{"id":13009,"date":"2011-03-18T14:58:01","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T19:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=13009"},"modified":"2011-03-18T14:59:07","modified_gmt":"2011-03-18T19:59:07","slug":"doubts-about-deference-to-police-hunches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2011\/03\/doubts-about-deference-to-police-hunches\/","title":{"rendered":"Doubts About Deference to Police Hunches"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the course of the past decade or so, legal scholars have been paying increasing attention to psychological research on cognition and decisionmaking.\u00a0 In general, this has meant that scholars have become more sensitive to the common sorts of cognitive bias that have the potential to\u00a0warp legal decisionmaking.\u00a0 But, inspired in many cases by Malcolm Gladwell\u2019s\u00a02005 best-seller\u00a0Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking<\/em>, another line of psychology-influenced legal scholarship seeks to harness the insights available through subconscious mental processes.\u00a0 As Gladwell demonstrated, hunches can be amazingly\u00a0accurate in many contexts, particularly hunches by experts.\u00a0 This has led to arguments that courts ought to be quite deferential to police officers seeking warrants or testifying at suppression hearings \u2014 demanding rigorous justifications for officers\u2019 suspicions, the argument goes, might cause officers not to rely on their hunches as much, which might be detrimental to effective policing.<\/p>\n

Andrew Taslitz responds critically to this line of thinking in a helpful new article, Police Are People Too: Cognitive Obstacles to, and Opportunities for, Police Getting the Individualized Suspicion Judgment Right<\/em>, 8 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 7 (2010).<\/a>\u00a0 Taslitz first outlines the many sources of cognitive bias that seem likely to\u00a0infect police suspicions\u00a0in many common circumstances, particularly white police officers interacting with minorities in high-crime neighborhoods.\u00a0 As even Gladwell recognized, hunches are not foolproof and can be led astray by superficial appearances and other irrelevant cues.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

(My own summary of Gladwell\u2019s thought-provoking but mostly inconclusive book would be, \u201cHunches are more reliable than conscious deliberation except when they are not.\u201d)\u00a0 Taslitz then argues that robust explanation requirements for officers can help to diminish the negative effects of cognitive bias without sacrificing the power of hunches.\u00a0 He concludes:<\/p>\n

Perhaps this article\u2019s most important points are that reviewing courts should demand serious, thorough explanations from officers, who must justify their search and seizure decisions, and courts should not also readily defer to conclusory assertions of police intuition. Although the justification requirement is already part of the legal landscape, this article suggests that a more robust version of the requirement is often desirable. That robust version must also take more seriously the command that what police must justify is particularized, not generalized, suspicion. Cognitive science thus suggests that arguments for courts giving even more deference to police search and seizure judgments than is currently true should be rejected.\u00a0 (78)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One reason\u00a0I find Taslitz\u2019s analysis attractive\u00a0is doubtlessly because it echoes some of my own work on sentencing.\u00a0 I\u2019ve argued in favor of rigorous explanation requirements for sentencing judges in order to diminish the effects of cognitive bias (e.g., here<\/a>), and I\u2019ve expressed much skepticism about applying the Blink <\/em>model to sentencing (e.g., here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

There is at least one source of bias that Taslitz discusses that I have probably not devoted adequate attention to in the sentencing context: the fundamental attribution error.\u00a0 Here is what Taslitz says:<\/p>\n

This error is the tendency, especially in American culture, to judge an individual\u2018s actions as stemming from fundamental personality traits rather than from the situation in which she finds herself. Moreover, people are willing to make quick and confident judgments of a subject\u2018s personality trait based on a very limited data sample. They will also overgeneralize, treating one perceived negative personality trait as indicative of an overall negative personality across many criteria.<\/p>\n

Many early judgments of this kind are based on facial expressions. If, therefore, someone in a rush believes that he has been unjustly stopped by the police, the stopee may react with an angry or irritated scowl. There is a good chance that the officer will interpret the person stopped as being unsociable, unfriendly, unsympathetic, cold, [and] forceful. These traits may lead the officer to dislike the person stopped and to suspect him of wrongdoing.\u00a0 (17)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Comparable dangers seem quite likley in the sentencing context, too.\u00a0 One of the great dangers of incapacitation-based approaches to sentencing is that a\u00a0judge will too quickly reach the decision that a defendant is a \u201cbad person\u201d based on a few situation-dependent\u00a0bad acts, or even just bad demeanor in the courtroom.\u00a0 For that reason, if incapacitation is to be regarded as a legitimate purpose of punishment, it should be based on objective, actuarial guidelines, rather than judicial hunches about recidivism risk.<\/p>\n

Cross posted at Life Sentences Blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the course of the past decade or so, legal scholars have been paying increasing attention to psychological research on cognition and decisionmaking.\u00a0 In general, this has meant that scholars have become more sensitive to the common sorts of cognitive bias that have the potential to\u00a0warp legal decisionmaking.\u00a0 But, inspired in many cases by Malcolm 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