Policing Principles Now Available
Principles of the Law, Policing is now available to purchase on the LexisNexis website. The Policing Principles project began in 2015, and is the Institute’s first project in this critical area. Principles are primarily addressed to legislatures, administrative agencies, or private actors.
“The goal of the project is to set out a series of principles, or best practices, for policing in the United States,” said project Reporter Barry Friedman. “We assembled these principles by gathering the knowledge and guidance from a wide range of stakeholders, speaking to all of the various sides of the questions we wanted to tackle. Our hope is that legislative bodies would think that these principles provide a good benchmark for sound policing, and that policing police agencies will feel they could and would adopt these practices and policies.”
These Principles already are having an impact in the world. Those that have been have already been approved by the ALI’s membership have been shared with legislators and additional policymakers. Some of the concepts in the Principles—around things like democratic governance, pretextual stops, use of force, and the like—already are being written into law. Said Friedman, “[t]he Reporters all are active in efforts to spread the word further, and these efforts will increase now that the project is completed.”
The first Principles to be approved by ALI’s membership were the Use of Force Principles approved at the 2017 Annual Meeting. Reporter Friedman, through the NYU Policing Project (of which he is the director), worked closely with the Camden County Police Department to establish a revised use of force policy, built largely from the ALI Principles. And the Policing Project has developed a model use of force statute, which is available on its website, and has been the basis for conversations with many legislators.
Friedman explained, “Like the Use of Force Principles found in the ALI project, Camden’s revised use of force policy goes beyond the Supreme Court’s minimal constitutional principles regarding use of force—that an officer may only use force that a reasonable officer would when facing similar circumstances—to clearly state that officers must do everything possible to respect and preserve the sanctity of all human life, avoid unnecessary uses of force, and minimize the force that is used, while still protecting themselves and the public.”