About This Unit

When police kill, the questions that follow are nearly liturgical: Was it lawful? Will anyone be charged? And — when the answer disappoints — will the city burn? This unit examines police violence against Black Americans as a recurring national crisis with a legal architecture. Devon Carbado's analysis of the Fourth Amendment shows how five decades of Supreme Court doctrine allocated to police the powers to surveil, stop, frisk, and kill with little constitutional friction — making much of what shocks the conscience formally "reasonable." The courts appear here in both of their roles: as the doctrine-makers who structured police power in advance, and as the trial venues where, case after case, acquittals have converted private grief into public conflagration.

The unit's second thread takes the uprisings seriously as politics. From Watts and Detroit through Los Angeles in 1992 to the summer of 2020 — the largest protest mobilization in American history — urban rebellions have been dismissed as riots and policed as crime. Elizabeth Hinton's history reframes them as a sustained political tradition: predictable responses to violent policing, intelligible as rebellion. The Kerner Commission said as much in 1968, in a federal report whose diagnosis — "our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal" — was shelved by the president who commissioned it. Learners work the full circuit: doctrine, killing, verdict, uprising, commission, and the reforms that follow, or fail to.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain how Fourth Amendment doctrine structures police power — stops, frisks, pretextual traffic stops, deadly force — and why most police violence is legal violence.
• Analyze urban uprisings as political events with identifiable triggers, grievances, and logics, rather than as senseless disorder.
• Trace one full cycle from incident through trial to uprising and reform, identifying where each institution — police, prosecutors, courts, commissions — shaped the outcome.
• Interpret police-violence data critically: what is counted, by whom, what the official record misses, and why civilian databases exist at all.

Keywords

• Police violence
• Legal violence
• Fourth Amendment reasonableness
• Legal estrangement
• Urban rebellion
• Consent decrees and pattern-or-practice reform
• Counter-counting

Open Educational Resources

• LA 92. Directed by Daniel Lindsay and T. J. Martin. National Geographic, 2017. Watch the film. Discussion guide.

Documentary film · Open access.

An all-archival reconstruction of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising — no narrator, no talking heads — built from news footage, police radio, and home video: the beating of Rodney King, the trial's move to Simi Valley, the acquittals, and the six days that followed, with the killing of Latasha Harlins and the Watts uprising of 1965 woven through as memory. The form is the argument: viewers assemble causation themselves from the record. Anchors the unit's central case; the distributor's discussion guide structures the viewing.

• Carbado, Devon W. "Race and Police Violence." Recorded presentation, 2019. Watch the lecture.

Recorded lecture (video) · Open access.

Carbado presenting the core of his Fourth Amendment argument in lecture form: how doctrine produces the police encounters that produce the killings — pedagogically valuable precisely because he walks through the cases (Whren, Terry, Graham) at a pace built for non-lawyers. The spoken scaffold for Unreasonable under Key Scholarship below; learners who watch first read the book's chapters with the map already in hand.

• Mapping Police Violence (national database and dashboard). Explore the database.

Civilian data project · Open access.

The most comprehensive public database of people killed by police in the United States — compiled from media reports, public records, and crowdsourcing because no complete federal count exists. The dashboard disaggregates by race, state, agency, and circumstance, and its methodology page doubles as a lesson: the absence of an official national count of police killings is itself a fact about the state. The unit's data instrument and a standing example of civilian counter-counting.

• Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Report). 1968. Read the report (HathiTrust).

Government report (primary source) · Public domain.

The federal commission convened after the 1967 uprisings answered its own three questions — What happened? Why? What can prevent it from happening again? — with findings the country has been rediscovering ever since: that white institutions created, maintain, and condone the ghetto, and that police practices were the leading grievance in nearly every city studied. Assigned as a primary source, it lets learners test a half-century-old diagnosis against every subsequent case in the unit — the report's afterlife as ignored warning is part of what it teaches.

Key Scholarship

• Carbado, Devon W. Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment. New York: The New Press, 2022. Publisher page.

Book.

Carbado's case-by-case demonstration that the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence "allocated enormous power to police officers — the power to surveil, the power to racially profile, the power to stop-and-frisk, and the power to kill." Following a fictional Black woman, Tanya, through a day of entirely lawful police intrusions, then through the real doctrines (consent, pretext, reasonableness) that authorize them, the book relocates the problem from bad officers to good law — which reframes what reform would have to change. The unit's legal spine and 2022 anchor.

• Hinton, Elizabeth. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. New York: Liveright, 2021. Publisher page.

Book.

Hinton documents nearly two thousand Black rebellions between 1968 and 1972 alone — a "crucible" period largely written out of civil rights memory — and argues for "rebellion" over "riot": these were political responses to violent policing, patterned and intelligible, almost always ignited by a police encounter. The book extends the analysis to 2020 and supplies the unit's historical thesis: the cycle of violence, uprising, and punitive response is a policy choice repeated across six decades.

• Felker-Kantor, Max. Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Publisher page.

Book.

The city-scale history behind the unit's central case: how the LAPD built itself into an aggressive, insulated institution between Watts (1965) and the 1992 uprising — and how Black and Latinx Angelenos contested it at every step, from community patrols to the campaign that finally curbed Chief Gates. Read alongside LA 92, the book converts the documentary's six days into the endpoint of a twenty-seven-year institutional story, and shows police power as something built, opposed, and therefore changeable.

• Bell, Monica C. "Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement." Yale Law Journal 126, no. 7 (2017): 2054–2150. Read the article.

Law review article · Open access.

Bell argues that the reigning reform framework — rebuilding "legitimacy" and trust — misdiagnoses the problem: many Black Americans experience not a trust deficit but legal estrangement, a structurally produced sense that the law and its enforcers are not theirs and do not protect them. The article supplies the unit's "courts" thread with its sociological theory, explains why procedural-justice reforms underdeliver, and gives learners a framework that predicts the reform disappointments the case studies document.

• Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016 (expanded ed. 2021). Publisher page.

Book.

Written in the Ferguson moment, Taylor's analysis situates Black Lives Matter in the long arc from civil rights to the present, asking why police violence persisted through the era of Black political incorporation — Black mayors, Black police chiefs, a Black president — and what that implies about reform within existing institutions. The book gives the unit its movement-analysis register: how a hashtag became an organization-rich movement, and the strategic debates inside it that the 2020 uprising would replay at scale.

Case Studies

• Los Angeles, 1992: Anatomy of an Uprising

LA 92 (2017), with the Christopher and Kerner commission reports · Documentary-analysis exercise.

A documentary-analysis exercise in which learners watch LA 92 and reconstruct the causal chain — the killing of Latasha Harlins and the Du verdict, the King beating, the change of venue, the acquittals, the geography of the six days — then test two framings against the evidence: "riot" as criminal disorder versus "rebellion" as political violence with a grievance structure. A closing layer reads the Christopher Commission's findings against what the Kerner Report had already said, treating commissions as the uprising's paper afterlife.

• Five Years After George Floyd: The Reform Ledger

Stanford Center for Racial Justice, The Marshall Project, and Brennan Center for Justice reports (2025), with Mapping Police Violence data · Policy-tracking analysis.

A policy-tracking analysis of the reform wave that followed the 2020 uprising — the Chauvin conviction, state use-of-force statutes, federal pattern-or-practice investigations and consent decrees over Minneapolis and Louisville — and the retrenchment that followed it, including the Justice Department's 2025 withdrawal from those decrees. Working from three 2025 assessments — the Stanford Center for Racial Justice's brief on use-of-force regulation, The Marshall Project's reporting on the rollbacks, and the Brennan Center for Justice's report on state policing reforms — learners build a ledger of what was enacted, what was reversed, and what persists at the city and state level, then read the arc through Bell's legal estrangement and Carbado's account of the doctrine reform never touched — with Mapping Police Violence supplying the outcome data: did killings change?

Questions for Reflection

1. On Carbado: "Most police violence is legal violence" is the book's hardest claim. Choose one doctrine — consent searches, pretextual stops, the reasonableness standard for force — and explain how it converts an encounter most people would call unreasonable into one the law calls reasonable. What would changing that doctrine require?
2. On Hinton and the word "riot": Take one uprising — 1965, 1992, or 2020 — and write its one-paragraph description twice: once as "riot," once as "rebellion." What does each word select, omit, and imply about response? Which description better fits the evidence you've seen, and why?
3. On the Kerner Report: A federal commission diagnosed the causes of urban uprisings in 1968 and proposed remedies that were largely shelved. Reading its findings now, which diagnosis has aged best, which worst — and what does the report's shelving itself teach about the politics of official knowledge?
4. On Bell: Legal estrangement names the sense that the law is not yours. Identify one concrete practice — a stop pattern, a court fee structure, a response-time disparity — that produces estrangement, and one that might repair it. Why does Bell think "trust-building" alone cannot?
5. On the data: There is no complete federal count of people killed by police; the best databases are civilian projects. What does that absence reveal? Pull one finding from Mapping Police Violence and assess what it can and cannot establish, given how the data is assembled.
6. Synthesis across the unit: Carbado locates the crisis in law: Fourth Amendment doctrine makes most police violence legal violence. Hinton locates the response in politics: uprisings are patterned rebellions against violent policing, not senseless disorder. Drawing on both works, trace one full cycle the unit examines — Los Angeles from Watts to 1992, or Minneapolis from George Floyd's murder through the 2025 rollbacks — from doctrine through killing, verdict, and uprising to commission or reform. Where in the cycle did each institution shape the outcome, and which framework better explains why the cycle repeats? What would have to change, in law or in politics, for it not to?

Further Readings and Resources

• Butler, Paul. Chokehold: Policing Black Men. New York: The New Press, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

A former federal prosecutor's account of how the American legal system polices Black men, arguing that the violence and control learners encounter across this unit are not malfunctions but the system working as designed. Butler writes from inside the institutions he critiques — prosecution, courts, law schools — and closes with proposals that range from jury nullification to abolition. An insider complement to Carbado: where Unreasonable maps the doctrine, Chokehold shows its administration.

• Forman, James, Jr. Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning history of how Black mayors, judges, police chiefs, and community leaders in Washington, D.C. came to support tough-on-crime measures from the 1970s onward — often in response to constituents' demands for protection from violence and drugs. Forman, a former public defender, shows decisions made incrementally and in good faith compounding into mass incarceration. For this unit it is the indispensable complication: policing's harshest era was built partly on Black communities' own contested demands.

• Whose Streets? Directed by Sabaah Folayan, 2017. Film page.

Documentary film.

A documentary on the 2014 Ferguson uprising told from the organizers' side — activists, residents, and families filmed as the protests unfolded and the movement took shape. Co-directed by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, the film follows what happened after national media left, as demonstrations became durable organizing. The movement-eye view that LA 92's all-archival method cannot supply: participants narrating their own uprising rather than being assembled from the record.

• Vitale, Alex S. The End of Policing. London: Verso, 2017 (updated ed. 2021). Publisher page.

Book.

A widely read argument that the reform project — training, diversity, body cameras, community policing — has failed on its own terms, because the problem lies in policing's expanding scope rather than its technique. Vitale surveys what police are asked to manage — homelessness, mental illness, schools, drugs — and argues for shrinking that footprint in favor of other institutions. The updated edition responds to 2020. Sets up the material on abolitionist futures later in this module.

• Lowery, Wesley. They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement. New York: Little, Brown, 2016. Publisher page.

Book.

A reported account of the movement's birth years — Ferguson, Cleveland, Charleston, Baltimore — by a Washington Post journalist who covered them on the ground and helped build "Fatal Force," the first national newspaper database of police killings. Lowery profiles the young organizers who turned hashtags into infrastructure and records what covering, and counting, police violence required of the press. A journalistic companion to the unit's data thread: the counting had to be invented.

• U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. 2015. Read the report (DOJ case page).

Federal investigation report (primary source) · Open access.

The Justice Department's civil-rights investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, released after Michael Brown's killing: the pattern-or-practice report as a genre. Page by page it documents revenue policing — a municipal court and police force run to generate fines from Black residents — alongside stop, search, and force disparities. As a primary source it shows learners what federal reform instruments respond to, and what the unit's reform-tracking case study measures the retreat from.

• Epp, Charles R., Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-Markel. Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Publisher page.

Book.

A large-scale empirical study of traffic stops, built on surveys of thousands of drivers in the Kansas City metropolitan area. The authors distinguish traffic-safety stops from investigatory stops — pretext-driven inquiries concentrated on Black drivers — and show that the disparity, and the message of suspect citizenship it delivers, lies in the investigatory kind. The data under Carbado's doctrine: what pretextual-stop jurisprudence licenses, measured in drivers' experience.

• The Christopher Commission Report. Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, 1991. Read the HRW account.

Commission report (primary source).

The independent commission convened after the Rodney King beating to investigate the Los Angeles Police Department, chaired by Warren Christopher. Its report documented a pattern of excessive force, a code of silence, and a discipline system that failed to act on repeat offenders, and recommended structural reforms including limits on the chief's tenure. A primary-source companion to the unit's Los Angeles case: the official diagnosis delivered a year before the acquittals and the uprising.