Constitutional accountability for police shootings

Abstract

Constitutional accountability for police shootings is imposed in part through civil rights lawsuits alleging Fourth Amendment violations, but little is known about how judges evaluate these claims. I introduce original data on all federal circuit court decisions resolving Fourth Amendment excessive force claims in police shooting cases over three decades. The quasi‐random assignment of a majority‐Republican panel substantially increases the probability of circuit courts finding a police shooting to be constitutional. Capturing law's influence by mapping case facts to the three‐part analytical framework delineated by the Supreme Court in Graham v. Connor, I find that active resistance and threat immediacy are associated with increases in the probability of finding police shootings to be constitutional, but crime severity is not systematically associated with outcomes. In addition, there is evidence that law conditions the effect of politics, with increases in latent Fourth Amendment reasonableness narrowing the partisan outcome gap in constitutional assessments. The quasi‐random assignment of a Black judge does not impact outcomes. The results have important implications for police oversight and longstanding debates in judicial politics over the prevalence of panel effects and the extent to which law influences decision making.