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Investigations of police departments by the U.S. Department of Justice spurred the spread of early intervention systems that use data to detect officers at elevated risk of problematic conduct. These systems of internal self-surveillance remain even when consent decrees expire and federal investigators turn to other tasks—or pull back during Presidential regime changes. Such automated technologies of harm detection and prevention that outlast political upheaval are alluring—but they are only as effective as the data and criteria on which they rely to detect and prevent problems. Current systems largely are dependent on reported events and use simplistic thresholds based on intuition to trigger red flags. To improve the harm prevention power and build a smarter system, this Article proposes using a rich and growing source of data not traditionally used in early intervention systems—audiovisual data from police-worn body cameras and community-member cell phone cameras. The Article also presents findings from the coding and collection of 213 body camera policies regarding whether a major source of audiovisual data—police-worn body camera videos—may be used to monitor and evaluate officers. While there are policy silences, gaps, and splits, the Article concludes that the majority of departments have the opportunity to use the rapidly accumulating trove of audiovisual data to create smarter early intervention systems.

This Article addresses an open question of pressing practical importwhether people and businesses operating in the shadow of a legalization conflict have a reliance defense. A legalization conflict arises when conduct is decriminalized by one authority while remaining criminalized under another legal regime. For example, drugs, guns, undocumented immigrants, and giving legal advice or financial support for certain activities, may be both illegal and legal under conflicting regimes. People plan their lives, hopes, and financial affairs around legalization laws and decrees. If people take actions now in reliance, will they face sanctions later? The question is of great import for many people and businesses, as well as the lawyers who advise them. ]para]The Article argues that reliance defenses should be available when governmental actors in charge of enforcing the criminal regime expressly acquiesce in the competing legalization. In such cases, reliance is reasonable and estoppel is required lest people or businesses be lulled by the statements of actors charged with administering the law into a snare of sanctions. Potential objections regarding privileging governmental lawlessness and the danger of giving people a normative choice of law that enables strategic gamesmanship are addressed

The strategy of taking the death penalty battle to the market by ferreting out and campaigning against lethal injection drug suppliers has been wildly successful in shriveling the execution drug supply. The supply-side strategy has not halted executions, however. Rather, the unintended consequences of shrinking the execution drug supply are heightened risks of harm as states resort to alternative drugs and a surge of new state secrecy laws to protect remaining supply sources. The new secrecy laws are facing a barrage of legal challenges and a circuit split on how to resolve them. This Article is about the unintended consequences of the supply-side attack strategy and how harm reduction is better served by challenging the lack of notice and adversarial testing regarding new drug protocols rather than outing and attacking the last remaining licensed suppliers. [para] While execution drug supplier confidentiality laws are often conflated with concealment of the method of execution, the Article argues it is important to distinguish the two. The success-and downsides-of the drug supplier outing strategy illustrates the legitimate harm prevention rationale behind execution drug supplier confidentiality laws. Confidentiality serves the important interest of safeguarding remaining licensed drug sources and reducing the need to resort to questionable backroom sources abroad or old methods of execution such as firing squads. In contrast, eleventh-hour drug substitutions heighten the risk of unintended suffering because the death cocktail protocol has not been subject to sufficient adversarial testing, much less scientific evaluation. For those concerned about reducing harm, it is counterproductive to attack compounding pharmacies licensed as competent to produce drugs for the public. Rather the focus should be on sufficient notice regarding the lethal injection protocol to evaluate and challenge changes in cocktail combinations, which pose a far greater risk of harm.

Mass shootings at Navy Yard, Newtown, Aurora, and elsewhere have jolted Congress and the states into considering gun violence prevention. More than 1500 gun-related bills have been introduced since 2013, after the slaughter in Newtown of twenty elementary-school children and six adults. Legislation and debates are shaped by the specter of a heavily armed, mentally ill individual hunting in public places such as schools, businesses, and workplaces. In the states, the most successful type of legislation involves firearms restrictions for the mentally ill. In Congress, the legislation that garnered the most debate was a ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. While the national attention to firearms violence prevention is salutary, for law and policy to tackle the core of the problem it is important to address two empirical questions: Who are the dangerous individuals committing most firearms homicides, and why do the law's current screens miss them? [para]This Article draws on data from the National Violent Death Reporting System to answer the crucial foundational questions of who poses a danger and why the dangerous slip through existing legal screens. Presenting data on the most prevalent place of shooting, the victim-shooter relationship, and the shooter's prior history, this Article shows that prevention of extraordinarily devastating firearms violence calls for attention to how the nation addresses "ordinary'" violence. By ordinary violence, this Article means violence that is often viewed as mundane, such as altercations between family members, friends, and intimates in the home. Many perpetrators of firearms homicide have a history of such prior events—yet a substantially smaller proportion of these violent episodes have been adjudicated, thereby slipping through existing screens for firearms restrictions. Based on these findings, the Article discusses how executive action steering scene-of-assault procedure and discretion in dealing with ordinary violence can improve detection of the dangerous ...