Criminal Law & Process – Page 44 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Nationally, Police Get Good Marks From Citizens; Locally, We’ll Soon Find Out

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:November 3, 2013
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Milwaukee Public Race & Law

Last week, the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission announced that it would conduct its first survey of citizen satisfaction with the police. The results should provide us with helpful new ways to evaluate the Milwaukee Police Department’s performance and identify areas in need of improvement.

Unfortunately, media coverage provides a very distorted picture of police-citizen interactions. What makes the news, of course, are the incidents in which officers become violent or exhibit extreme callousness. When video is available of such incidents, as is increasingly common, the disturbing images may be repeated endlessly on TV or circulate virally on social media. Viewers may be left with the impression that such incidents are the norm. However, the vast majority of police-citizen interactions occur without anything newsworthy happening. Among other things, the Fire and Police Commission’s new survey should give us a much better sense of what happens in the more routine interactions and how those interactions affect public perceptions of the police.

Although data of this sort have not been available for Milwaukee specifically, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics did sponsor a national survey in 2011 regarding police-citizens interactions. The results, released in two reports earlier this fall, indicate a remarkably high level of citizen satisfaction, even among the minority groups who seem to bear the brunt of the high-profile incidents of police misconduct.

Thoughts on the Holder Address: Two Cheers for the New Paradigm

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:October 26, 2013
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Federal Criminal Law & Process Federal Sentencing Public

In August, Attorney General Eric Holder delivered a widely noted address to the American Bar Association that seemed to promise significant changes in federal prosecutorial policies. I wrote these reactions for the Federal Sentencing Reporter.

Following decades in which the U.S. Department of Justice has consistently advocated for a rigid and harsh legalism in criminal justice policy—in which DOJ, in the name of abstract principles of national uniformity, has willfully disregarded the devastating impact of its charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing practices on real-life human beings—Attorney General Holder’s ABA address seems a breath of fresh air. He calls for a more flexible federal criminal justice system, in which prosecutorial charging priorities are more specifically tailored to meet local needs, in which sentencing is more individualized to the offender and prosecutors sometimes forego mandatory minimum sentences, and in which individual U.S. Attorney Offices experiment with new diversion programs as an alternative to conventional case-processing. Holder believes—correctly, I think—that a more flexible and pragmatic system can achieve better public-safety results at less cost than a system in which preserving the integrity of the federal sentencing guidelines is the overriding value.

Through Holder’s address, DOJ offers its most prominent and unequivocal endorsement yet of an emerging new criminal justice paradigm.

A History of the Mug Shot

Post author:David R. Papke
Post published:October 16, 2013
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Legal History Privacy Rights Public

Al Capone mugshot Some of the very earliest photographs from the late 1830s are of alleged and/or convicted criminals, and law enforcement officials used photographs of criminals in Belgium as early as the 1840s to track down wrong-doers. In Paris, a clerk in the Prefecture of Police Office originated the “mug shot” as we usually imagine it — two shots side by side, with one shot being a frontal shot and the other being a profile.

This so-called “Bertillon System” was displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and it quickly caught on with American urban police departments. It was an age of science, and some thought of the mug shot as a useful component in “scientific law enforcement.” Indeed, there are surviving efforts by police departments to superimpose photographs of certain types of criminals on top of one another. We could then, theoretically, have distilled images of, to note only two of many possibilities, the typical pickpocket or typical forger.

In the present, mug shots are still with us, but we now live in an era in which the market rather than science is seen by many as our savior. It is possible to round up mug shots from public records and post them regardless of whether the pictured individuals have been prosecuted and/or convicted.