Unreasonable Black lives, police power, and the fourth amendment

Devon W. Carbado

Book - 2022

"Published on the second anniversary of the global protests over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, UNREASONABLE is a ground-breaking investigation of the role that the U.S. Constitution plays in the epidemic of police violence against Black people. In this crucially timely book, celebrated legal scholar Devon W. Carbado explains how the Fourth Amendment became ground zero for regulating police conduct -- more important than Miranda warnings, the right to counsel, equal protection, and due process. Fourth Amendment law determines when and how the police can make arrests, stop-and-frisk, conduct traffic stops, and employ deadly force -- and Fourth Amendment law legitimizes the treatment of Black people as what the b...ook calls 'runaway criminals.' Drawing on the narratives behind and the outcomes of key Supreme Court cases that everyone should know, Carbado shows how, in the last four decades, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment to protect police officers, not African Americans; how the Fourth Amendment sanctions racialized policing; and how that amendment has become a body of constitutional law that manages the precarious line between stopping Black people and killing Black people. Accessible, compelling, and essential reading, UNREASONABLE offers a 'people's' account of the Fourth Amendment that sheds light on a critical but rarely understood dimension of a pressing social issue."--The book jacket.

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  • Prologue
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1. Pedestrian Checks
  • Chapter 2. Traffic Stops
  • Chapter 3. Stop-and-Frisk
  • Chapter 4. Stop-and-Strip
  • Chapter 5. Predatory Policing
  • Chapter 6. Unreasonable
  • Chapter 7. Reasonable
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

UCLA Law professor Carbado (coauthor, Acting White?) contends in this astute legal analysis that the Supreme Court has degraded the Fourth Amendment by giving law enforcement extraordinary powers to stop, frisk, and intrusively search Black citizens. Illustrating the degree to which constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures have been weakened, Carbado takes a fictional Black woman named Tanya through a series of police interactions to show how, even without any "objective reason" to suspect her of illicit activity, officers can follow, question, search, and surveil her without violating the Fourth Amendment. Elsewhere, Carbado argues the Supreme Court's "colorblind" approach to police power ignores the real-life relationship between the Black community and law enforcement; convincingly disputes the court's insistence--in 1991's Florida v. Bostick and other cases--that people approached by the police feel free "to decline officers' requests or otherwise terminate the encounter" without being informed of their right to do so; and documents how the wide leeway the court gives police to use minor traffic infractions as a pretext to search for drugs and other criminal violations disproportionately affects people of color. Enriched by Carbado's accessible analysis of court rulings and judicious selection of case studies, this is a powerful indictment of the criminal justice system. (Mar.)

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