Professors Bennett Capers and Benjamin Zipursky, along with Harvard Law Professor John C.P. Goldberg, wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post on how states can implement police reform without changes to federal laws.
The good news is that changing federal law is not the only way to erase the grave accountability deficit for unlawful police violence. There’s an alternative hiding in plain sight: state law.
While no state can change federal law, each state has the authority to change its own rules. State tort law has long empowered individuals who have been choked, shot or maimed to sue the person who victimized them. And, while the states have their own sorry track record when it comes to police accountability, it is the prerogative of state lawmakers — not the federal government — to change rules of state law that stand in the way of imposing legal responsibility for police violence.
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While advocates should continue to press for federal law reform, the people’s representatives in state capitals need not and should not wait for this to happen. It is time to put pressure on states to dismantle the immunities they have long maintained for police officers, police departments and municipalities. The drive for federal protection originated precisely because states had failed to enforce their own laws on behalf of people of color. Now is the moment to rectify that failing.