Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2020 Race and Reasonableness in Police Killings Jeffrey A. Fagan Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Alexis D. Campbell Columbia Human Rights Law Review,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, Criminal Law Commons, Criminal Procedure Commons, Law and Race Commons, Law and Society Commons, Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons, and the Race and Ethnicity Commons Recommended Citation Jeffrey A. Fagan & Alexis D. Campbell, Race and Reasonableness in Police Killings, 100 B.U. L. REV. 951 (2020). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2656 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. RACE AND REASONABLENESS IN POLICE KILLINGS JEFFREY FAGAN & ALEXIS D. CAMPBELL ABSTRACT Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias.