Police: History, Discretion, and the Legal Standards for Stops, Searches, and Force
The police domain tests the authority officers exercise - stops, arrests, searches, interrogations, and force - along with the organizational history and styles of policing. Questions are usually fact patterns asking which legal standard applies.
Foundations and eras
- Peel's Metropolitan Police (1829) stressed prevention and public consent.
- American eras: political (patronage), professional (Vollmer; centralized, crime-fighting), community and problem-oriented policing (SARA: scanning, analysis, response, assessment), then intelligence-led and hot-spot approaches.
- Wilson's styles: watchman, legalistic, service.
Legal standards
- Terry stop: reasonable suspicion, based on articulable facts, of ongoing or imminent crime. A frisk is limited to weapons when the officer reasonably suspects the person is armed and dangerous.
- Arrest: probable cause.
- Warrant: probable cause plus particularity. Exceptions include search incident to arrest, automobile (probable cause plus mobility), plain view, consent, exigency, and inventory.
- Exclusionary rule: Mapp v. Ohio applied it to the states; evidence derived from illegality is fruit of the poisonous tree; the good-faith exception (United States v. Leon) covers reliance on a facially valid warrant.
- Interrogation: Miranda applies to custody plus interrogation; voluntariness is always required.
- Force: Graham v. Connor uses objective reasonableness under the totality - severity of the crime, immediate threat, resisting or fleeing. Tennessee v. Garner allows deadly force only when the suspect poses a significant threat.
- Entrapment: government inducement plus lack of predisposition.
Worked example
An officer sees a car matching a burglary broadcast, stops it, and spots a crowbar in plain view on the back seat. The stop rests on reasonable suspicion; the crowbar needs no warrant under plain view; the arrest needs probable cause, supplied by the matching description plus the tool. A trunk search would need probable cause plus the automobile exception, not search incident to arrest.
Traps that cost marks
Saying probable cause is needed for a Terry stop; assuming Miranda applies to all questioning; treating the good-faith exception as curing an obviously invalid warrant; confusing Garner's deadly-force rule with Graham's general test.