From Selma to Ferguson

Yesterday the Department of Justice sued Ferguson, Missouri, following the collapse of the settlement to overhaul that city's police department to remedy a long history of civil rights abuses. Stephen Rushin (who teaches at the University of Alabama and is an expert on police reform) and I have just finished a draft article on federal responses to police misconduct. Given the widespread nature of police misconduct and failures of past reform efforts, we offer a new way forward. The article draft is titled From Selma to Ferguson: The Voting Rights Act as a Blueprint for Police Reform and the abstract is as follows:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 revolutionized access to the voting booth. Rather than responding to claims of voter suppression through litigation against individual states or counties, the Voting Rights Act introduced a coverage formula that preemptively regulated a large number of localities across the country. In doing so, the Voting Rights Act replaced reactive, piecemeal litigation with a proactive structure of continual federal oversight. As the most successful civil rights law in the nation’s history, the Voting Rights Act provides a blueprint for responding to one of the most pressing civil rights problems the country faces today: police misconduct. As with voter suppression in the mid-twentieth century, abusive police conduct against minority citizens is a national problem perpetrated by thousands of localities. Federal efforts to cure the problem through litigation against individual police departments have failed to produce widespread reform. This Article applies the lessons of the Voting Rights Act in proposing the use of a coverage formula to identify and regulate local police departments engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional misconduct. While this proposal would significantly enhance federal power over police departments, such a change is both necessary to curb police misconduct and constitutionally permissible.