, or undergoing certain kinds of training – they transform what would have been defensive violence into offensive violence. But because the self-defense framework distinguishes only between defensive and aggressive violence, it cannot easily register the unique moral features of offensive violence. Relying on the self-defense framework, then, produces judgments that are overly permissive of killings by gun owners and police, masking them as self-defensive when in fact they are much more morally fraught. (shrink)

Under a ‘dirty hands’ model of undercover policing, it inevitably involves situations where whatever the state agent does is morally problematic. Christopher Nathan argues against this model. Nathan’s criticism of the model is predicated on the contention that it entails the view, which he considers objectionable, that morally wrongful acts are central to undercover policing. We address this criticism, and some other aspects of Nathan’s discussion of the ‘dirty hands’ model, specifically in relation to state entrapment to commit a crime. (...) Using János Kis’s work on political morality, we explain three dilemmatic versions of the ‘dirty hands’ model. We show that, while two of these are inapplicable to state entrapment, the third has better prospects. We then pursue our main aim, which is to argue that, since the third model precludes Nathan’s criticism, a viable ‘dirty hands’ model of state entrapment remains an open possibility. Finally, we generalize this result, showing that the case of state entrapment is not special: the result holds good for policing practices more generally, including such routine practices as arrest, detention, and restraint. (shrink)

The police are routinely recognized for displaying heroic virtues associated with combat. I take a contrarian position in this paper. Part I begins with the claim that if bravery is to be prioritized in policing, then bravery should be part of the police’s routine roles and responsibilities. However, bravery is not central to what the police do every day, and, therefore, shouldn’t be prioritized (in recruiting, training, and so on). Conversely, Part II claims that if the virtue of honesty is (...) centrally connected to the police role, then it should be prioritized in policing. Because honesty is deeply connected to the police’s routine roles and responsibilities, it should be prioritized. By turning away from misconceptions about the police, the hope is that we will be in a better position to see both the practical and the moral importance of virtue in policing. (shrink)

Cooperative relations steeped in honesty and good faith are a necessity for any viable society. This is especially relevant to the police institution because the police are entrusted to promote justice and security. Despite the necessity of societal honesty and good faith, the police institution has embraced deception, dishonesty, and bad faith as tools of the trade for providing security. In fact, it seems that providing security is impossible without using deception and dishonesty during interrogations, undercover operations, pretextual detentions, and (...) other common scenarios. This presents a paradox related to the erosion of public faith in the police institution and the weakening of the police's legitimacy. -/- The book seeks to solve this puzzle by showing that many of our assumptions about policing and security are unjustified. Specifically, they are unjustified in the way many of our assumptions about security were unjustified after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when state institutions embraced a variety of brutal rules and tactics in pursuit of perceived security enhancements. The police are likewise unjustified in their pursuit of many supposed security enhancements that rely on proactive deception, dishonesty, and bad faith. -/- There are compelling reasons to think that the police's widespread use of proactive deception and dishonesty is inconsistent with fundamental norms of political morality regarding fraud and the rule of law. Although there are times and places for such tactics in policing, those times and places should be much more limited than current practices suggest. (shrink)

"Legitimacy is lost when the police either fail to protect the public or rely on coercion rather than consent to achieve that protection. Recovering Police Legitimacy challenges conventional criminological, political, and public solutions to the problem by approaching it from the bottom up"--.

This paper examines racial discrimination and algorithmic bias in predictive policing algorithms (PPAs), an emerging technology designed to predict threats and suggest solutions in law enforcement. We first describe what discrimination is in a case study of Chicago’s PPA. We then explain their causes with Broadbent’s contrastive model of causation and causal diagrams. Based on the cognitive science literature, we also explain why fairness is not an objective truth discoverable in laboratories but has context-sensitive social meanings that need to be (...) negotiated through democratic processes. With the above analysis, we next predict why some recommendations given in the bias reduction literature are not as effective as expected. Unlike the cliché highlighting equal participation for all stakeholders in predictive policing, we emphasize power structures to avoid hermeneutical lacunae. Finally, we aim to control PPA discrimination by proposing a governance solution—a framework of a social safety net. (shrink)

The use of deception and dishonesty is widely accepted as a fact of life in policing. This paper thus defends a counterintuitive claim: Good faith is a normative foundation for the police as a political institution. Good faith is a core value of contracts, and policing is contractual in nature both broadly (as a matter of social contract theory) and narrowly (in regard to concrete encounters between law enforcement officers and the public). Given the centrality of good faith to policing, (...) dishonesty and deception on par with fraud are justified only as a narrowly circumscribed investigative tool that is constrained by institutional commitments to the fair distribution of security and the rule of law. The practical upshot is the preclusion of most dishonest and deceptive police tactics on par with fraud, leading to an institution that is less proactive and more reactive. (shrink)

In many jurisdictions in the United States and elsewhere, the law governing deadly force by police and civilians contains a notable asymmetry. Often civilians but not police are bound by the imminence requirement—that is, a necessary condition for justifying deadly force is reasonable belief that oneself or another innocent person faces imminent threat of grave harm. In U.S. law enforcement, however, there has been some shift toward the imminence requirement, most evident in the use-of-force policy adopted by the Department of (...) Justice in 2022. This article defends that shift and argues that the ethical case for the imminence requirement in policing is stronger than Shannon Brandt Ford suggests in a recent article. Though the imminence requirement’s impacts on policing and public safety require ongoing study, the principle of equality before the law and the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing both provide moral grounds for this requirement, especially given the lack of evidence that the status quo helps protect life. (shrink)

When police abuse their duties, it undermines the state's internal security. It creates a crisis of legitimacy of police because people detest them for their abuse and tyranny. In 1957, IACP (the International Association of Chiefs of Police) developed an ethics tool Code of Ethics for law enforcement. Nevertheless, training has been focused and emphasized on techniques and tactics of policing. Ethics is not the part of presell of the training. The Code of Ethics is pronounced once in a life (...) only during pass-out day. Police face dilemmas in real-time situations with people and society. This is why, this article is concerned with ethics a tool, and procedures to reduce police abuse. (shrink)

This chapter argues that just policing requires attention to the complexity of the social world. Attempts at social control are fraught, and we should expect them to produce injustices of their own. But it is important to understand the nature of the injustices. They are often the result of honest political disagreements or the result of small problems in one social system interacting with problems in others and creating new or amplifying existing injustices. Policing is coupled with key social arrangements (...) at all levels of society, so pathologies in other social arrangements can affect the justice of policing and vice versa. Unintended consequences, misaligned incentives, and feedback loops are the rule rather than the exception. This chapter argues that police discretion is an essential tool in avoiding many of the injustices arising from complexity and coupling. (shrink)

This chapter begins by recapping difficulties in offering a theoretical account of police legitimacy and outlining a Millian dilemma for democratic authorization. This enables an evaluation of extant attempts at securing democratic authorization via participatory democracy mechanisms found in community policing strategies. It argues that they are either underspecified or do not address relevant procedural concerns about democratic authorization, and so are not promising avenues for democratic policing. Indeed, many of them have predictable dynamics that exacerbate democratic authorization for policing (...) by enabling unequal political power. The rest of the chapter is dedicated to a positive account of how policing can secure democratic authorization, one that relies on both electoral and non-electoral mechanisms. The choice between democratic, faithful enforcement of the criminal code and anti-democratic, discretionary policing is a false one. (shrink)

This chapter argues that a principle of liberal neutrality constrains order maintenance policing. Many cities are confronted with purportedly disorderly use of public space. These are among the most difficult problems for police to handle, but cities increasingly rely on them for solutions. This chapter argues that the just maintenance of order requires judicious use of police discretion informed by the principle of neutrality, and often requires declining to invoke police authority, in service of protecting pluralism and diverse ways of (...) living. There are ineliminable disagreements over the acceptable use of public space, and such disagreement is an example of pluralism that diverse societies must tolerate or even embrace. This implies that police must opt for strategies of _containment_, rather than dispersing contentious uses of space. Finally, the dynamic nature of cities requires a presumption of deference to the established uses of public and private space. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the unavoidable reality of discretionary non-enforcement undermines the legalist account of police legitimacy. Comprehensive administrative oversight of officers is unlikely; fully determinate criminal codes are impossible; resource scarcity precludes a stable full enforcement strategy. Societies incur huge normative costs when they turn to actual full enforcement, zero tolerance strategies. This means that the criminal code, surprisingly, is ill-suited to justify police power. It simply underdetermines it. Good faith enforcement requirements leave policing similarly underdetermined. Analogues to positions (...) developed in just war theory, appeals to the rule of law, and proceduralist arguments do not show that police discretion is illegitimate or unjust. If police discretion is unavoidable and in principle permissible, we need an evaluative framework for determining just policing, and for determining how police can legitimately exercise their discretion. (shrink)

This chapter argues that police must exercise their discretion to avoid high legitimacy-risk policing. Police discretion is unavoidable, so a theory of just policing requires involves an account of just police discretion. But in practice, people tend to meet the expectations of their role. Part of what makes policing a moral morass is the lack of clarity over the policing role. The questions unanswered by the criminal code also leave the police role underspecified. This chapter argues for the importance of (...) using rules and defined roles to organize our social lives. Then it makes the case for a separation of executive, police powers. This is in service of developing a framework for understanding the risks to just and legitimate policing. Understanding the various risks and how they interact motivates conceptual and institutional boundaries for police power. (shrink)

This chapter defends a substantive principle of justice that constrains the enforcement of the criminal code. One of the main concerns about police discretion is procedural: it is anti-democratic, or exercises legislative power, or violates legislative primacy. This chapter argues that the substantive principle of proportionality, one that uncontroversially constrains the execution of democratic orders in war, also constrains the enforcement of the criminal code. It then outlines a partial theory of permissible self and other-defense and applies it to the (...) police. This has far-reaching implications: many burdensome police initiatives are ruled unjust, including those that are unlikely to accomplish their goals, that are counterproductive, and those that target state-generated violations. Policing that enforces the law without concern for principles of defensive force, like proportionality, is unjust. (shrink)

Diverse and dynamic societies face a problem of social control. Institutions of social control, of which the police are a part, are a necessary part of just and legitimate governance. But in our non-ideal world they are also responsible for injustices of their own. This project raises questions of political philosophy as they apply to the professional police agency. It begins by constructing an inchoate, but mainstream view about just policing, legalism, according to which police power is justified by the (...) criminal code, and just policing is just the faithful enforcement of law. This view is undermined by the practical realities of policing, which involves widespread and unavoidable police discretion. It then develops an account of just and legitimate police discretion, including principles of proportionality, liberal neutrality, and democratic responsiveness. This sheds lights on controversial police tactics, order maintenance initiatives, and community policing strategies. This account also informs the just institutional arrangement of police powers, informing ongoing debates about police reform and abolition. (shrink)

The way police exercise their power depends in part on their incentives and agency structure. This chapter argues that the form of police agencies is essential for just and legitimate policing, and for guiding officers to minimize legitimacy risks. The argument begins with a diagnosis of the injustices of _criminal patrol_: the structure of police agencies contributed to the blending of high-legitimacy-risk police goals and tactics. The multifunctional, generalist nature of the police agency and the patrol officer enabled a plurality (...) of officers to take up an unjust operational style. Not only are preventive patrol and criminal investigation distinct political powers, we also have reason to make finer distinctions according to legitimacy-risk profiles. The rise of criminal patrol motivates institutional boundaries to prevent the exercise of criminal patrol powers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of agency reform informed by the author’s account of just policing. (shrink)