Reparations for Police Killings

Abstract

After a fatal police shooting, it is typical for city and police officials to view the family of the deceased through the lens of the law. If the family files a lawsuit, the city and police department consider it their legal right to defend themselves and to treat the plaintiffs as adversaries. However, reparations and the concept of “reparative justice” allow authorities to frame police killings in moral rather than legal terms. When a police officer kills a person who was not liable to this outcome, officials should offer monetary reparations, an apology, and other redress measures to the victim’s family. To make this argument, the article presents a philosophical account of non-liability hailing from self-defense theory that centers on the distinction between reasonableness and liability. Reparations provide a nonadversarial alternative to civil litigation after a non-liable person has been killed by a police officer. In cases where the officer nevertheless acted reasonably, “institutional agent-regret” rather than moral responsibility grounds the argument for reparations. Throughout the article, it is argued that there are distinct racial wrongs both when police kill a non-liable black person and when family members of a black victim are treated poorly by officials in the civil litigation process.

Police-Generated Killings: The Gap between Ethics and Law

“…In the debate over policing post-Ferguson, there often has been reluctance to pursue this approach. 1 Even among those recognizing the need to change police practices, much of the focus has been on reforms that can be enacted without changes to law, such as revised departmental policies by police administrators (Mummolo 2018b; Police Executive Research Forum 2016; Zimring 2017) and reparations to victims paid by municipalities (Page 2019). Although these proposals have merit, by themselves they remain deeply inadequate.…”

Truth and Reparation for the U.S. Imprisonment and Policing Regime

“…Journalist Juleyka Lantigua Williams (2018) proposes layered reparations and an official apology to persons whose socioeconomic background led to their imprisonment. Others advocate for municipalities to pay reparations to the families of victims of police killings (Page 2019); there is also discussion of Drug War reparations (Flanigan and Freiman, 2020).…”