Beyond Bad Apples: Exploring the Legal Determinants of Police Violence

Police use of excessive force has been a longstanding concern for communities of color. When scholars, politicians, and observers endeavor to identify the causes of racially disproportionate police violence, they often land on police officers’ individual biases or insufficient processes within police departments for responding to excessive uses of force by individual police officers.

Certainly, there is substantial research to support the claim that discriminatory attitudes can shape officers’ decision making. But the focus on “bad apples” and inadequate organizational responses to them often leaves law uninterrogated. Consequently, reform measures often focus on combating personal and departmental biases without fully acknowledging how the law puts police in the position to exert violence in communities of color with impunity.

This conference uses the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Graham v. Connor—which shifted the constitutional discourse on what constitutes police excessive force to an “objectively reasonable” standard and cabined the inquiry to the Fourth Amendment—to extend the conversation on the causes of police violence in a manner that focuses on the law.

Conference Organizers