System Justification Theory (SJT) provides a useful lens through which to critique recent police reform efforts. SJT posits that members of society tend to justify and maintain existing social and political systems even when those systems disadvantage them, because the predictability of the status quo provides palliative, epistemic, and existential comfort in what otherwise appears to be an unjust and inequitable societal structure. Contrary to "false consciousness" theories, SJT claims that disadvantaged groups may intentionally rationalize what they know to be an unfair status quo, because doing so reduces social anxiety and threat while providing much desired order and meaning to structurally or systemically broken systems. One such broken system-the American policing machine-continues to enjoy broad system justifying supportfrom advantaged and disadvantaged groups alike, despite incontrovertible evidence of the system's unfairness, ineffectiveness, and inefficiency. This contention may seem at odds with the fact that policing also receives among the most vocal and sustained criticism and calls for change of any stable political structure in the country. But it is those very "reforms" championed and implemented in recent years that proves the inherent desire to defend and maintain the status quo. This Article provides two novel contributions to legal literature. First, it provides the firstSJT-specific critique ofpolicing and its ability to maintain itself, relatively unchanged, despite its long history of racialized violence and class exploitation. Second, it utilizes the SJT framework to explore how purported reforms to the policing status quo are designed to defend that status quo as fundamentally sound and fair. The two most heavily funded and implemented policing reforms since the Summer 2020 uprisings against police violence-procedural justice and predictive policing-serve not to transform the structure of policing by eliminating it or reducing its bias and exploitation, but to justify its inherent authority through the fa & ccedil;ade of objectivity. These reforms provide a veneer of legitimacy, making it easier to rationalize the unchanged and unjust status quo. At root, SIT reveals that defenses of policing rarely derive from logic or facts, but from deep-seated psychological needs to perceive the world as orderly, safe, and fair. Recognizing these motivations is key to fostering productive dialogue about true transformative change.

This Article provides the first comprehensive critique of the structural inadequacies present in nearly every aspect of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence for the unhoused. Privacy conceptions excluding what one knowingly, if involuntarily, exposes to the public erases any meaningful privacy protections for the unsheltered and unhoused. Protections from unwarranted entries into the home apply with lesser force when that home is erected illegally on public property and thus is itself evidence of the crime. Searches incident to arrest subject many unhoused persons to suspicionless searches of their entire lives, far beyond the limited purposes of such searches. Malleable conceptions of probable cause and reasonable suspicion sweep in disproportionate swaths of the unhoused, as police interpret behavior indicative of mental distress or addiction as suspicious criminal activity. Violent encampment removal tactics do not constitute Fourth Amendment "seizures," as the word's definition excludes police violence designed to disperse people from an area. And increasingly common psychiatric hold procedures often fall within the amorphous "special needs" exception to the Fourth Amendment, if they fall within the Amendment's reach at all. In addition to cataloguing these comprehensive privacy and liberty failures, this Article articulates an independent Fourth Amendment right to human dignity, grounded in the purpose and meaning of the Amendment. In so doing, this right to dignity informs a reframing of Fourth Amendment rights to privacy and bodily integrity, supported by the logical framework of recent Supreme Court cases about electronic data. This reframing protects a zone of privacy for involuntarily exposed intimacies and singular sensitive spaces like makeshift dwellings, as well as a right to bodily integrity that includes freedom from violent dispersal techniques. This dignity-based reframing, while salient for the unhoused, has broader implications for all of society and its relationship to the Fourth Amendment. These issues require urgent attention. The United States recorded its largest ever unhoused population in 2024. Acute affordable housing shortages and climate-fueled natural disasters have exacerbated a decades-long unaddressed humanitarian crisis, straining resources in cities and rural areas alike. In response, state and local governments have pivoted to a more punitive approach to houselessness. Draconian "anti-camping" ordinances subject houseless people to fines or arrests while police destroy their property in encampment "sweeps," disconnecting the unhoused from critical social structures. Quality-of-life laws criminalize basic biological functions in public. New York, California, and other states have expanded the reach of involuntary civil commitment procedures, forcibly hospitalizing and medicating people who are not at serious risk of harm in an effort to "get them off the streets." And the Supreme Court's decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson has acted as an accelerant; over one hundred cities passed new antihouselessness laws in the first six months after the decision. Police crackdowns on the unhoused have become more common and visible, largely exempt from the restraints of the one constitutional provision designed to constrain such conduct: the Fourth Amendment.

The singular focus on procedural justice police reform is dangerous. Procedurally just law enforcement encounters provide an empirically proven subjective sense of fairness and legitimacy, while obscuring substantively unjust outcomes emanating from a fundamentally unjust system. The deceptive simplicity of procedural justice - that a polite cop is a lawful cop - promotes a false consciousness among would-be reformers that progress has been made, evokes a false sense of legitimacy divorced from objective indicia of lawfulness or morality, and claims the mantle of "reform" in the process. It is not just that procedural justice is a suboptimal type of reform; it is the type of reform that actively frustrates other reforms by dressing up policing with the perception of correctness and legitimacy. And yet, procedural justice dominates police reform policy. Virtually all current federally funded police reform proposals support procedural justice trainings to the exclusion of proposals to address police brutality, eliminate discriminatory overpolicing, demilitarize departments, and end qualified immunity. As a result, a growing procedural justice industrial complex has taken shape. This multilayered public -private partnership between government agencies, academic institutions, and for-profit training companies increasingly helps police departments "protect their brand" and "reduce liability" through procedural politeness, while requiring no changes to unlawful, unnecessary, and violent police behavior. This Article provides the first comprehensive account of this growing complex, charting its roots in community policing and evolving into a cottage industry of private, for-profit purveyors offering costly procedural justice trainings to departments flush with federal grant money. This Article also challenges the dominant scholarly narrative supporting these procedural justice policies, interrogating its role in promoting unnecessary ubiquitous police presence and justifying new racially discriminatory practices like "hot spots policing" and "precision policing." In doing so, the Article applies these process -oriented critiques to five substantive police reform proposals, exploring how this singular focus on procedural justice distinctly frustrates more necessary transformative reforms in the areas of discriminatory policing, police brutality, police accountability, legal reform, and police abolition.

What role will the Fourth Amendment play in a world without police? As aca-demics, activists, and lawmakers explore alternatives to traditional law enforce-ment, it bears asking whether the amendment primarily tasked with regulating po-lice investigations would also regulate postpolice public safety agencies. Surprisingly, the answer is often no. Courts are reluctant to recognize protections from government searches or seizures outside criminal investigations, and they are even more reluctant to require probable cause or a warrant for such conduct. Thus, by removing most public safety functions outside the criminal sphere, abolitionists also move intrusive government conduct outside these traditional strictures and guardrails.This Article provides the first sustained evaluation of the Fourth Amendment's limited role in a postpolice world and examines the implications of this reality. In doing so, it makes three contributions to existing scholarship. First, Part I cata-logues comprehensive abolitionist proposals to replace traditional police while situ-ating these proposals within the various semipermanent and permanent abolitionist perspectives animating them. Second, Part II applies current Fourth Amendment "special needs" doctrine to these burgeoning postpolice agencies and explores the troubling implications of nonpolice public safety entities operating largely free of the amendment's search and seizure restrictions. Third, Part III suggests three novel lenses through which to view a postpolice Fourth Amendment-abolition subconsti-tutionalism, abolition endogeneity, and objective intrusion theory-that accord with the core purpose of the amendment and respond to potential privacy and liberty con-cerns in a world without police.

Although racism has plagued the American justice system since the nation's colonial beginnings, private White Americans are taking matters into their own hands. From racist 911 calls and hoaxes to grassroots voter suppression and vigilante 'self-defense,' concerted efforts are made every day by private citizens to exclude Black Americans from schools, neighborhoods, and positions of power. Neighborhood Watch examines the specific ways people police America's color line to protect 'White spaces.' The book charts how these actions too often result in harassment, arrest, injury, or death, yet typically go unchecked. Instead, these actions are promoted and encouraged by legislatures looking to expand racially discriminatory laws, a police system designed to respond with force to any frivolous report of Black 'mischief,' and a Supreme Court that has abdicated its role in rejecting police abuse. To combat these realities, Neighborhood Watch offers preliminary recommendations for reform, including changes to the 'maximum policing' state, increased accountability for civilians who abuse emergency response systems, and proposals to demilitarize the color line.

Police crowd control techniques have come under increased scrutiny after viral videos of unprovoked violence against protesters dominated airwaves in 2020. Many demonstrators, and at least two state attorneys general, pursued civil rights claims claiming excessive use of force under the Fourth Amendment. While debate rages over the merits of those claims, surprisingly little scholarly literature exists to examine an important related threshold question: does the Fourth Amendment apply at all to protest policing violence? This Article provides the first sustained treatment of the issue, highlighting how the United States Supreme Court’s narrow definition of “seizure” and cramped notion of Fourth Amendment “standing” cast doubt on demonstrators’ ability to sustain claims of excessive force under the Fourth Amendment. The Court has long defined a “seizure” as requiring an intent to submit a suspect to an officer’s grasp, but crowd control techniques are designed to disperse rather than restrain protesters. Moreover, questions abound regarding whether actual submission or physical force are required to constitute a seizure, as well as what one means by “submission” or a physical touching in a crowd dispersed by chemical munitions. As to standing, while some individuals may assert personal claims, more recent attempts to aggregate protester claims through class actions or State-led parens patriae actions seem to contravene the Court’s strict rejection of vicarious standing in Fourth Amendment cases. This Article critiques both the Court’s seizure and standing jurisprudence as contrary to the original purpose of the amendment, articulates a novel “restraint on liberty” theory of seizures that incorporates the command to leave as equivalent to the command to stay, and charts a principled path forward for class action and state representative actions limited to the mass demonstration context.