Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

Local governments increasingly rely on unarmed, nonpolice experts to provide public safety services. In response to demands to reduce police violence, many municipalities have empowered paramedics, mental health counselors, social workers, and homeless outreach personnel, to triage health and safety issues without police involvement. Pilot programs reallocating police funds to these alternate responders appear to reduce arrest rates and rates of police violence. But they have not eliminated acts of violence committed by these nonpolice actors themselves. Shocking stories of paramedics chemically sedating motionless patients to death, social workers assaulting clients, and homelessness response units brutally dispersing unhoused persons after destroying their homes highlight the continued risks to vulnerable individuals interfacing with public safety personnel.

This Article provides the first sustained treatment of what I call “nonpolice brutality,” evaluates why most violent nonpolice actors operate free from constitutional restraints, and charts the troubling implications for marginalized communities depending on these responders. While the Fourth Amendment’s excessive force jurisprudence governs most police violence as a potential “unreasonable seizure,” courts are reluctant to apply the same excessive force rules to nonpolice actors outside criminal investigative contexts. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s narrow definition of “seizure” excludes brutal acts designed to disperse rather than detain individuals, a particularly relevant loophole in the homeless rights context. And residual protections from government violence under the Due Process Clause virtually never apply in nonpolice public safety cases, because any such violence fails to “shock the contemporary conscience” of judges removed from the insecurity of daily life on the margins of society’s fragile social welfare system. The Article concludes with recommendations for jurisprudential reform grounded in the text, purpose, and design of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.

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