To Make Black Lives Matter, We Must Tear Down the Case Law that Gave Police the Power to Stop, Search, and Abuse
This piece originally appeared at .
Something is missing from the debate over police reform. Though police killings of Black men have sparked a nationwide movement to stop police violence, the police can fairly ask whether they deserve all of the blame.
That鈥檚 not because current levels of police violence are warranted (they aren鈥檛), or because policing is race neutral (it isn鈥檛). It鈥檚 because the chief architects of American policing are not police departments; they鈥檙e courts. The movement for police reform should be joined by an equally ambitious movement for court reform.
Courts have shaped American policing by defanging the Fourth Amendment鈥檚 prohibition on 鈥�.鈥� Because the term 鈥渦nreasonable鈥� is unclear, courts have had to decide which police intrusions, beyond the blatantly arbitrary, go too far. And the U.S. Supreme Court鈥檚 consistent answer has been that scarcely anything goes too far.
Perhaps most important, the court held in that the Fourth Amendment permits officers to use any violation, like a broken tail light, as a pretext to stop people they deem suspicious. This decision, which just reached its , helped cement modern-day racial profiling.
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