The role of lawsuits in law enforcement decision making.
By Joanna C. Schwartz:
Drawing on extensive documentary evidence and interviews, this Article finds that officials rarely have much useful information about suits alleging officer misconduct. Some departments intentionally ignore information from suits. The small number of departments with formal policies to gather data from lawsuits characteristically falter in the implementation phase. Technological kinks, employee error, and deliberate efforts to sabotage data collection combine to undermine other department's limited efforts to gather information.
Over two-thirds of police departments and over 80 percent of sheriff's departments with more than one thousand sworn officers have no computerized system to track lawsuits brought against them. Even less frequently do law enforcement agencies investigate claims made in lawsuits, review closed litigation files, or consider the dispositions of cases.
If we embrace the potential impact of information from suits on law enforcement behavior, however, there remains a gap between where we are now and where we might one day be. Until that gap closes, the information failures revealed in my study should lead us to reconsider certain assumptions in judicial opinions and scholarship. No longer should we facilely—and inaccurately—consider it “almost axiomatic” that lawsuits deter.
Even when departments do gather information about lawsuits, they rarely take note of who wins, or how much they win. Accordingly, these recommended
changes would not alter the data entered into systems currently in place to
gather and analyze information from suits.
Take, for example, Daryl Levinson’s theory that government policymakers
are motivated by political, not financial, concerns, and so are not reliably deterred by lawsuits. Levinson hypothesizes that a police chief will allow his officers to engage in constitutional violations-chokeholds, for example-despite lawsuits against them, until “the costs of permitting chokeholds, quantified in constitutional tort damages paid to people severely injured or killed by the police, would exceed the crime-reduction benefits.” According to Levinson, this same calculation will likely occur regarding any rights that are frequently litigated in civil rights damages actions.
Link: http://uclalawreview.org/pdf/57-4-4.pdf