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Current frameworks for compensating victims of police violence inadequately address collective healing and repair. Overlooked are those who suffer policing’s harmful effects without direct police contact, e.g., bystanders and family members of those directly impacted. Consider 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, who documented George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police and subsequently required her mother’s comfort to sleep through the resulting trauma. While strangers far and wide rallied to support her healing through GoFundMe donations, most indirect victims receive no such widespread support. Typically, bystanders traumatized by police violence must rely solely on their families and local communities—often the same race-class subjugated circles that experience policing’s worst excesses. This Article proposes a new direction: when local governments breach Fourth Amendment guarantees, liability should include damages for communal harms, or what I call “reparative” damages.

Section 1983 was intended to be strong medicine for the enduring problem of state-enabled racialized violence in the United States. Reconstruction lawmakers recognized that such violence left entire communities under siege, so they responded with unbounded federal power to address these harms. As the 2020 uprisings spotlighted, police violence today similarly harms entire communities, particularly Black and Brown ones. Yet current remedial schemes fail to capture these broader harms. I propose that at the damages stage of a successful Fourth Amendment suit against cities under Section 1983, courts should aim to repair policing’s collective harms by considering five factors in awarding compensation: (1) the police department’s overall budget; (2) evidence of historically troubling or abusive departmental practices; (3) annual frequency of excessive force litigation against the department; (4) existence of any consent decrees governing the department; (5) if applicable, the department’s compliance with decree requirements. When a department demonstrates a troubling history, faces numerous constitutional claims, operates under consent decrees, and shows minimal reform progress, courts could reasonably conclude it inflicts systemic harm on the community it is supposed to serve, warranting reparative damages.

Rather than awarding damages to individual plaintiffs, courts would direct compensation to a community reparative fund—a hybrid model incorporating key features of both Victims Compensation Funds (VCF) and cy pres distributions. People harmed by police in that locality could thereafter apply to the program for compensation. Self-certification would enable anyone who could credibly establish that they were vicariously harmed by police to receive compensation. Embracing a dynamic approach to statutory interpretation, this approach aligns with Section 1983’s sweeping remedial vision and meets the equity demands of our time. And because the judiciary has played a principal role in enabling police violence by manufacturing stringent immunity doctrines and eroding the Fourth Amendment, enlisting courts to make collective amends for policing’s harms has stronger moral force than a legislative approach.