The Case Against States’ Citizen’s Arrest Laws
Despite the recent uproar at the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, few states have revisited and reexamined their citizen’s arrest laws.
Landwebs
Despite the recent uproar over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, most states still have some version of citizen’s arrest laws on the books, and as long as they endure, advocates say they could ultimately have tragic consequences, reports Vox. In many states, the laws are unclear about how long a citizen is permitted to detain someone, how much probable cause is necessary, and how much force can be used. In addition, many of the laws also don’t specify what it means to carry out a citizen’s arrest or to detain someone while making one.
Such vagueness can lead to fatal “mistakes of judgment” such as the recent killing of Arbery. The young jogger was thought to be a robber by the three men who chased, shot and killed him. Another example is the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, who followed and reported Martin as a suspicious person to 911 and then shot and killed him, despite the dispatcher’s insistence that he not approach the 17-year-old boy. Few states have reexamined their citizen’s arrest laws, even as many critics point out that they tend to target people who are of the wrong race in the wrong place at the wrong time, rather than protect any area from specific crimes. In an effort to honor Arbery, New York lawmakers moved to revise the language in the state’s citizen’s arrest statute, calling the law a “dangerous and historically abused practice” that has been “used by racists to advance their bigoted goals, ” but then the bill never advanced. See also: Ahmaud Arbery, Race and Amateur Police, The Crime Report, Nov 2, 2021
