Addie C. Rolnick

What is the most significant issue facing your field and how should it be addressed?

Racial disparities in the justice system – like the fact that Black people are 12% of the population but more than one-third of the prison population, or the fact that Native American youth are three times as likely as white youth to be locked up, or the fact that Native Americans and African Americans are killed by police at rates much higher rates than any other group. Fifteen years ago, you could point out these disparities, but the observation was always followed by a debate about whether the disparities were simply a reflection of underlying differences in offending. Today, thanks to major social movements like #blacklivesmatter and greater media attention, more people accept the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the system. But they still want easy solutions. For example, many push for implicit bias training and body cameras for police. While those are important interventions, Eric Garner’s death showed us that cameras don’t solve the problem. And questions remain about how effective bias training is. What kinds of reforms are required to really address the jaw-dropping racial disparities? Is the system fixable at all, or is racial subordination built into it? At our April conference, Doing Justice: Race, Reform & New Strategies in Criminal Law, we will tackle the complicated relationship between race and criminal justice in Nevada and nationwide and highlight innovative reforms and critiques without accepting easy answers. 
 
Tell me about one of your recent books or articles related to criminal justice.

With all the interest in addressing police violence, one thing we forget to talk about is what happens before the police arrive. Usually, someone has called them. Too often, that person is a suspicious neighbor. Recall the video of an officer in McKinney, Texas tackling a teenaged girl on the sidewalk after a pool party. Not many knew that the police came because a neighbor called them to report that the teenagers at the pool were trespassing and being too rowdy. This kind of neighbor-on-neighbor policing is widespread and it often goes unchecked. Here in Las Vegas, people use neighborhood Facebook groups and the NextDoor app to post photos of people that they think look “suspicious” or out-of-place. This invocation of vague suspicion is a problem given what we know about how some neighborhoods (like Summerlin, where I live) are viewed as predominantly white and how Black people are automatically associated with criminality and danger, especially in those neighborhoods. No amount of police training is going to help stop private citizens from acting on their biased fears. In fact, the law allows people to do just that, as long as the biased fear is widely shared enough that it would be considered “reasonable” by a jury. 

My latest article Defending White Space is about this relationship between self-defense law, neighborhood racial profiling, and segregation. The law of self defense and home defense, which legalizes killing based on reasonable fear, provides a framework that validates a whole range of neighbor-on-neighbor surveillance and violence done in the name of fear and suspicion. Even though we know that fear and suspicion can be racially coded, Nevada and other states have expanded, rather than limited, self and home defense laws. It’s not surprising to me that we see so much private racial profiling and brazen calls to the police, like “BBQ Becky” and “Permit Patty.”We have created a system in which white people feel entitled to enact small and large acts of violence on their Black neighbors, helping to cement segregation, and justify it by saying they look scary or out of place.