The Samaritan Wire

A traffic stop is one of the smallest encounters the state has with a citizen. A claimed eleven miles an hour over the limit is about as low as the stakes of law enforcement go. And yet, according to a federal civil-rights lawsuit now filed in Arkansas, that is how an ordinary morning turned into a video the whole country has now seen: an eighteen-year-old, Alisa Hackett, taken to the ground and struck in the face by a state trooper on the side of a highway.

The trooper has been named in the suit. The video is public. The complaint alleges that the force came not because Ms. Hackett posed any danger, but because she questioned the officer. Ben Crump has been retained. The Arkansas Legislative Black Caucus and the state conference of the NAACP have asked, plainly, for accountability. I want to explain why, as a matter of law and not only of feeling, they are right to ask — and what the answer is supposed to be.

Start with the constitutional test, because it is not vague and it is not new. Since Graham v. Connor in 1989, American courts have judged police force under the Fourth Amendment by a standard of objective reasonableness, weighing three things: the severity of the offence at issue, whether the person posed an immediate threat to anyone’s safety, and whether they were actively resisting or trying to flee. Lay the allegations of this stop against those three factors. The offence is a speeding infraction. The threat, on the face of the video, is a teenager talking. The flight is none. When all three factors sit at the bottom of the scale and the force sits near the top, the law does not call that a hard case. It calls it a claim that must be answered.

The harder problem is not the standard. It is the shield. The doctrine of qualified immunity has, for a generation, stood between citizens and the officers who wrong them, requiring a victim to show not merely that a right was violated but that it was “clearly established” in some nearly identical prior case. It is the reason so many meritorious claims die before a jury ever hears them, and it is why the civil-rights statute that is supposed to vindicate these injuries — Section 1983, a law passed in 1871 precisely to check official violence — so often cannot. A right that cannot be enforced is a right in name only.

This is also not an isolated Arkansas story, and that is the part the state’s lawmakers should sit with. In 2022, in Mulberry, three officers were captured on video beating Randal Worcester; the Department of Justice brought federal charges. A pattern is not proven by two incidents, but it is signalled by them — and the place to answer a signal is the legislature. Accountability that depends entirely on whether a bystander happened to be filming is not accountability. It is luck. The work of turning luck into law — use-of-force standards, independent investigation of serious force, an honest reckoning with the immunity doctrine — is done in a capitol, and Arkansas has one.

There is an international floor beneath all of this, too, and it is worth naming because it belongs to every country including this one. The UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials permit force only when it is necessary and strictly proportionate to a legitimate aim. Necessity and proportionality are not soft words. They are the same two ideas that run through the constitutional test, arrived at from the other direction: force is lawful to the extent it is needed, and no further. A blow to the face of a stopped teenager who is not fighting satisfies neither.

Here is what the video changed. It did not change the law; the law was already clear. It changed what can be denied. For most of the history of these encounters, the citizen’s account and the officer’s account met as one word against another, and the badge won by default. The camera has removed the default. What it has not yet removed is the excuse — the doctrines and habits that let a clear wrong dissolve before it reaches a jury.

That is the task in front of Arkansas, and in front of anyone who says they believe in the rule of law: not merely to watch what the video shows, but to change what the system is willing to excuse. Accountability is not an attack on policing. It is the price of the badge, and a profession that carries the power to use force against citizens should be the first, not the last, to insist on paying it.