Police and Law Enforcement: Powers, Use of Force, and Accountability

Police and law enforcement in the United States run through a decentralized system of roughly 17,600 agencies: close to 100 at the federal level and more than 17,500 state and local departments, each with its own jurisdiction, rules, and chain of command.¹ What any officer may lawfully do is set by the Fourth Amendment and a long line of Supreme Court cases; what happens when they overstep is set by a patchwork of civil rights lawsuits, state licensing boards, civilian review bodies, union contracts, and, intermittently, the U.S. Department of Justice. All of those pieces are in motion right now.

Who Does the Policing

Day-to-day crime response is a state and local function. The Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 17,541 state and local law enforcement agencies as of 2018, employing about 1.2 million people, a 7% increase over the prior decade.² Local police departments make up 67% of those agencies and employ 59% of full-time sworn officers. Sheriffs’ offices account for another 17% of agencies and 24% of sworn officers, and typically run county jails in addition to patrol. The rest are state police, tribal departments, and special jurisdiction agencies such as transit or campus police.

State police and highway patrol agencies handle statewide investigations, patrol highways, and cover areas without a local department. Titles vary: “State Police,” “Highway Patrol,” or “Department of Public Safety,” depending on the state.³ County sheriffs are usually elected.p>

Federal law enforcement is a separate system focused on crimes that cross state lines, violate federal statutes, or touch specific subject matter. The FBI handles bank robberies and kidnappings; the Drug Enforcement Administration pursues controlled-substance trafficking; Customs and Border Protection covers ports of entry and the border; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement works the interior.¹ Other federal agencies with police powers include the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Transportation Security Administration.³ Federal, state, and local agencies routinely combine on joint task forces for specific investigations.

What Officers Are Legally Allowed to Do

The Fourth Amendment is the primary constitutional limit on police authority. It bars “unreasonable searches and seizures” and requires warrants supported by probable cause that specifically describe the place to be searched and the items to be seized. To get a warrant, officers must convince a neutral magistrate that there is a fair probability that evidence of a crime will be found at the location.⁴

A great deal of police activity happens without a warrant, under exceptions the Supreme Court has recognized over decades:

Consent, when someone with a reasonable expectation of privacy voluntarily agrees to a search.
Search incident to arrest, covering the arrested person and their immediate surroundings for weapons or evidence.
Plain view, allowing seizure of evidence visible during a lawful encounter.
Exigent circumstances, when officers reasonably believe evidence will be destroyed or safety is at immediate risk.
The automobile exception, when officers have reason to believe a vehicle contains contraband.
Stop-and-frisk, a brief detention and pat-down for weapons based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.⁴

Cell phones are a notable boundary. In Riley v. California (2014), the Supreme Court unanimously held that police may not search the digital contents of a phone during an arrest without a warrant, recognizing that phones hold “the privacies of life.”⁵

When officers do violate the Fourth Amendment, the main judicial remedy is the exclusionary rule, which bars the government from using illegally obtained evidence at trial. Evidence derived from an unlawful search is also generally excluded under the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine. The rule has exceptions. Evidence can still come in if officers acted in good-faith reliance on a warrant later found invalid, if the evidence would inevitably have been discovered through lawful means, or if the link between the illegal conduct and the evidence is sufficiently attenuated.⁶

When Officers Can Use Force

The constitutional yardstick for police use of force comes from Graham v. Connor (1989). The Supreme Court held that excessive-force claims arising from an arrest or investigatory stop are analyzed under the Fourth Amendment’s “objective reasonableness” standard: whether a reasonable officer on the scene, facing the same facts, would have used the same level of force. The officer’s subjective intent is irrelevant.⁷

Courts weigh several factors in that analysis: the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to officers or bystanders, and whether the suspect is actively resisting or trying to flee. The immediacy of the threat is generally the most important consideration. Courts also look at any physical disparity between officer and suspect, the number of people involved, and whether the situation is static or rapidly evolving.⁸

The 2025 Shift in Barnes v. Felix

In May 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Barnes v. Felix, changing how lower courts frame the force analysis. The case grew out of a 2016 Texas traffic stop in which Officer Roberto Felix Jr. pulled over Ashtian Barnes for suspected toll violations. When Barnes restarted the ignition instead of getting out, Felix jumped onto the doorsill and fired two shots as the car moved, killing Barnes. The sequence from the vehicle beginning to move to the shooting took roughly five seconds.⁹

The Fifth Circuit had granted the officer summary judgment under its “moment of threat” doctrine, which cabined the reasonableness analysis to only the final seconds when the officer was in danger. The Supreme Court rejected that approach. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Kagan held that the Fourth Amendment requires courts to look at the “totality of the circumstances,” including the facts and events leading up to the use of force, not an isolated snippet.⁹ Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, and Barrett, concurred and emphasized the dangers of traffic stops, arguing that a driver suddenly pulling away can be characterized as “flight” when courts weigh reasonableness.¹⁰

Departments Going Beyond the Constitutional Floor

Critics have long said Graham permits outcomes that are “lawful but awful,” constitutionally allowed but out of step with community expectations. A growing number of departments have adopted stricter internal rules. By 2023, 48% of the 100 largest U.S. cities had adopted a “necessary” standard for use of force that exceeds the Graham minimum. The share of tracked departments banning chokeholds rose from 22% in 2015–2016 to 92% by 2023. Courts have confirmed that agencies may hold officers to higher standards than the Constitution requires without expanding municipal liability.¹¹

Suing an Officer or a City

People who believe their constitutional rights were violated by police can sue under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the federal civil rights statute first enacted in 1871. The law allows anyone deprived of rights by a state or local official acting “under color of law” to seek damages. Common claims include excessive force, false arrest, wrongful death, and malicious prosecution. “Under color of law” can even cover off-duty conduct if an officer invokes authority, for example by displaying a badge.¹²

Suing the city or county is harder than suing the officer. Under Monell v. Department of Social Services (1978), a municipality is liable only if the violation was caused by an official policy or custom, not simply by the misconduct of one employee. Plaintiffs must show the municipality acted with “deliberate indifference” to the constitutional rights of the people its officers encounter.¹³

Qualified Immunity

Even when a plaintiff can prove a violation, qualified immunity often blocks recovery against the individual officer. The doctrine shields government officials from personal liability unless the right they violated was “clearly established” at the time, which in practice forces plaintiffs to identify a prior court decision with nearly identical facts.

The Supreme Court has shown no appetite for scaling the doctrine back. In March 2026, it issued a summary reversal in Zorn v. Linton, ruling that a Vermont detective who used a rear wristlock on a passively resisting protester during a 2015 sit-in was entitled to qualified immunity.¹⁴ The six-page unsigned opinion held that a 2004 Second Circuit precedent did not establish the right with the “high degree of specificity” required to place the question “beyond debate.” Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, dissented, calling the ruling a “resurgence and perpetuation” of a “one-sided approach to qualified immunity” that “transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.”¹⁵

Federal legislation to abolish qualified immunity has stalled. States have moved on their own, in both directions. New Mexico enacted a Civil Rights Act barring the defense, Colorado authorized damage actions for state constitutional violations without allowing qualified immunity, and New York City became the first municipality to end the defense for unreasonable searches, seizures, and excessive force. Iowa, by contrast, broadened the defense in 2021, and Connecticut recognized a “good faith belief” defense even while creating a new cause of action for damages.¹⁶

What Misconduct Costs

Even with those hurdles, misconduct litigation imposes very large costs on taxpayers. New York City paid approximately $796 million to settle police misconduct lawsuits between 2019 and early 2026, including over $117 million for 1,044 lawsuits in 2025 alone. Those settlements are paid from a separate portion of the city’s budget, not the NYPD’s $6.4 billion operating budget.¹⁷ Chicago spent $231.2 million on misconduct settlements in the first seven months of 2025, nearly triple its annual budget for such costs, with wrongful conviction cases accounting for $145.7 million.¹⁸ A national database identified over 400 publicly reported settlements totaling nearly $4 billion as of December 2025.¹⁹ Critics argue these payouts function as a “cost of doing business” that rarely drives internal policy change, because the money comes out of city general funds rather than departmental or officer budgets.¹³

Federal Oversight of Troubled Departments

The Justice Department has historically used “pattern-or-practice” investigations under 42 U.S.C. § 14141 to push systemic reforms on departments found to engage in widespread constitutional violations. Those investigations often lead to consent decrees: court-enforceable agreements requiring specific changes to policies, training, and oversight.

The current administration has reversed course. In May 2025, the DOJ dismissed lawsuits with prejudice against the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments and retracted previous findings of constitutional violations. It also closed investigations into the Phoenix, Trenton, Memphis, Mount Vernon, Oklahoma City, and Louisiana State Police departments.²⁰²¹ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon called existing consent decrees a “failed experiment” that divested local control and imposed excessive costs.

An April 2025 executive order formalized the shift. It directs the Attorney General to review all ongoing federal consent decrees and “modify, rescind, or move to conclude” any that “unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.” It also instructs agencies to increase transfers of excess military and national security assets to local police, to build a mechanism for taxpayer-funded legal representation for officers accused of misconduct, and to prioritize prosecution of local officials who “willfully and unlawfully direct the obstruction of criminal law.”²² In November 2025, a federal court terminated the longstanding consent decree governing the New Orleans Police Department, the seventh police reform matter the DOJ resolved that year.²³

The DOJ says it is “not ruling out” future consent decrees but has not announced the standards it would apply.²¹ The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has noted that while the administration can ask to amend or terminate decrees, the presiding judge still has the final word.²⁴

On the legislative side, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was re-introduced in September 2025 by Representative Glenn Ivey, with 122 cosponsors. The bill would lower the federal criminal intent standard for prosecuting officers from “willfulness” to “recklessness,” reform qualified immunity, establish a National Police Misconduct Registry, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases, require body-worn cameras for federal officers, and change the federal use-of-force standard from “reasonable” to “necessary.”²⁵²⁶²⁷

State and Local Accountability Tools

Officer Decertification

The most concrete non-criminal consequence an officer faces is decertification: the state revoking the license required to work in law enforcement. At least 30 states passed laws to establish or strengthen decertification processes after the murder of George Floyd, and Massachusetts and Hawaii created their first centralized bodies for the purpose.²⁸ The National Decertification Index, run by the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training, now holds over 53,500 records of decertified officers, with 49 POST agencies contributing data. It works as a pointer system rather than a blacklist, alerting hiring agencies to potential issues and directing them to the relevant state authority for detailed records.²⁹

Civilian Oversight

More than 160 jurisdictions have civilian oversight entities, up from about 100 in 2001, and nearly 80% of major-city police agencies use some form of civilian oversight.³⁰ They generally take one of three forms: investigation-focused entities that independently investigate complaints (35%), review-focused boards that assess internal police investigations (40%), and auditor or monitor agencies that examine systemic patterns (25%).

Research on effectiveness is limited and the findings are mixed. One study found that independent civilian review raised the odds of sustaining misconduct allegations by 78%, and a 2019 study linked oversight entities with broader authority to reduced racial disparities in arrests and fewer police homicides. On the other hand, a study of the 50 largest police agencies found only six oversight boards with actual disciplinary authority.³⁰ Some states have moved to curtail oversight: Tennessee abolished civilian oversight boards in Nashville and Memphis in 2023, and Florida passed legislation prohibiting civilian agencies from investigating misconduct.³¹

Body-Worn Cameras

Eight states mandate statewide use of body-worn cameras by law enforcement: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Carolina. Retention rules vary. Illinois requires a minimum of 90 days for general footage and two years for footage related to complaints, use of force, arrests, or injuries. South Carolina requires a minimum of 14 days. Colorado requires footage tied to a complaint to be released to the public within 21 days.³² Public access rules diverge sharply: some states treat footage as a public record, while others, including North Carolina, classify recordings as not public records and require a court order to obtain copies.³³

Union Contracts and Officer Bills of Rights

Police union contracts set much of what accountability actually looks like inside a department. An analysis of contracts covering nearly half of all U.S. police officers found that almost 90% contained at least one provision that could thwart disciplinary actions.³⁴ Common provisions include restrictions on interrogating officers accused of misconduct, mandated destruction of disciplinary records after a set period, bans on civilian oversight, and time limits on internal investigations.³⁵ In Florida, after deputies gained collective bargaining rights in 2003, complaints of violence against civilians rose by 40%.

Some jurisdictions have pushed back on specific contract terms. Colorado passed a 2022 law banning provisions that delay interviews, mandate paid leave for constitutional violations, or allow expungement of use-of-force records. Connecticut and Vermont prohibited agreements restricting the disclosure of disciplinary records. Washington, D.C. amended its law in 2020 to bar negotiations over discipline policy entirely.³⁴ Separately, Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights statutes in at least 24 states layer in procedural protections for officers, including investigation timelines, rights to representation, and limits on discipline.³⁶ Maryland, the first state to enact such a law, became the first to repeal it in 2021.³⁷

Racial Disparities in Stops and Searches

The Stanford Open Policing Project, drawing on over 200 million traffic stop records, found persistent racial disparities in how officers exercise discretion. Officers generally stop Black drivers at higher rates than white drivers, and in nearly every jurisdiction analyzed, Black and Hispanic drivers are searched more often than white drivers.³⁸ A study of roughly 95 million stops from 2011 to 2018 found that at the municipal level, Black drivers were searched at 9.5% versus 3.9% for white drivers.³⁹

Researchers also developed a “threshold test” to estimate how much suspicion officers require before searching. At the municipal level, the inferred search threshold was 10% for white drivers compared with 5% for Black drivers and 4.6% for Hispanic drivers, meaning officers searched minority drivers on weaker evidence. Contraband was found in 36% of searches of white drivers, 32% for Black drivers, and 26% for Hispanic drivers, so the lower bar for searching minorities did not yield proportionally more evidence.³⁹⁴⁰ In states that legalized recreational marijuana, overall search rates fell for all groups, but the relative gap between white and minority drivers persisted.³⁸

Reforms After George Floyd, and What Stuck

The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 accelerated state-level reform. At least 30 states and Washington, D.C. enacted policing reforms in the years that followed. Nine states and D.C. passed complete bans on chokeholds and other neck restraints; eight more states restricted their use to situations where deadly force is already legally justified. Twelve states and D.C. created a legal duty for officers to intervene when they witness excessive force or misconduct by a fellow officer.²⁸

The “defund the police” movement that accompanied the 2020 protests proved short-lived as a budgetary matter. Austin cut its police budget by over 28% in 2020–2021, only to see it rebound by over 43% the next year. Los Angeles initially removed $150 million from the LAPD budget but restored funding to pre-protest levels within a year. Minneapolis reduced its budget by about 7% and then raised it by 13% the following year while spending $6.4 million on recruitment.⁴¹²⁸

Alternatives to Armed Response

More jurisdictions are routing mental health crises, homelessness calls, and other non-criminal matters to non-police responders. The oldest model is CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) in Eugene, Oregon, running since 1989. CAHOOTS dispatches a mental health crisis worker and a medic to non-safety calls. In 2019 it handled 18,583 calls and requested police backup only 311 times, diverting an estimated 5 to 8% of 911 calls and saving the police department about $1.23 million annually.⁴²

Denver’s STAR program, modeled on CAHOOTS, pairs a paramedic with a crisis worker and diverted 748 calls during a six-month pilot. Denver also runs a co-responder model that pairs licensed mental health professionals with officers for higher-risk situations, growing from 4 clinicians to 25 between 2015 and 2021.⁴² The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department pioneered the co-responder concept as early as 1991 with its Mental Evaluation Team.⁴³ At the federal level, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline launched in July 2022 as a nationwide alternative to 911 for mental health emergencies, and the American Rescue Plan included $15 million in grants for mobile crisis programs plus three years of enhanced Medicaid funding covering 85% of operating costs.

Local Police and Immigration Enforcement

How much local police help federal immigration enforcement is one of the most contested questions in American policing. Under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, state and local agencies can sign agreements with ICE to perform limited immigration functions: identifying removable individuals in jail, participating in ICE-led task forces, and serving administrative warrants on people already in custody. ICE covers training costs. Some states, including Georgia and Florida, have mandated local agency participation.⁴⁴¹

On the other side, jurisdictions commonly called sanctuary cities limit local cooperation. These policies typically bar local police from honoring ICE detainer requests, limit sharing of non-public personal information without a judicial warrant, and prohibit using local resources to assist in federal immigration operations. ICE detainers are voluntary requests, not mandatory obligations, and several courts have found that holding someone past their release date based solely on a detainer, without a judicial warrant, is an unlawful seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Federal law (8 U.S.C. § 1373) bars states and localities from restricting the exchange of information about a person’s citizenship or immigration status, but it does not require them to collect that information or share other data such as home addresses or release dates.⁴⁵

Surveillance Technology and AI

Police agencies are deploying artificial intelligence and surveillance tools faster than law is being written to govern them. Seven federal agencies currently use facial recognition technology, including the FBI, Customs and Border Protection, and the Secret Service. There is no overarching federal law on police AI. States have moved piecemeal: Washington and Colorado require accountability reports and warrants for real-time facial recognition surveillance; Vermont prohibits the technology except in child exploitation cases; at least 15 states require warrants for police drone use; and Alabama prohibits using facial recognition as the sole basis for an arrest.⁴⁶

Departments increasingly use “data fusion” platforms that pull together license plate reader data, social media monitoring, gunshot detection, and public records to generate AI-driven risk scores and relationship maps. Civil liberties groups argue these tools rely on historical arrest data that embeds existing racial and socioeconomic bias, and that many local jurisdictions have no governing policies at all. In August 2025, Congress opened an investigation into Flock Safety, one of the largest providers of license plate reader technology, over its tracking capabilities.⁴⁷

Who Becomes an Officer

Requirements to become an officer vary significantly by state. All states use Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) boards or equivalent bodies to certify officers, but minimum training hours range from 480 in states like Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia to 868 in North Carolina.⁴⁸ The national average across state and local academies was 806 hours as of 2022.⁴⁹ Georgia’s POST Board voted in 2024 to nearly double its minimum from 408 to 810 hours. The national average cost to take an officer from recruitment through certification is approximately $100,000, and more than 14% of recruits do not complete basic training (8% dismissed involu

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