Abstract
A scofflaw is a person who “flouts the law,” typically by intentionally violating it out of contempt for that law. Many law enforcement officers—despite ostensibly bearing responsibility to enforce the law—openly flout laws. They do so both by publicly refusing to enforce laws and by breaking the laws themselves. This article focuses on the latter: the phenomenon of law enforcement officers intentionally breaking the law, sometimes the very laws they are tasked with enforcing.
Few, if any, scholars have attempted to comprehensively study the ways and frequency with which police officers break the law, and this article also does not attempt that task. Instead, the piece achieves two modest but important goals. First, it creates a taxonomy of motivations behind scofflaw behavior by law enforcement officials, accompanied by examples of behaviors that reflect each motivation. Second, the article studies what systemic factors encourage and empower law enforcement officers to break the law. In other words, the article examines both the why and the how of scofflaw behavior: why many law enforcement officers act as scofflaws, and how society and the legal profession have enabled this behavior.