Due Process of Administration: The Problem of Police Accountability

Details

Author(s):
Publish Date:
October 1, 2014
Publisher:
Stanford Public Law Working Paper
Format:
Working Paper
Citation(s):
  • Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon, Due Process of Administration: The Problem of Police Accountability, Stanford Public Law Working Paper, No. 2507280 (2014).

Abstract

Many contemporary civil rights claims arise from institutional activity that, while troubling, is neither malicious nor egregiously reckless. When law-makers find themselves unable to produce substantive rules for such activity, they often turn to regulating the ways in which actors exercise their discretion. The consequence is an emerging duty of responsible administration that requires managers to actively assess the effects of their conduct on civil rights values and to make reasonable efforts to mitigate harm to protected groups. This doctrinal evolution partially but imperfectly converges with independent developments in public administration. We illustrate the doctrinal and administrative changes with a study of policing. We discuss court-supervised reforms in New York and Cincinnati as examples of contrasting trajectories that these developments can take. Both initiatives are better understood in terms of an implicit duty of responsible administration than as an expression of any particular substantive right. However, the Cincinnati intervention reaches more deeply into core administrative practices and indeed mandates a particular crime control strategy – Problem-Oriented Policing. As such, it typifies a more ambitious type of structural civil-rights intervention that can be found in other areas.