Race and the Decision to Detain a Suspect
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23231597 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sheri L Johnson (0000-0002-9945-4816, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1983 |
| Volume | 93 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 214 |
| Publication date | 1983-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Yale Law Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0044-0094 • E-ISSN: 1939-8611 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/796306 |
| OpenAlex | W27169727 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Thirty years ago police stopped Malcolm X because he was a black man in a white neighborhood.'A revolution in civil rights later, police still view race as an important factor in the decision to detain a suspect.The facts behind the recent Supreme Court case of Kolender v. Lawson = 2 are instructive: During a two-year period, Edward Lawson, a law-abiding black citizen with a penchant for strolling through white neighborhoods, was detained or arrested fifteen times under a California statute requiring "suspicious" persons to identify themselves to a policeman's satisfaction.Even more disturbing than this persistent discrimination is the limited and ambivalent response it has evoked from the courts.The judicial reaction to other disquieting indicia of suspicion, such as youth, a "hippie" appearance, or presence in a "crime-prone" neighborhood, has been similarly disorganized.The Supreme Court has developed a two-tier standard for measuring the legality of a detention: The prosecution must establish "probable cause" to justify a full custodial arrest and it must show "reasonable suspicion" to justify an investigatory stop and frisk.'Both concepts focus on
Criminology · Race (biology) · Sociology · Suspect · Gender Studies · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.22 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1999 - 2021 (23) |
| Highly cited | No |