Policing as Injustice
Courts have long shielded police violence from accountability, foreclosing remedies for victims and survivors, and stymying systemic change. Although scholars have examined the doctrinal barriers insulating police misconduct, this Article is the first to develop a comprehensive theory of how these doctrines operate within a unified system of injustice deflection. It posits that the legal system does not merely excuse or fail to remedy police violence; rather, it transforms that violence into a permissible and structurally entrenched practice. Police violence, this Article contends, is not an aberration but a deliberate failure of justice sustained by doctrines that shield the state from accountability and a legal architecture that deflects demands for structural transformation.
By constructing injustice deflection as a theory of legal legitimation, this Article builds on and transcends existing scholarship on injustice. It reconceives how law normalizes state violence, revealing the doctrinal and institutional mechanisms that insulate police misconduct from meaningful challenge. Scrutinizing civil rights jurisprudence, the Article demonstrates how courts, in invoking doctrines like qualified immunity and excessive force, recast police violence as an isolated misfortune rather than a constitutional failure or actionable injustice. More than a shield for individual officers, this injustice deflection reshapes the law’s understanding of state-inflicted harm. By excluding the moral and legal claims of those most harmed, it limits whose suffering the law acknowledges and leaves unheard their demands for redress.
To dismantle injustice deflection, this Article calls for a victim-centered recalibration of legal doctrine and institutional design that addresses victims and survivors’ harms on their own terms. Recognizing the limits of doctrinal reform, the Article advocates for community-centered initiatives grounded in transitional and restorative justice—truth commissions, reparative processes, and mechanisms for acknowledgment, apology, and redress—that foreground victims and survivors’ voices and foster structural change. Reframing police violence as pervasive injustice is essential to vindicating constitutional rights and restoring public trust. Only by confronting, rather than deflecting, policing injustice can courts and communities dismantle entrenched systems of state-sanctioned violence and construct accountability structures responsive to the moral, political, and structural dimensions of state-inflicted harm.