This guest post is by Dave Sainte-Luce, a brand new 1L student at BC Law.

My fascination with law enforcement stretches as far back as my childhood. I was your normal cop-loving kid, who always perked up and watched in awe as those Ford Crown Victorias roared by with their sirens blaring and lights flashing. With each visit to the store, I could never leave without convincing my dad to buy me a new toy police car. At that age, I only understood cops as being brave and strong, running headfirst toward danger to fight crime and maintain law and order. Accordingly, I thought all criminals deserved to be punished, and the cops did the dirty work of putting the bad guys away to keep our community safe. With such a simple yet honorable equation, how could I not love the police?

I eventually graduated from police Legos and model cars to a fleet of larger remote-control police cars in my teens, and I often turned the TV channel to Cops to watch real-life policing in action. With the murder of Michael Brown in 2014, however, it was becoming more evident that law and order is not so simple and might not be as black and white as I imagined. My naive view of “good guys vs. bad guys” was increasingly challenged by each officer-involved killing of Black men that plagued the news in the years that followed. I grappled with this cognitive dissonance and began asking myself important questions: If police officers are truly just trying to do their job – that is, to protect the public – then surely Brown and the others must have done something wrong or they would not have been stopped in the first place. But would the same have happened if Brown had been a White male instead? Maybe there is a small handful of “bad apples,” but certainly all police officers are not prejudiced against Black people. So how could it be that people of color are seemingly stopped and killed by police so disproportionately? As a Black male, how do I maneuver these contradicting perspectives? How do I reconcile my reverence for police with the grim reality that my similarly skinned peers are often subjected to discriminatory stops and are losing their lives at the hands of police?

The unsettling evidence of racial discrimination by police only multiplied as I reached college. During intense debates with my peers, I was deemed the devil’s advocate for attempting to qualify both sides. Unsatisfied with the generalizing dismissal of ACAB (i.e. “All Cops Are Bastards”), I decided to investigate this issue during my senior year. I researched how laws leave room for police officers to discriminate against people of color through my honors thesis, The Ambiguity of Probable Cause and its Contentious Application by Police. During my thesis presentation, I used the experience of 18-year-old Tae-Ahn Lea to demonstrate how the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Carroll v. United States (1925), and subsequent Supreme Court rulings granted the Louisville Metro Police the latitude to reasonably believe that Lea’s miniature Louisville Slugger bat lying in his car was a “weapon,” thereby justifying their warrantless search of his vehicle during a traffic stop in 2018. My focus on person, vehicle, and property searches revealed enlightening but concerning tactics endorsed by the Supreme Court, such as the Plain View Doctrine, that police can apply to justify their questionable determinations of probable cause without warrants when engaging with Black men.

While the choice to discriminate and failure to suppress implicit biases ultimately depend on the officer, my research into probable cause revealed how certain laws and legal frameworks enable police to discriminate against people of color. I was particularly intrigued by how the flexibility of the laws allow for varying interpretations and applications. Thus, my deep respect for police and critical analysis of their actions, together with my legal work experiences, have reinforced my desire to further study the law and its many flexible gray areas, both within and beyond criminal law. While I continue to explore which area of law I can most passionately contribute to, I look forward to using my Juris Doctor to pursue social justice and equity for individuals who are facing social, economic, or legal hardships.

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Dave Sainte-Luce is a 1L student at BC Law. Contact him at sainteld@bc.edu.