ERIC GARNER was not the first American to be choked by the police, and he will not be the last, thanks to legal rules that prevent victims of police violence from asking federal courts to help stop deadly practices.

The 1983 case City of Los Angeles v. Lyons vividly illustrates the problem. That case also involved an African-American man choked by the police without provocation after he was stopped for a minor offense — a burned-out taillight. Unlike Mr. Garner, Adolph Lyons survived the chokehold. He then filed a federal lawsuit, asking the city to compensate him for his injuries. But he wanted more than just money. He also asked the court to prevent the Los Angeles Police Department from using chokeholds in the future. The trial court ordered the L.A.P.D. to stop using chokeholds unless an officer was threatened with death or serious injury, and to institute better training, reporting and record-keeping.

The Supreme Court overturned this order by one vote. The court explained that Mr. Lyons would have needed to prove that he personally was likely to be choked again in order for his lawsuit to be a vehicle for systemic reform. Without that, he could win compensation only for past injuries.

This is the legal standard when a plaintiff asks a federal court for an injunction — or a forward-looking legal order — in order to stop illegal practices that could harm him in the future. It makes some sense in the abstract: If someone can’t show he will be harmed in the future, why should a court try to prevent the harm? But even though Mr. Lyons couldn’t prove that the L.A.P.D. would choke him again, he could be confident that the police would eventually choke someone else. When the stakes are this deadly, federal courts should step in.

The decision instead left it to local authorities to enact solutions. History shows they’re not up to the job. In 1985, the New York Police Department agreed that chokeholds were “potentially lethal and unnecessary” and announced that it would no longer use them “routinely.” That policy failed. After more deadly chokeholds, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly banned their use altogether in 1993. But just last year, the city received 233 allegations of police chokeholds.

Federal courts could address police violence by legally forbidding practices like chokeholds, as well as by mandating improved training and reporting. If police departments still failed to comply, federal judges could impose penalties and harsher requirements.

How do we know that these interventions would be more effective? Consider school segregation. Local officials had promised change but failed to ensure it, and it took decades of close supervision by federal courts to make a dent in the problem. As the courts started to leave this field in more recent years, de facto segregation returned.

In his dissent in the Lyons case, Justice Thurgood Marshall pointed out that, without judicial enforcement, the city would “continue the policy indefinitely as long as it is willing to pay damages for the injuries and deaths that result.” Today we still depend on bureaucratic cost-benefit analysis, with cities weighing the cost of compensating victims against the perceived value of aggressive policing.

Unfortunately, the hurdles to winning compensation are also severe. To get money from police officers who act illegally, victims must prove not just that a practice is illegal, but that no reasonable officer would think the practice was legal. To get money from a local government, a victim must prove that his injury was part of a pattern or policy. On the rare occasions when victims do prevail, governments can afford the costs and have little incentive to reform.

To be sure, there are still ways that federal courts can address the Garner case. The Justice Department has announced that it will conduct a federal civil rights investigation, as it did in Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo. But the Justice Department has limited resources and fluctuating political will. Protests help bolster this will. But the Justice Department cannot notice (let alone investigate) every allegation of police violence. Citizens need to be able to instigate judicial reform on their own.

Some federal judges have recently acted boldly to allow these suits despite the Lyons precedent. For example, in last year’s N.Y.P.D. stop-and-frisk decision, the judge found that discriminatory police searches were pervasive enough to issue an injunction in a case brought by past victims.

Public indignation about police violence should be directed not only at the grand juries and prosecutors that fail to vindicate victims of police violence, but also at the legal rules that enabled this violence in the first place. The law shouldn’t just serve to punish past conduct: It should also drive reform.

Shakeer Rahman and Sam Barr are third-year students at Harvard Law School.

(The New York Times)

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 6, 2014, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Legal Rules Enable Police Violence. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Israel refuses to confirm or deny reports but says it will not allow "sophisticated weapons" to fall into enemy hands.

Tamir Rice's mother, Samaria Rice, appeared on "Good Morning America," Dec. 8, 2014. ABC

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The mother of a 12-year-old boy who was fatally shot by policeafter he was seen playing with a plastic gun on a Cleveland playground has spoken for the first time since burying her son.

Samaria Rice told ABC News in an exclusive interview that her 14-year-old daughter was tackled by police when she arrived at the scene of the shooting.

"I couldn't believe they tackled her and put her in handcuffs and in the back of the same police car that was on the grass that the officer got out of and shot her brother so my daughter is sitting there looking at her brother on the ground," Rice said this morning.

The mother of four has already filed a wrongful death lawsuit over Tamir's death but she said this morning that she wants "the police [to] be accountable for what they did to my son."

"I'm looking for a conviction for both of the officers," she said.

Rice is being represented by Benjamin Crump, the same attorney who helped the parents of Michael Brown, the teen fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, this summer.

PHOTO: Tamir Rice, 12, was fatally shot by police in Cleveland after brandishing what turned out to be a replica gun, triggering an investigation into his death and a legislator's call for such weapons to be brightly colored or bear special markings.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration issued guidelines Monday that ban federal law enforcement from profiling on the basis of religion, national origin and other characteristics, protocols the Justice Department hopes could be a model for local departments as the nation tackles questions about the role race plays in policing.

The policy, which expands decade-old guidelines established under the Bush administration, also will require new training and data collection.

Civil rights advocates said they welcomed the broader protections, but were disappointed that the guidelines will exempt security screening in airports and border checkpoints and won't be binding on local and state police agencies.

Though the guidelines — five years in the making — were not drafted in response to recent high-profile cases involving the deaths of black individuals at the hands of white police officers, they're nonetheless being released amid an ongoing national conversation about standards for police use of force, racial justice and the treatment of minorities by law enforcement.

"Particularly in light of certain recent incidents we've seen at the local level — and the widespread concerns about trust in the criminal justice process which so many have raised throughout the nation — it's imperative that we take every possible action to institute strong and sound policing practices," said Attorney General Eric Holder, referring to the August shooting by a white police officer of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, and the chokehold death weeks earlier of a man in New York City.

Local grand juries declined to indict either officer. The Justice Department is investigating both cases.

The guidelines cover federal agencies within the Justice Department, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They also extend to local and state officers serving on joint task forces alongside federal agents.

A memo implementing the new rules was being released later Monday.

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FILE - In this Thursday, Dec. 4, 2014, file photo, U. S. Attorney General Eric Holder speaks during …

Their practical impact remains to be seen, especially since local police officers are the ones primarily responsible for traffic stops, 911 calls and day-to-day interactions with the communities they patrol. But the Obama administration envisions the rules as a possible roadmap for local police, with Holder expected to brief local law enforcement officials Monday to encourage them to adopt the federal guidelines.

Holder, who has made the release of the guidelines a priority before leaving the Justice Department next year, called the guidelines a "major and important step forward to ensure effective policing" by federal law enforcement.

The guidelines extend a ban on routine racial profiling that the Justice Department announced in 2003 under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. Civil rights groups have long said those rules left open too many loopholes by allowing an exemption for national security and border investigations and by failing to extend the ban to characteristics beyond race and ethnicity.

The new guidelines would end the carve-out on national security and border investigations and widen the profiling ban to prohibit the practice on the basis of religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity — though agents would still be able to consider those factors if they had information linking a person of that characteristic to a specific crime or threat.

Some advocacy groups for minority communities said the new guidelines didn't go far enough. Muslim Advocates, a national organization, noted that federal law enforcement would still be permitted to "map communities based on race, ethnicity or religion."

"You can't be against profiling in some contexts but for it in other contexts," Rajdeep Singh, policy director of the Sikh Coalition.

The new protocols allow for significant exemptions, including for Homeland Security officials who screen passengers at airports and do inspections at the border. Homeland Security officials argued for the exemptions on the basis of what they said was "the unique nature of border and transportation security as compared to traditional law enforcement."

"This does not mean that officers and agents are free to profile," the department said in a statement. "To the contrary, DHS' existing policies make it categorically clear that profiling is prohibited," while allowing for limited circumstances in which race, ethnicity and other characteristics could be considered.

The American Civil Liberties Union objected to those exemptions.

"It's so loosely drafted that its exceptions risk swallowing any rule and permit some of the worst law enforcement policies and practices that have victimized and alienated American Muslim and other minority communities," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office. "This guidance is not an adequate response to the crisis of racial profiling in America."

The department said other activities, such as civil immigration enforcement and Coast Guard law enforcement actions, would still be covered.

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