WHY YOU’RE AFRAID OF THE POLICE AND WHY YOU’RE RIGHT

A Forensic Profile of American Law Enforcement

The Outlaw Armory

Robert Bryant Starnes

March 2026

outlawlivin.com

Every claim sourced. Every number documented. Every conclusion yours.

“You were born with rights.”

INTRODUCTION: THE FEAR IS RATIONAL

You are afraid of the police. You may not say it out loud. You may not admit it to yourself. But when you see the lights in your rearview mirror, your heart rate spikes, your hands tighten on the wheel, and a single thought crosses your mind: Please, God, let this go smoothly.

That fear is not irrational. It is not paranoia. It is not anti-police bias. It is a mathematically appropriate response to a documented, systemic threat. This document will show you why — with sources, statistics, case law, and the system’s own published records.

This is not an attack on every individual who wears a badge. There are men and women in law enforcement who took the oath and meant it, who serve their communities with honor, who risk their lives for strangers. This document acknowledges their existence and indicts their silence. Because a good officer who watches a bad officer violate a citizen’s rights and says nothing is not a good officer. He is a witness who chose the badge over the oath. The blue wall of silence is not loyalty. It is complicity. And complicity, when you have a sworn duty to act, is its own breach of that oath.

What follows is a forensic profile — not of one cop, but of the system that selects, trains, deploys, arms, indoctrinates, and protects the officer who is now walking toward your window. By the time you finish reading, you will understand what you are facing, why you are right to be afraid, and what the Constitution says about it.

I. THE BODY COUNT

In 2023, police in the United States killed at least 1,213 people. In 2024, they killed more — the highest number ever recorded. These numbers come not from the government, but from journalists, nonprofits, and crowdsourced databases. Because no official national database exists to track killings by police.

Source: Mapping Police Violence, 2023 & 2024 Reports; Washington Post Police Shootings Database, 2015–2024.

Congress mandated the Attorney General to compile and publish annual statistics on police use of excessive force in 1994, through Section 210402 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Thirty years later, it has never been carried out. The FBI does not collect these data. The agency responsible for counting the dead decided not to count.

Source: Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, § 210402.

A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet estimated that between 1980 and 2018, more than 30,000 people were killed by police, and that 55.5% of those deaths were incorrectly classified in the National Vital Statistics System. Death certificates do not require coroners to note police involvement. More than half the dead were miscategorized or made to disappear from the data.

Source: GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators, The Lancet, 2021.

Where It Happens

Sixty-four percent of police killings in 2024 occurred during traffic stops, responses to mental health crises, and situations where the person killed was not threatening anyone with a firearm. These were not shootouts. These were not armed standoffs. These were encounters that began with a tag light, a wellness check, or a report of someone “acting strange.”

Source: 2024 Police Violence Report, Mapping Police Violence / Campaign Zero.

More than 800 people have been killed by police following traffic stops since 2017. Traffic stops — the most routine encounter between a citizen and the state — are the most common origin point for lethal force.

Source: Mapping Police Violence database, 2017–2024.

More than 98% of police killings from 2013 to 2025 have not resulted in criminal charges against the officers involved. Accountability is not absent. It was designed out of the system.

Source: Mapping Police Violence, 2013–2025 accountability data.

The Encounter Rate

Approximately 50 million Americans have contact with police each year. Of those, roughly one million experience police threat of or use of force. That is a 2% force rate per encounter. One in fifty interactions with a law enforcement officer involves the state’s agent threatening or using physical violence against a citizen who has not been convicted of any crime.

Source: University of Illinois Chicago, Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project; Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Of the estimated 250,000 civilians injured each year by law enforcement, approximately 75,000 suffer non-fatal injuries requiring hospital treatment. These are not criminals resisting arrest. These are citizens — some guilty, many not — who encountered a system that treats force as a first-line tool rather than a last resort.

Source: UIC Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project.

II. WHO THEY HIRE

In 1996, Robert Jordan applied to be a police officer in New London, Connecticut. He scored a 33 on the Wonderlic Personnel Test — the equivalent of a 125 IQ. The department rejected him. Not because he failed. Because he scored too high.

Source: Jordan v. City of New London, No. 99-9188 (2d Cir. 2000); CBS News.

Jordan sued. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the department’s policy in 2000. The court ruled that excluding intelligent candidates had a “rational basis” — the theory being that smart people would get bored and quit after expensive training. The court acknowledged the policy might be “unwise” but said it wasn’t the court’s job to judge wisdom. Only rationality.

Source: Jordan v. City of New London, 2000 U.S. App. LEXIS 22195 (2d Cir. 2000).

That case has never been overturned. It remains good law. A federal appellate court ruled, and the ruling stands, that a police department may legally refuse to hire a person for being too intelligent.

The Wonderlic test manual itself — the instrument used by departments nationwide — recommends hiring officers who score between 20 and 27. That is an IQ range of approximately 104 to 114. The national median score for police officers is 21 to 22, equivalent to an IQ of 104. Just barely above average.

Source: Wonderlic Personnel Test guidelines; ABC News national survey of police scores.

For context: the average IQ in the United States is 100. The average police officer scores four points above that. The man who will decide in a fraction of a second whether to deploy lethal force against you, who will interpret your body language, assess your mental state, apply a statute he may or may not have read, and determine whether your constitutional rights apply in this particular moment — that man was selected from a hiring pool that screens out anyone who might ask too many questions.

The system does not accidentally produce officers who cannot distinguish a disability from intoxication. It selects for officers who will not ask the question.

III. HOW THEY TRAIN THEM

The average police recruit in the United States receives 633 hours of basic academy training. In some states, it is far less. Louisiana requires only 360 hours. Georgia requires 408. Oregon requires 400.

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018; Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform.

In Finland, police training requires 4,500 hours. In Norway, 4,500 hours. In Germany, 4,000 hours. In the United Kingdom, 2,250 hours. An analysis of 80 countries found that only Iraq and Afghanistan had lower police training requirements than the United States.

Source: Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform, 2020; PERF; CBS News.

In many American states, it takes more training hours to become a licensed cosmetologist than to become a police officer authorized to carry a firearm and use lethal force on behalf of the state.

What They Learn

The average police recruit receives 58 hours of firearms training and 49 hours of defensive tactical training. They receive 8 hours of de-escalation training.

Source: PERF, 2015 report; PowerDMS analysis of police training curricula.

Eight hours to learn how to talk a human being down from crisis. One hundred and seven hours to learn how to hurt or kill them. The ratio is 13:1 in favor of force over communication. The curriculum is the confession. It tells you what the system values, what it prioritizes, and what it considers an afterthought. Your life is the afterthought.

Thirty-seven states allow recruits to begin working as police officers before they even complete their basic training. The person at your window may not have finished the 633-hour course that was already less training than Iraq requires.

Source: Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform.

IV. WHAT THEY TEACH THEM TO BELIEVE

Into this undertrained, cognitively average recruit walks Dave Grossman.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman is the founder of the Killology Research Group and one of the most prolific police trainers in America. He has spoken to over 100 police departments in a two-year period. He travels approximately 300 days a year. He is, by multiple accounts, the most influential police trainer in the United States.

Source: Men’s Journal; Slate; The Washington Post; Portland Mercury, Aug. 2024.

Grossman’s core message: You are warriors. The neighborhoods you patrol are battlegrounds. The citizens you encounter are potential threats. Be willing to kill without hesitation. His curriculum explicitly aims to reduce officers’ psychological inhibition to use lethal force.

Source: Killology Research Group curriculum; Slate, Aug. 2020.

In training sessions recorded for the documentary Do Not Resist, Grossman told officers: “I am convinced from a lifetime of study, if you fully prepare yourself, in most cases killing is just not that big of a deal.” In another recorded session, he told officers that the sex they have after killing another human being will be the best sex of their lives.

Source: Do Not Resist (2016); Washington Post, Feb. 2017; Spokesman-Review.

Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop in 2016, had attended Grossman’s seminar “The Bulletproof Warrior.” Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria supervisor, had been stopped by police at least 49 times in 13 years for minor traffic violations, most of which were dismissed. Yanez pulled him over because he thought Castile resembled a robbery suspect with a “wide set nose.” When Castile — who had a legal permit to carry — informed the officer he had a firearm, Yanez fired seven shots at point-blank range. A man trained to view every traffic stop as potential combat killed a man doing exactly what the law required: disclosing. Yanez was charged with second-degree manslaughter. A jury acquitted him on all counts. The training worked exactly as designed. The system performed exactly as built.

Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 2016; CNN, June 2017; Wikipedia.

Minneapolis banned warrior-style training in 2019. The police union responded by offering to pay for any officer who wanted to attend on their own time. The institution banned it. The culture preserved it.

Source: Minneapolis Mayor executive order, 2019; Minnesota statewide ban, 2020.

V. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BADGE

Dunning-Kruger: They Don’t Know What They Don’t Know

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a given area significantly overestimate their own ability. They lack the knowledge necessary to recognize their own ignorance.

Source: Kruger & Dunning (1999). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6).

An officer with a 104 IQ, 633 hours of training, and 8 hours of de-escalation instruction is placed in a position requiring real-time assessment of human psychology, legal knowledge, threat evaluation, cultural competency, and constitutional analysis. He was not selected for these skills. He was not trained in them. And he does not know he lacks them. He believes his training prepared him. His supervisors told him it did. The academy graduated him. The badge confirmed it.

In Clearfield, Utah, Officer Zachary Fratto encountered Shawn Nicholas — a Special Olympics medalist — walking home from karaoke at 3 a.m. Fratto could not distinguish Nicholas’s disability from intoxication. He applied a jaywalking statute that did not apply to the location. He demanded identification Nicholas was not legally required to provide. When Nicholas continued walking, Fratto swept his legs out from under him and cuffed him on the pavement. Nicholas kept repeating: “I didn’t do nothing.”

Source: KSL News, Nov. 2024; The Civil Rights Lawyer (John H. Bryan); Clearfield PD statement.

Fratto later told his supervisor: “His mannerisms were pretty weird... I don’t know if he was necessarily on drugs or, I guess, he’s handicapped.” The charge was dismissed. Fratto received “remedial training.” A PowerPoint. The system’s remedy for assaulting a disabled citizen was a presentation.

Fratto didn’t know the statute. He didn’t recognize the disability. He didn’t know the legal standard for detention. And he was confident enough in his ignorance to use force. That is Dunning-Kruger with a badge and a gun. The department ruled his use of force justified. Nicholas filed a federal excessive force lawsuit in June 2025. Fratto’s defense: qualified immunity — the doctrine that says even if you violated someone’s rights, you’re protected unless those rights were “clearly established.” The right of a disabled man to walk home without being leg-swept by an officer enforcing a statute that doesn’t apply, apparently, was not clearly enough established.

Milgram: They Do What They’re Told

In 1963, Stanley Milgram conducted experiments at Yale measuring obedience to authority. Participants were instructed by a researcher to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to another person. Sixty-five percent administered the maximum 450-volt shock when told to continue by the authority figure. They heard screaming. They expressed discomfort. They kept pressing the button.

Source: Milgram (1963). Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4).

Every police officer operates within a Milgram structure. The authority figure is the chain of command: the sergeant, the lieutenant, the chief, the policy, the union, the culture. When the sergeant says “your numbers are down,” the officer hears the experimenter say “please continue.” When department policy says noncompliance equals resistance, the officer administers the shock. “I was following policy.” “I was following training.” “I was following orders.” These are the Milgram defense dressed in blue.

The Threat Filter: When You’re a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

The human brain contains a structure called the Reticular Activating System — the RAS. It functions as a filter, determining which stimuli reach conscious awareness out of the millions of inputs the brain receives every second. The RAS is programmable. Tell yourself you want a red truck, and you will begin seeing red trucks everywhere. They were always there. Your filter wasn’t tuned to find them.

Police training programs the RAS to filter for threat. One hundred and seven hours of firearms and defensive tactics. Eight hours of de-escalation. Grossman’s killology seminars telling officers that neighborhoods are battlegrounds and citizens are combatants. The filter is installed, calibrated, and reinforced every shift. And once it is installed, everything that deviates from “normal” is processed as a potential threat. A stutter becomes evasion. A limp becomes furtive movement. An autistic stim becomes erratic behavior. A deaf person not responding to verbal commands becomes noncompliance. A diabetic in crisis becomes a drunk. A thirteen-year-old having a meltdown becomes a violent psych subject. The filter doesn’t distinguish. It wasn’t trained to distinguish. It was trained to detect danger, and it finds danger in everything it sees.

The data confirms the pattern. People with developmental disabilities like autism spectrum disorder are seven times more likely to encounter police than neurotypical people. And the overlap between autistic behaviors and behaviors police are trained to view as suspicious is substantial: lack of eye contact, failure to respond to commands, repetitive movements, emotional dysregulation, inability to explain oneself clearly.

Source: Marshall Project, March 2024; Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN).

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network stated it directly: “An hour of learning about autism cannot overcome months of training that teaches police that in uncertain situations, the first thing they should do is escalate force to exert control.” The training doesn’t just fail to account for disability. It actively overrides the ability to recognize it.

Source: ASAN statement, April 2025.

The Pattern: When Help Arrives Armed

In North Miami, Florida, in 2016, Charles Kinsey — a behavioral therapist — lay on his back in the street with his hands raised, trying to retrieve his autistic patient Arnaldo Rios-Soto, who had wandered from his group home holding a silver toy truck. SWAT officer Jonathan Aledda, positioned 152 feet away, saw the toy truck and processed it as a firearm. He fired. He hit Kinsey, the man lying on the ground with his hands in the air. When Kinsey asked the officer why he shot him, the officer replied: “I don’t know.” The threat filter fired. The officer pulled the trigger. The conscious brain never caught up. After the shooting, officers handcuffed Kinsey and left him bleeding on the ground for twenty minutes without medical aid. They pinned Rios-Soto to the pavement, cuffed him, and detained him in a police car for nearly four hours. Aledda was convicted of culpable negligence — a misdemeanor — and acquitted on two counts of attempted manslaughter. A toy truck, a therapist with his hands up, and the worst the system could deliver was a misdemeanor.

Source: Shooting of Charles Kinsey, July 18, 2016; NBC News; Miami Herald; NBC News, June 2019 (conviction).

In Salt Lake City in 2020, Golda Barton called police to request a crisis intervention team for her thirteen-year-old son, Linden Cameron, who has autism and was having a mental health episode triggered by separation anxiety. She told officers he was unarmed. She told them he was a child. She told them he didn’t know how to regulate. Within minutes of arriving, officers shot him. He survived, but with injuries including a shattered shoulder, fractured skull, and wounds to his intestines, bladder, and ankles. He was thirteen. His mother called for help, and help arrived with a gun and a threat filter that processed a child’s panic as a combat situation. The city settled for $3 million. The officer was not charged.

Source: NPR, Sept. 2020; Wikipedia; Salt Lake City settlement, Sept. 2022.

In Pocatello, Idaho, in April 2025, officers responded to a call about seventeen-year-old Victor Perez — nonverbal, autistic, with cerebral palsy, unable to understand English. His family called 911 seeking medical assistance, not police. Officers arrived and shot him nine times within seconds. He was on the other side of a fence. He died a week later after being declared brain dead. The department had prior records documenting his disabilities. His family’s attorney stated officers arrived “just like gangbusters” with no effort to assess, de-escalate, or identify who they were shooting. The family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in June 2025 alleging constitutional violations and failure to train officers in handling mental health crises. The police chief’s justification: “The risk was immediate.” The risk was a nonverbal teenager with cerebral palsy on the other side of a fence.

Source: NBC News, April 2025; Newsweek, June 2025; KTVB, June 2025; ASAN statement, April 2025.

Three cases. Three disabled citizens. Three encounters where the threat filter processed disability as danger. In each case, the officer’s training — not his malice — produced the outcome. The RAS was tuned to find threats. It found threats. The officers acted on the filter’s output exactly as trained. The system worked. That is the problem.

VI. THE ESCALATION PLAYBOOK

The encounter at your window is not a conversation. It is a script designed to produce one outcome: your compliance through psychological manipulation and, if necessary, physical force. The officer is not determining whether you committed a crime. He is manufacturing the justification to act as though you have.

The Manufactured Nervous Subject

“You seem nervous.” This is not an observation. It is a weapon. The officer says it to create it. The moment he tells you that you appear nervous, you become nervous — because a man with a gun and the authority to end your life just told you he’s watching your body for signs of guilt. Your hands begin to shake. Your voice wavers. Your eyes dart. And the officer notes each response as “indicia of criminal activity” to justify the next intrusion.

“Why are your hands shaking?” Because you told me I look nervous while standing over me with a firearm. Because adrenaline is a physiological response to perceived threat and you are the threat. Because my autonomic nervous system cannot distinguish between a predator in the wild and a predator in a uniform. The officer knows this. He was trained to exploit it. Your fear is his probable cause.

“You’re being really defensive.” You are being interrogated on the side of a road by an armed agent of the state who has not told you what crime you committed. Defensiveness is the only rational response. But the officer reframes your rationality as suspicion. Your assertion of rights becomes evidence of guilt. Your refusal to consent to a search becomes “something to hide.” Your request for a supervisor becomes “resisting.”

“If you have nothing to hide, you won’t mind if I look around.” The Fourth Amendment is your right to have something to hide. The entire purpose of the prohibition against unreasonable searches is to protect the citizen who says no. “No” is not probable cause. “No” is the Constitution working. But the officer was trained to treat “no” as an obstacle, not a right.

The Compliance Trap

The script is designed so that every response feeds the officer’s narrative. Comply, and you’ve given consent that waives your rights. Refuse, and you’re “resisting” or “uncooperative.” Assert your rights, and you’re “hostile.” Remain silent, and your silence is “suspicious.” Ask questions, and you’re “argumentative.” There is no correct answer. That is the point.

The Performance Metric

The officer at your window may not be there because you committed a crime. He may be there because his supervisor told him his “numbers are down.” Traffic stops generate revenue through citations. Citations generate court appearances. Court appearances generate fees. Fees fund the department. The officer is not protecting you. He is performing for a metric that rewards contact, not safety.

Your fear, your shaking hands, your racing heart — these are byproducts of a revenue model. The state sent an armed agent to generate a data point on a supervisor’s spreadsheet. And if that agent, jacked on protein powder and warrior training, decides your nervousness is probable cause to drag you out of your vehicle — that’s a Tuesday for him. It’s the rest of your life for you. If you survive it.

VII. THEY ARE LEGALLY PERMITTED TO LIE TO YOU

In Frazier v. Cupp (1969), the Supreme Court ruled that police deception during interrogations is constitutionally permissible. They can lie about evidence, about witnesses, about what your friends said. They can tell you they have DNA when they don’t. They can tell you your partner confessed when he didn’t. This is not misconduct. It is doctrine.

Source: Frazier v. Cupp, 394 U.S. 731 (1969).

In Illinois v. Perkins (1990), the Court held that undercover officers do not need to provide Miranda warnings. They can lie about who they are.

Source: Illinois v. Perkins, 496 U.S. 292 (1990).

The officer at your window who says “I smell marijuana” may smell nothing. The officer who says “your eyes look glassy” may be reciting a script. The officer who says “someone called in a report about this vehicle” may be manufacturing probable cause in real time. None of it is illegal.

Meanwhile, if you lie to that officer — about anything, no matter how trivial — you have committed a criminal offense. The asymmetry is the architecture. The state may deceive you. You may not deceive the state.

They Lie Under Oath, Too

The licensed deception does not stop at the roadside. It follows the officer into the courtroom. Police perjury is so common that officers themselves have a word for it: “testilying.” A survey of prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys found that police commit perjury on the witness stand approximately 20% of the time. Defense attorneys estimated the rate at 53% in cases involving Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure issues. One in five times an officer raises his right hand and swears to tell the truth, he lies. In cases where your constitutional protections against illegal search are at stake, the estimate is closer to one in two.

Source: Slobogin, C. (1996). “Testilying: Police Perjury and What To Do About It.” 67 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1037.

This is not a fringe claim. The 1994 Mollen Commission — established to investigate corruption in the New York Police Department — documented that the practice of police falsification in connection with arrests was so common in certain precincts that it had spawned its own terminology. Officers fabricated probable cause after the fact, invented traffic violations to justify stops, and lied under oath to prevent evidence suppression. The Commission found that supervisors actively trained officers in how to commit perjury.

Source: Mollen Commission Report, 1994.

Joseph McNamara, chief of police of San Jose, California, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that after 35 years wearing a police uniform, he had come to believe that “hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests.” That is a police chief — not a defense attorney, not an activist — acknowledging the scale of the problem from inside the institution.

Source: McNamara, J. (1996). “Has the Drug War Created an Officer Liars’ Club?” Los Angeles Times.

San Francisco’s former Police Commissioner Peter Keane confirmed it: perjury in court to justify illegal searches is commonplace. He called it one of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system. The officer at your window is licensed to lie to your face. If you end up in court, there is a one-in-five chance he will lie under oath about what happened. And the system — prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys — knows it, tolerates it, and calls it the cost of doing business.

Source: Keane, P. (1996). San Francisco Chronicle; Chicago Appleseed Center, Nov. 2020.

VIII. THEY HAVE NO DUTY TO PROTECT YOU

“Protect and Serve” is a marketing slogan. It is the LAPD’s motto, adopted in 1963. It has no legal force. No statute requires it. No court enforces it.

Warren v. District of Columbia (1981): Two women called 911 while their roommate was being attacked. Officers came, knocked, got no answer, and left. The attack continued for hours. No duty to protect.

Source: Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. 1981).

DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989): A boy was beaten into permanent brain damage by his father. Everyone knew. Nobody acted. No duty to protect.

Source: DeShaney v. Winnebago County, 489 U.S. 189 (1989).

Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005): A woman’s three daughters were kidnapped by her estranged husband in violation of a restraining order. She called police repeatedly. They did nothing. He murdered all three children. No duty to protect.

Source: Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005).

Three cases. One doctrine. The police have no legal obligation to protect you. The slogan on the car is a lie the system tells so you’ll feel grateful to the institution that has no duty to help you and a 2% chance of hurting you.

IX. THE WALL OF SILENCE

In any other profession, if a colleague committed an act of violence against a civilian, you would be expected to report it. In medicine, failure to report malpractice is sanctionable. In law, failure to report misconduct violates the Rules of Professional Conduct. In policing, reporting a fellow officer is career suicide.

The blue wall of silence is not informal. It is structural. Officers who report misconduct face retaliation, ostracism, denial of backup, and termination. The culture enforces itself.

The oath every officer takes says he will faithfully perform the duties of his office. Watching a fellow officer violate a citizen’s constitutional rights and remaining silent is not faithful performance. It is breach. Every silent officer is an officer in breach of his oath.

To the good officers: you exist, and this document does not deny it. But your goodness is measured by what you do when your partner crosses the line. If you stand by and watch, you are not a good officer who works with bad ones. You are a participant. Your badge is not a shield against moral responsibility. Your silence is the wall that protects every bad officer in your department. You are the wall. And until you break it, you own what it protects.

They Bring It Home

The system that trains officers to dominate, to use force as a first-line tool, to view noncompliance as a threat — that training does not clock out at the end of a shift. Two peer-reviewed studies presented to the United States Congress in the early 1990s found that approximately 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, compared to 10% of families in the general population. A closer analysis of the data shows that 28% of male officers self-reported perpetrating physical violence against their spouse — roughly two to four times the national average. A third study of more senior officers found a rate of 24%.

Source: Johnson, L.B. (1991). Testimony before the U.S. House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families; Neidig, Russell & Seng (1992). Police Studies, 15(1); National Center for Women & Policing Fact Sheet.

These studies are from the early 1990s. No major study has been conducted since. The absence of updated data is itself an indictment. The institution that tracks crime statistics for the entire nation has not studied how often its own officers assault their families in over thirty years. Nobody in a position to fund that research wants to know the answer.

What we do know about the system’s response is consistent with everything else in this document. A 1994 nationwide survey of 123 police departments found that nearly half had no specific policy for dealing with officer-involved domestic violence. The most common discipline for a sustained allegation was counseling. Only 19% of departments indicated officers would be terminated after a second sustained allegation. In Chicago, between 2011 and 2023, at least 38 officers were charged with domestic battery. Thirty-one had their cases dropped or dismissed. Three were found not guilty. Two officers were convicted. Out of thirty-eight.

Source: Arlington, TX PD / Southwestern Law Enforcement Institute survey, 1994; Chicago Weekly / Cook County State’s Attorney data, 2011–2023.

Of all officer-involved domestic violence cases where officers were arrested, charged, and convicted, more than half kept their jobs. The officer trained to dominate on the street dominates at home. The system that refuses to hold him accountable for force against citizens refuses to hold him accountable for force against his wife. And the spouse who might report him knows that the responding officers are his colleagues, his friends, his brothers behind the blue wall. Who do you call when the person hurting you is the police?

X. THE ASSEMBLY LINE

This is not a collection of isolated problems. It is a manufacturing process.

Step 1: Selection. Screen out the intelligent. Select for cognitive mediocrity. Federal court blesses it. The pool is narrowed to people who will follow orders without asking why.

Step 2: Training. 633 hours. Less than Iraq. Less than a cosmetologist. Eight hours of de-escalation. Fifty-eight hours of firearms. Boot camp culture. Compliance in, compliance out.

Step 3: Indoctrination. Killology. Warrior mentality. Neighborhoods are battlegrounds. Citizens are threats. Killing isn’t a big deal.

Step 4: Deployment. Performance metrics. Revenue. Every stop is a data point. Every citation is money. The citizen is raw material in a production line that generates revenue and calls it justice.

Step 5: Insulation. Qualified immunity blocks suits. The DA won’t prosecute. The union fights discipline. The blue wall prevents reporting. The body cam “malfunctions.” 98% impunity is not a bug. It is the product specification.

Step 6: Repetition. The officer who faces no consequences learns consequences don’t exist. The recruit watching learns the same. The assembly line runs 24/7 in 18,000 departments. Output: 1,200 dead Americans per year and a population that grips the steering wheel and prays.

XI. WHAT THE CONSTITUTION SAYS — AND WHAT THE COURTS HAVE DONE TO IT

The Constitution is not ambiguous. The Bill of Rights was written in plain language by men who had just fought a war against a government that searched without warrants, seized without cause, quartered soldiers in private homes, and punished speech. They did not write suggestions. They wrote prohibitions. What follows is a comparison between what the Constitution says and what the courts have said — and the distance between the two is the architecture of the system described in this document.

The Fourth Amendment

What the Constitution says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The text is unambiguous. No search or seizure without a warrant. No warrant without probable cause. No probable cause without an oath. Every element must be particular — the place, the person, the thing. The Framers did not write “unless the officer has a hunch.” They did not write “unless the officer thinks you look nervous.” They wrote “shall not be violated.”

What the courts did: In Terry v. Ohio (1968), the Supreme Court created an entirely new category of seizure. An officer may now stop you on the street and physically search your person — without a warrant, without probable cause, and without your consent — based on “reasonable suspicion.” That standard appears nowhere in the Fourth Amendment. The Court invented it. The NAACP warned in its amicus brief that this power would lead to widespread harassment of Black Americans. The Court acknowledged the warning and proceeded anyway, stating it “could not really do anything about that.” The Fourth Amendment required probable cause, supported by oath, for any seizure of a person. Terry replaced that standard with an officer’s gut feeling, and fifty-seven years of stops, frisks, and pretextual encounters followed.

Source: Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968); Constitution Center, “Terry v. Ohio”; UW School of Law, “Two Legal Scholars Unpack the Fourth Amendment.”

Justice Douglas wrote in dissent that to give the police greater power than a magistrate is to take a long step down the totalitarian path. He warned that if such a step were to be taken, it should be the deliberate choice of the people through a constitutional amendment — not a judicial rewriting of the Fourth Amendment from the bench. That amendment was never proposed. The Court simply redefined the word “reasonable” until the warrant requirement became optional.

Source: Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), Douglas, J., dissenting.

Professor Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School summarized the result: the Fourth Amendment has become an embarrassment. Warrants are not required — unless they are. All searches and seizures must be grounded in probable cause — except when the Court decides they need not be. The exceptions have swallowed the rule. Justice Scalia himself acknowledged as much.

Source: Amar, A.R. (1994). “Fourth Amendment First Principles.” 107 Harv. L. Rev. 757; California v. Acevedo, 500 U.S. 580 (1991), Scalia, J., concurring.

The Fifth Amendment

What the Constitution says: “No person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The text is absolute. No person. Shall be compelled. In any criminal case. To be a witness against himself. There is no asterisk. There is no exception for people who fail to use the correct legal vocabulary while being questioned by armed agents of the state.

What the courts did: In Salinas v. Texas (2013), the Supreme Court held 5–4 that if you remain silent during police questioning — before arrest, before Miranda warnings — and you do not specifically say the words “I am invoking my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination,” then the prosecution may use your silence against you at trial as evidence of guilt. Salinas answered every question the officers asked him until they asked whether shotgun shells from the murder scene would match his gun. He went silent. The prosecution told the jury his silence proved his guilt. The Supreme Court agreed.

Source: Salinas v. Texas, 570 U.S. 178 (2013).

Justice Breyer’s dissent called it exactly what it was: a rule that punishes the uneducated. A defendant who happens to know the precise legal incantation is protected. A defendant who simply stops talking — which any reasonable person would understand as exercising the right to remain silent — forfeits the right because he did not invoke it with the correct words. The Fifth Amendment does not say “no person shall be compelled to be a witness against himself, provided he first states the correct legal basis for his silence.” The Court added that requirement.

Source: Salinas v. Texas, 570 U.S. 178 (2013), Breyer, J., dissenting.

The American University Law Review documented the downstream consequence: more than fifty years after Terry, lower federal courts consistently refuse to recognize a right to remain silent during a Terry stop. Citizens not in custody have an absolute right to walk away. Citizens in custody must be read Miranda warnings. But the millions detained in between — stopped, questioned, and frisked under Terry — have no recognized right to remain silent at all.

Source: 69 Am. U. L. Rev. 915 (2020), “Obvious but Not Clear: The Right to Refuse to Cooperate with the Police During a Terry Stop.”

Then in 2022, the Court went further. In Vega v. Tekoh, it held 6–3 that a police officer who interrogates you without reading Miranda warnings and extracts a confession used against you at trial has not violated your constitutional rights in a way that permits you to sue. Miranda warnings, the Court declared, are “prophylactic rules” and “are not themselves rights protected by the Constitution.” The only remedy is suppression of the statement at trial. If the statement is admitted anyway — as it was in Tekoh’s case — there is no civil remedy. No damages. No accountability.

Source: Vega v. Tekoh, 597 U.S. 134 (2022).

Justice Kagan’s dissent identified the practical result: sometimes an un-Mirandized statement will not be suppressed. Sometimes a defendant will be wrongly convicted and spend years in prison. He may eventually get the conviction reversed. But then what remedy does he have for the harm he suffered? The majority, she wrote, “injures the right by denying the remedy.” The Fifth Amendment says you cannot be compelled to be a witness against yourself. The Court says an officer can compel a confession, use it against you, and face no civil consequence for doing so.

Source: Vega v. Tekoh, 597 U.S. 134 (2022), Kagan, J., dissenting.

42 U.S.C. § 1983 — The Remedy Congress Built

What the law says: “Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured.”

The statute is plain. Every person. Any citizen. Any rights. Shall be liable. Congress wrote this in 1871, in the wake of the Civil War, specifically to allow citizens to sue government officials — including law enforcement — who violate their constitutional rights. It was called the Ku Klux Klan Act because it was designed to reach state officials who refused to protect freed citizens or who actively participated in their persecution. The statute contains no immunity provision. None.

What the courts did: In Pierson v. Ray (1967), the Supreme Court created a “good faith defense” for public officials sued under § 1983 — a defense that does not appear in the statute’s text. In Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), the Court expanded this into what we now call qualified immunity: government officials are shielded from civil liability unless they violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”

Source: Pierson v. Ray, 386 U.S. 547 (1967); Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800 (1982).

The practical effect: an officer can violate your constitutional rights and face no civil liability unless a previous court has ruled on a case with virtually identical facts. If no prior case matches closely enough, the right was not “clearly established,” and the officer is immune. As one petition to the Supreme Court observed, this approach sounds the death knell for accountability because a court can almost always find some minor factual difference between any two cases.

Source: Petition for Writ of Certiorari, No. 19-682 (2019); Jeffries, J.C., Jr. (2010). “What’s Wrong with Qualified Immunity?” 62 Fla. L. Rev. 851.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman stated it directly: qualified immunity is a limitation on § 1983 that the Court created in 1982 without support in the statute’s text or legislative history. University of Pennsylvania law professor David Rudovsky wrote that the Court has engaged in an aggressive reconstruction of the scope of § 1983, blunting its impact. A 2023 analysis from Cardozo School of Law found that the legal foundation of qualified immunity may rest on the erroneous omission of language from the 1874 Revised Statutes — a “Notwithstanding Clause” from the original 1871 Act that was dropped and never restored.

Source: Adelman, L.S. (2018); Rudovsky, D., “The Qualified Immunity Doctrine in the Supreme Court”; Reinert, A. (2023). California Law Review.

Congress wrote a law that said every person who violates your rights shall be liable. The Court rewrote it to say almost no officer who violates your rights shall be liable — unless someone else had his rights violated in exactly the same way, in exactly the same jurisdiction, and a court happened to rule on it. The statute contains no immunity. The Court manufactured it.

The Fourteenth Amendment

What the Constitution says: “No State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

What the courts did: In Warren v. District of Columbia (1981), the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that police have no duty to protect individual citizens, even when those citizens have called for help and are actively being brutalized. In DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989), the Supreme Court held that the state’s failure to protect a four-year-old boy from his father’s beatings — despite documented knowledge of the abuse — did not violate due process. In Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), the Court held that a woman had no constitutional right to police enforcement of her restraining order, even after her estranged husband kidnapped and murdered their three daughters.

Source: Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. 1981); DeShaney v. Winnebago County, 489 U.S. 189 (1989); Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005).

The Fourteenth Amendment says no state shall deprive any person of life without due process. The courts say the state has no obligation to prevent that deprivation — even when it knows the deprivation is coming, even when the citizen has begged for help, even when children die as a result. The officer has the power to kill you with 98% impunity and no legal obligation to save you. Both conditions are court-made.

The Distance Between the Text and the Doctrine

Read the amendments again. They use the words “shall not.” Shall not be violated. Shall not be compelled. Shall not be deprived. Shall be liable. The Framers did not use these words loosely. They had just watched a government use general warrants, compelled confessions, and summary punishment to control a population. They wrote prohibitions, not suggestions. They wrote “shall not” because they meant “shall not.”

The courts have replaced “shall not” with “unless.” Unless the officer has reasonable suspicion. Unless you fail to invoke your rights with the correct vocabulary. Unless the violation is not “clearly established.” Unless the state decides not to protect you. Unless the cost of accountability is an inconvenience to the judiciary. Every “unless” is a brick in the wall between the citizen and the rights the Constitution guarantees.

This is not interpretation. It is amendment by judiciary. The Fourth Amendment has been rewritten without ratification. The Fifth Amendment has been conditioned on legal literacy the state does not provide. The civil remedy Congress enacted has been gutted by a doctrine Congress never authorized. And the duty to protect — the most basic obligation of the social contract — has been disclaimed by the very institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

The question is not whether you have rights. You were born with them. The Framers enumerated them. The Fourteenth Amendment extended them to every person in every state. The question is whether the system that claims authority over you will honor them. The data in this document says the system, as currently constructed, will not. Not because it can’t. Because it was built not to.

Know your rights. Know their obligations. Know the oath they swore. Know the bond they filed. Know the chain of authority that put them at your window. And know that the Constitution you were born under gives you the right to examine every link in that chain.

You were born with rights. This document is your receipt.

SOURCES AND CITATIONS

Case Law

Jordan v. City of New London, No. 99-9188 (2d Cir. 2000)

Frazier v. Cupp, 394 U.S. 731 (1969)

Illinois v. Perkins, 496 U.S. 292 (1990)

Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968)

Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996)

Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. 1981)

DeShaney v. Winnebago County, 489 U.S. 189 (1989)

Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005)

Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800 (1982)

Pierson v. Ray, 386 U.S. 547 (1967)

Salinas v. Texas, 570 U.S. 178 (2013)

Vega v. Tekoh, 597 U.S. 134 (2022)

California v. Acevedo, 500 U.S. 580 (1991)

Data Sources

Mapping Police Violence — mappingpoliceviolence.org

Washington Post Police Shootings Database (2015–2024)

Fatal Encounters — fatalencounters.org

Bureau of Justice Statistics, Contacts Between Police and the Public

University of Illinois Chicago, Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project

Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform

Police Executive Research Forum (PERF)

Academic Sources

Edwards, Lee, & Esposito (2019). PNAS, 116(34).

Kruger & Dunning (1999). J. Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6).

Milgram (1963). J. Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4).

GBD 2019 Police Violence Collaborators. The Lancet (2021).

Slobogin, C. (1996). “Testilying: Police Perjury and What To Do About It.” 67 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1037.

Johnson, L.B. (1991). Testimony, U.S. House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families.

Neidig, Russell & Seng (1992). “Interspousal Aggression in Law Enforcement Families.” Police Studies, 15(1).

Mollen Commission Report (1994). Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption, NYPD.

Amar, A.R. (1994). “Fourth Amendment First Principles.” 107 Harv. L. Rev. 757.

69 Am. U. L. Rev. 915 (2020). “Obvious but Not Clear: The Right to Refuse to Cooperate with the Police During a Terry Stop.”

Jeffries, J.C., Jr. (2010). “What’s Wrong with Qualified Immunity?” 62 Fla. L. Rev. 851.

Reinert, A. (2023). “Qualified Immunity and the Notwithstanding Clause.” California Law Review.

Schwartz, J.C. (2017). “How Qualified Immunity Fails.” Yale Law Journal.

Journalism

The Civil Rights Lawyer (John H. Bryan) — Shawn Nicholas coverage

Slate, “Warrior cop class” (Aug. 2020)

Washington Post, “Killology” (Feb. 2017)

Portland Mercury, “Police Training Seminars” (Aug. 2024)

ABC News, “Police training falls short” (Feb. 2023)

CBS News, “Too Smart To Be A Cop?” (1999)

CNN, “Officer who shot Philando Castile found not guilty” (June 2017)

NBC News, “North Miami officer convicted of culpable negligence” (June 2019)

NPR, “13-Year-Old Boy With Autism Shot by Salt Lake City Police” (Sept. 2020)

NBC News / KTVB, Victor Perez shooting coverage (April–June 2025)

Courthouse News Service, Nicholas v. Fratto (Feb. 2026)

McNamara, J. (1996). “Has the Drug War Created an Officer Liars’ Club?” Los Angeles Times.

Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, “Testilying” (Nov. 2020)

Snopes, “40% of Cops Admitted They Abuse Their Partners?” (July 2024)

Documentary

Do Not Resist (2016), dir. Craig Atkinson

The Outlaw Armory — outlawlivin.com

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