Meaning
The deliberately public escorting of a handcuffed suspect by police, timed so cameras can film the procession from door to vehicle. The phrase covers both the practice and, loosely, any ostentatious parading of an accused person; it is American, and contested. Often used loosely for any public shaming procession; in strict use it implies police staging for the cameras. Regional use: American English (New York police origin).
Origin
Short for 'perpetrator walk', and New York to the core. Parading the accused is old - the practice echoes medieval processions to the scaffold - and an NYPD inspector staged an early media version in 1903, marching handcuffed Mafia suspects through Little Italy on the claim that the wagons were late. The term itself is newer: the language columnist William Safire traced its earliest media use to 1986, though reporters recall police and photographers using it by the 1940s, and departments formalised walk guidelines after 1969. The practice expanded in the 1980s when Rudolph Giuliani, as United States Attorney, extended it to white-collar defendants. It is also litigated: in Lauro v. Charles (2000) the Second Circuit held that a walk staged purely for a television crew violates the Fourth Amendment even though routine transport falls outside it, and the 2011 walk of Dominique Strauss-Kahn - lawful to stage in New York, unlawful to publish in France - drew international criticism of the custom.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- doing the perp walk
- perpetrator walk
- taken on a perp walk
Usage Examples
- Cameras were tipped off for the dawn perp walk, and by breakfast the financier's mugshot was on every front page.
- Defence counsel argued that the perp walk was staged theatre no jury could unsee.
- Small-town departments do not do the perp walk; in New York it is practically a press release.