Gabriel Mendlow (Michigan): Justifying the Police: A Theory of the Crime Fighting Power

Gabriel Mendlow is a professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan Law School, and will be giving the third paper of Trinity Term: “Justifying the Police: A Theory of the Crime Fighting Power".

Abstract:

When the police nip crime in the bud or stop it in its tracks, they exercise what I call the crime fighting power, the power to prevent or disrupt crime using physical force or an authoritative command backed by the explicit or implicit threat of physical force. Police exercise the crime fighting power when they take a drunk person’s car keys and make her walk home; when they command a vandal to put away his can of spray paint; when they pull stolen property from a thief’s hands and return it to its owner; when they order a trespasser to get off private property; when they grab an underground rider’s open container of alcohol and toss it in the trash; when they seize someone’s prohibited weapons or chemicals. If punishment manifests the state’s authority to enforce the criminal law ex post, exercises of the crime fighting power manifest the state’s authority to enforce the criminal law ex ante.

Incarcerating someone might seem at first blush a far more problematic use of force by the state than a police officer taking a underground rider’s ill-concealed container of alcohol: incarceration limits a person’s freedom comprehensively and may last for decades, whereas an exercise of the crime fighting power is brief and often experienced as an irritant rather than as a profound personal intrusion (often, but far from always). Yet there are at least two reasons why crime fighting presents a distinct normative problem, and, in its way, a harder problem. One is that the typical case of crime fighting is supremely discretionary and all but free of any formal process. The other is that crime fighting as permitted by law is often painful and injurious on purpose. Punishment is often painful and injurious, too. But it isn’t supposed to be—not in a contemporary liberal state, anyway, and not by design.

The essay begins by explaining how the crime fighting power is conceptually and normatively independent from other familiar powers of the police, and why we might want the police to retain the crime fighting power even if legal regulation can mitigate the power’s dangers only imperfectly. The essay then considers how we might attempt to justify the crime fighting power to those whose interests it invades, and how the principles undergirding an adequate justification might serve to limit and constrain the power’s proper exercise.

This seminar takes place in Massey Room, at Balliol College, University of Oxford (Broad St, Oxford OX1 3BJ) at 5:00pm on Thursday 8 May.

This event is open to anyone. No registration needed.

Pre-reading is desirable and strongly suggested, but not a requirement to attend.

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