Powerful and Achievable Ways to Disempower the Police State Through State Law

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Powerful and Achievable Ways to Disempower the Police State Through State Law<br>Every claim below comes from a court opinion, a federal dataset, or a published study, and every one of them is linked where it appears.

Christopher Armitage<br>Jul 07, 2026

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What follows are ten facts about policing in the United States, each of them current law or current federal data, and together they divide into two categories: what officers may legally do to us, and what the courts have so far declined to make officers do for us. To be clear, a list of grievances without a remedy is not helpful so this article ends with a remedy: four reforms state legislatures have already proven they can pass.<br>A department can reject an applicant for scoring too high on an intelligence test, and a federal appeals court found nothing unconstitutional in the practice. When Robert Jordan scored a 33 on the Wonderlic cognitive ability exam, well above the scores typical for patrol applicants, New London, Connecticut declined even to interview him, because the city considered only candidates who scored between 20 and 27 on the theory that high scorers grow bored and quit. The policy survived rational basis review, the Second Circuit held in Jordan v. City of New London (2000), and the decision has never been disturbed. The Constitution sets no minimum for the judgment, education, or intelligence of the people we arm and send into our homes, yet at least one city successfully defended a maximum.

Whatever the entrance exam misses, the academy has little time to fix, because training an American police officer takes less time than licensing the person who cuts our hair. Basic training at state and local academies averaged 806 hours in 2022, which comes to about twenty weeks, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics Census of Law Enforcement Training Academies, while cosmetology licenses in most states require somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 hours. Germany trains its officers for a minimum of two and a half years before they patrol alone, and Finland requires a three year degree from its Police University College, which leaves the American figure short of both. The distribution inside those 806 hours matters as much as the total, since recruits averaged 73 hours on firearms skills and 51 hours on criminal and constitutional law, per the same census, which means the typical academy spends more classroom time teaching a recruit to shoot than teaching that recruit what the Constitution allows.

Officers are not even required to know the law those hours are supposed to teach, and the Supreme Court has said so directly. A North Carolina officer stopped a car over a single broken brake light even though state law required only one working lamp, so no violation had actually occurred, yet the stop went forward, a consent search followed, and the car’s owner ended up with a felony cocaine conviction that the courts refused to overturn. A reasonable mistake of law can justify a seizure, the Court held eight to one in Heien v. North Carolina (2014). The rest of us are still governed by the old maxim that ignorance of the law is no excuse, and officers received a different rule, written by the same Court that wrote ours.

We can be handcuffed, booked, and jailed for offenses that carry no jail time at all. Gail Atwater was driving her two children home in Lago Vista, Texas when an officer arrested her for a seatbelt violation, an offense whose maximum penalty was a fifty dollar fine, and she was handcuffed in front of her kids, driven to the station, booked, and held in a cell for about an hour until she posted bond. The Fourth Amendment permits a full custodial arrest even for a fine-only offense, the Supreme Court held five to four in Atwater v. City of Lago Vista (2001), and the majority described what happened to her as involving gratuitous humiliations and pointless indignity before upholding the arrest anyway.

Staying silent does not invoke the right to remain silent, which is the kind of sentence that sounds wrong until we read the cases. A Michigan suspect sat nearly mute through almost three hours of questioning, and when he finally gave a one-word answer, that word counted as a waiver because he had never expressly invoked the right, the Supreme Court held in Berghuis v. Thompkins (2010). Texas prosecutors then used a man’s silence during voluntary, pre-arrest questioning as evidence of his guilt, and the Court allowed that too, in Salinas v. Texas (2013), because he never spoke the invocation aloud; even the words “Maybe I should talk to a lawyer” had already failed as too ambiguous in Davis v. United States (1994). The working script therefore has two sentences and no improvisation: I am invoking my right to remain silent, and I want a lawyer. After that comes actual silence, because answering a question...