![handle is hein.journals/wflron3 and id is 1 raw text is: WHY POLICE LEARN FROM THIRD-PARTY DATA
Randall K. Johnson*
INTRODUCTION
Does lawsuit data collection deter police misconduct lawsuits?
One might think so, judging from recent scholarship on police
accountability and deterrence.1 The best of this work argues that
police learn from lawsuit data collection, without actually proving the
point.2 While I agree with the premise that law enforcement agencies
may learn from better and more complete information, there is little
proof that lawsuit data collection deters police misconduct lawsuits.3
As a result, additional research is necessary in order to support or to
deny this claim.
I modeled and tested this claim in a recent paper: Do Police Learn
from Lawsuit Data?4 My paper introduced a new § 1983 dataset5 in
order to determine if lawsuit data collection correlates with better
deterrence of published misconduct cases. This dataset drew on
10,044 cases that were brought against twenty-six U.S. law
enforcement agencies.6 I matched these published cases with police
* J.D. 2012, University of Chicago Law School; M.U.P. 2006, New York
University; M.Sc. 2003, London School of Economics; B.A. 2000, University of
Michigan. Special thanks to Amos Jones, Taimoor Aziz, and Lionel Foster.
1. See, e.g., Myriam E. Gilles, In Defense of Making Government Pay: The
Deterrent Effect of Constitutional Tort Remedies, 35 GA. L. REV. 845, 853 (2001).
2. See, e.g., Joanna C. Schwartz, Myths and Mechanics of Deterrence: The
Role of Lawsuits in Law Enforcement Decisionmaking, 57 UCLA L. REV. 1023,
1086 (2010) [hereinafter Schwartz, Myths and Mechanics]; Joanna C. Schwartz,
What Police Learn from Lawsuits, 33 CARDOZo L. REV. 841, 890 (2012)
[hereinafter Schwartz, What Police Learn].
3. See generally VICTOR E. KAPPELER, CRITICAL ISSUES IN POLICE CIVIL
LIABILITY (3d ed. 2001).
4. Randall K. Johnson, Do Police Learn from Lawsuit Data?, 40 RUTGERS L.
REV. 30, 36 (2012).
5. The primary vehicle for asserting federal claims against local public
entities and public employees is the Civil Rights Act of 1871, 42 U.S.C. §1983.
[The statute's] broad language ... led to its present status as the primary source
of redress for a wide variety of governmental abuses. Robert W. Funk et al.,
Civil Rights Liability, in ILLINOIS MUNICIPAL LAw: CONTRACTS, LITIGATION AND
HOME RULE (2012 ed.)
6. Johnson, supra note 4, at 35. I used LexisNexis Advance to perform the
research, and I searched using the following legal search terms: Villa /s Rica /s
Police; Farmington /s Police; New /s York /s Police; District /s Columbia /s Police;
Boise /s Police; Philadelphia /s Police; San /s Jose /s Police; New /s Orleans /s
Police; Buffalo /s Police; Chicago /s Police; Cincinnati /s Police; Nashville /s Police;
Albuquerque /s Police; Prince /s Georges /s County /s Police; Portland /s Police;
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