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47 Crime & Delinquency 3 (2001)

handle is hein.journals/cadq47 and id is 1 raw text is: 




Assessing Legal Liabilities in

Law Enforcement: Police Chiefs' Views



      Michael S. Vaughn
      Tab   W.  Cooper
      Rolando V. del Carmen


      Texas mandates 40 hours of law enforcement management and leadership training bian-
      nually for police chiefs. To implement this requirement, from October 1997 to August
      1999, the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas held 22 statewide training
      classes. During the training, we administered a survey on legal liabilities in law enforce-
      ment, in which 808 usable surveys were completed. Amassing the largest data set on legal
      liabilities in law enforcement, this article reports results from that survey and documents
      the chiefs' perceptions ofthe prevalence of civil litigation, fear of litigation, type ofsuits
      filed by members of the public as well as by their own officers, and issues surrounding
      settlements, policy and procedure changes, training, indemnification, and lawsuit pre-
      vention. The article concludes that nationwide systematic data collection should be
      undertaken on legal liabilities in law enforcement so the public becomes better informed
      about this important aspect of police work

      Civil liability is a major concern for law enforcement officials and local
governmental   entities. Some police lament liability litigation because it may
limit aggressive police actions, giving law enforcement officers pause before
engaging  in activities that might violate citizens' rights. They say that suing
a police department  and  local government  has burgeoned   into a hearty cot-
tage industry throughout the nation, resulting in a state of lawsuit paranoia
that purportedly hinders, hampers,  constricts, and otherwise handicaps  the
effective operation  of law  enforcement   agencies  (Young,   1996a,  p. 8).
Arguing  that the specter of civil liability does little to deter police miscon-
duct, Love  (1998, p. 45) contends that the current legal landscape only pro-
vides  sporadic windfall  to a few  lucky plaintiffs and plaintiffs' attorneys
(Olson,   1996). This   school  of thought  believes  that  the case-by-case


MICHAEL S.   VAUGHN:   Department of Criminal Justice, Georgia State University. TAB W.
COOPER:   Law  Enforcement Management Institute, Criminal Justice Center, Sam Houston
State University. ROLANDO V. DEL CARMEN:   College of Criminal Justice, Sam Houston
State University.
   An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2000 Academy of Criminal Justice Sci-
ences meeting held in New Orleans, Louisiana.
CRIME & DELINQUENCY,  Vol. 47 No. 1, January 2001 3-27
0 2001 Sage Publications, Inc.
                                                                             3


from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

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