Baldy Center Distinguished Speaker Anna Lvovsky
Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2022 11:53 am
Event schedule and format subject to change, please check The Baldy Center event website for updates and registration: http://www.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/events/calendar.html
Anna Lvovsky (Harvard Law School)
"The Double Lives of Police Professionalism: Police Reform in Practice and in Court"
MARCH 11, 2022—DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
509 O’Brian Hall and via Zoom; 12:30pm
Zoom registration here.
Abstract: Ever since police professionalism rose to the center of debates about police reform in the mid-twentieth century, courts have invoked that concept as a reliable check on police misconduct. Whether trusting internal discipline to scour out misconduct or crediting professional training and norms with ensuring good judgment in the field, judges tout the central platforms of professionalism as bulwarks of legal compliance, supplanting the need for more intrusive remedies. Training a deeper lens of police professionalism, not as a set of top-down tools for constraining police behavior but as a sociological process that shapes officers’ identities and attitudes, this article argues that the central platforms of professionalism—including the same ones celebrated by the courts—have not reliably mitigated police misconduct. They have also, in their own way, themselves exacerbated the leading causes of such abuse, increasing pressures to cut corners, deepening wellsprings of pride and violence, distorting the accuracy of police judgment, and breeding contempt for constitutional rules. Recognizing how professionalism’s positive legacies may be offset and undercut by its less savory psychological effects offers a novel challenge to a range of judicial doctrines resting on faith in professionalized police departments. It also illuminates today’s broader debates about police misconduct, expanding our understandings of the operational downsides of incrementalist reform. Not least, the historical example of police professionalism exemplifies the extent to which the central function of police reform has never simply been to shift police practices. It has always been, simultaneously, to mediate officers’ relationship with other legal actors, in those theaters of accountability where they are called to answer for their conduct. In a system that tasks multiple actors with ensuring that the law is properly enforced, experimenting with technocratic police reform does not simply risk failing to refine the daily operations of policing, or even making those operations worse. It risks reassuring the judges who oversee police behavior that their oversight is no longer necessary, obstructing what existing legal avenues for imposing accountability on the police.
Bio: Anna Lvovsky is an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches American legal history, the history of policing, criminal law, and evidence. Professor Lvovsky’s scholarship focuses on the legal and cultural dimensions of policing, judicial uses of professional knowledge, and the regulation of gender, sexuality, and morality. Her articles on policing and criminal procedure have appeared or are forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
Professor Lvovsky's book, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, recently published by the University of Chicago Press, examines the daily realities and legal contests surrounding the policing of gay communities in the mid-twentieth century. As a dissertation, the project received the 2016 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.
Anna Lvovsky (Harvard Law School)
"The Double Lives of Police Professionalism: Police Reform in Practice and in Court"
MARCH 11, 2022—DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
509 O’Brian Hall and via Zoom; 12:30pm
Zoom registration here.
Abstract: Ever since police professionalism rose to the center of debates about police reform in the mid-twentieth century, courts have invoked that concept as a reliable check on police misconduct. Whether trusting internal discipline to scour out misconduct or crediting professional training and norms with ensuring good judgment in the field, judges tout the central platforms of professionalism as bulwarks of legal compliance, supplanting the need for more intrusive remedies. Training a deeper lens of police professionalism, not as a set of top-down tools for constraining police behavior but as a sociological process that shapes officers’ identities and attitudes, this article argues that the central platforms of professionalism—including the same ones celebrated by the courts—have not reliably mitigated police misconduct. They have also, in their own way, themselves exacerbated the leading causes of such abuse, increasing pressures to cut corners, deepening wellsprings of pride and violence, distorting the accuracy of police judgment, and breeding contempt for constitutional rules. Recognizing how professionalism’s positive legacies may be offset and undercut by its less savory psychological effects offers a novel challenge to a range of judicial doctrines resting on faith in professionalized police departments. It also illuminates today’s broader debates about police misconduct, expanding our understandings of the operational downsides of incrementalist reform. Not least, the historical example of police professionalism exemplifies the extent to which the central function of police reform has never simply been to shift police practices. It has always been, simultaneously, to mediate officers’ relationship with other legal actors, in those theaters of accountability where they are called to answer for their conduct. In a system that tasks multiple actors with ensuring that the law is properly enforced, experimenting with technocratic police reform does not simply risk failing to refine the daily operations of policing, or even making those operations worse. It risks reassuring the judges who oversee police behavior that their oversight is no longer necessary, obstructing what existing legal avenues for imposing accountability on the police.
Bio: Anna Lvovsky is an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches American legal history, the history of policing, criminal law, and evidence. Professor Lvovsky’s scholarship focuses on the legal and cultural dimensions of policing, judicial uses of professional knowledge, and the regulation of gender, sexuality, and morality. Her articles on policing and criminal procedure have appeared or are forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
Professor Lvovsky's book, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, recently published by the University of Chicago Press, examines the daily realities and legal contests surrounding the policing of gay communities in the mid-twentieth century. As a dissertation, the project received the 2016 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.