Redefining the Reasonable Person in Police Encounters: The Impact of the Mainstream News Media's Portrayal of Modern Police Conduct

Abstract

Who is the “reasonable person”? There is little doubt that every competent legal professional, both in law practice and in the academic setting, has spent a great deal of time attempting to define the reasonable person. “Reasonableness is largely a matter of common sense.” In police encounters, the definition is certainly important to the outcome of questionable police conduct. How the reasonable person is defined often determines whether a police officer has infringed on an individual’s Fourth Amendment guarantee to be secure in their person against unreasonable searches and seizures. As the narratives of the news media shape how some individuals view police conduct, undoubtedly, the changed attitudes will affect how those individuals respond should they be involved in a future police encounter.

This article explores the need for the courts to apply a redefined reasonable person analysis to the Mendenhall test in light of the changing perceptions of modern police conduct due to, at least partly, the mainstream news media’s unprecedented coverage and depictions of police violence. To that end, news media outlets exert an enormous amount of influence over how consumers perceive stories related to police conduct through the power of “framing”. The way a story is framed determines how individuals think about a particular issue or event. In fact, the framing has led to the Pavlovian Conditioning of many of the news media’s consumers, resulting in the need for redefining the reasonable person in police encounters by the courts.

Keywords: Fourth Amendment, search and seizure, Mendenhall, pretextual stop, Pavlov, framing, news media