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100 B.U. L. Rev. 895 (2020)
To Serve and Protect Each Other: How Police-Prosecutor Codependence Enables Police Misconduct

handle is hein.journals/bulr100 and id is 913 raw text is: TO SERVE AND PROTECT EACH OTHER: HOW POLICE-PROSECUTOR CODEPENDENCE ENABLES POLICE MISCONDUCT SOMIL TRIVEDI' & NICOLE GONZALEZ VAN CLEVE ABSTRACT MostAmericans are rightly enraged when police shoot unarmed civilians, use excessive force, or engage in unethical practices like planting evidence. However, there is little popular understanding and scholarly attention as to why prosecutors fail to charge or otherwise hold officers accountable. This Article offers a novel contribution to the study of police misconduct by examining how prosecutors nationwide enable police misconduct on an institutional level. Through both social-scientific and legal analysis, we consider the codependent relationship between prosecutors and police that prevents accountability for police violence and misconduct against the public. Specifically, we analyze (1) the cultural norms created between police and prosecutors that allow police to influence prosecutorial discretion over police accountability and (2) the legal and extralegal tools that prosecutors wield to protect their police benefactors- and themselves in the process. In contrast to other scholarship on police misconduct, we show how adjacent criminal justice institutions-police and prosecutors-enable persistent patterns of practice that operate within the boundaries of legality, but often to deadly and unethical ends. We end with potential solutions to better equip conscientious prosecutors, lawmakers, and the public to combat this codependent dynamic that has left so many communities-particularly those on the margins-afraid of the very law enforcement actors that are supposed to protect them. * Somil Trivedi is a Senior Staff Attorney in the Criminal Law Reform Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. * Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Brown University and an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, Illinois. She is the author of two books, CROOK COUNTY: RACISM AND INJUSTICE IN AMERICA'S LARGEST CRIMINAL COURT (2016) and THE WAITING ROOM (2018). The authors would like to thank Professors Khiara Bridges, Tracey Maclin, and Osagie Obasogie and the Boston University Law Review for convening the Beyond Bad Apples symposium. They would also like to thank their colleagues and families for personal and professional support, as well as the advocates inside and outside law enforcement fighting for a smarter vision of justice. Both authors contributed equally to this work. Coauthors are noted in alphabetical order. 895

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