The Need for Better Information
Acknowledgments
Appendix of State Laws
Notes
Index
About the Authors
List of Figures and Tables
Figure 1.1. Simplified Spectrum of Reasonableness
Figure 1.2. Analytical Spectrum of Reasonableness
Figure 2.1. Lethal Police Shootings per 100,000 People (2015–2018)
Table 3.1. Administrative Regulatory Considerations
Figure 3.1. Conceptual Force Matrix
Figure 3.2. Early Los Angeles Police Department Force Continuum
Figure 3.3. Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) Use-of-Force Model
Figure 3.4. (Former) Florida Force Matrix
Figure 3.5. Protective Safety Systems Transactional Use-of-Force Paradigm
Figure 3.6. Queensland Police Service, Situational Use-of-Force Model (2016)
Figure 3.7. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Incident Management Intervention Model
Foreword
Arif Alikhan1
With controversial police shootings capturing the attention of the nation, it has never been more important to understand when and how a police officer may use force. As a senior police executive, however, I experienced firsthand the difficulty of explaining the law and different policies regarding when an officer may use physical force against a suspect.
There are 18,000 different police agencies in the United States, each following different administrative policies, operating within different judicial districts, and serving different communities with varying expectations. This has resulted in a patchwork of legal interpretations, policies, and community standards that often conflict and can cause significant confusion among police professionals and the public.
Law enforcement experts Seth Stoughton, Geoffrey Alpert, and Jeff Noble provide a comprehensive explanation of the many factors that surround a police officer’s decision to use physical force and provide useful guidance on how to navigate the complexities of the law and policy in police uses of force. In these pages, they use their diverse experiences as leading police researchers, accomplished authors, and former police officers to simplify the complex concepts into understandable and useful explanations of when and how an officer may use force to apprehend a suspect, to defend themselves, or to defend others.
I have had many spirited debates with these learned gentlemen and greatly value their important insights about the gaps and contradictions in the law. Unlike most books on uses of force, they go beyond the typical constitutional analysis and discuss the impact of dozens of state laws and thousands of administrative policies that influence the subject. Most importantly, they address how community expectations often differ, and even conflict, with what the law allows and policies define as permissible.
{~?~PG:Arif Alikhan is a Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the former Director of Constitutional Policing and Policy at the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). He previously served as the Deputy Executive Director for Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, and Fire/EMS at Los Angeles World Airports, as a Distinguished Professor of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the National Defense University, as the Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, as a senior advisor to Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez, and as an Assistant United States Attorney. The opinions expressed above are his personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the University of Chicago and its affiliates.
Deciding whether to use physical force is among the most serious and consequential decisions a police officer can make. The decisions are often made during intense and uncertain circumstances. They are also captured on video for the world to see and pass judgment on, often with little or no understanding of the law governing these interactions or the policies that guide officers’ decisions. This important book, long overdue, will help police executives, legal professionals, researchers, and the public understand, assess, and have the ability to explain when and how a police officer may use force to protect the communities they serve.
Introduction
What does a police officer in the United States look like? There is no way for us to foresee, as we write this months or years before you read it, the details of the officer you’re imagining right now. They may be tall or short, male or female, white or black, uniformed or in plainclothes; there are an infinite number of variations. Yet we can confidently predict that the officer you’re picturing is armed.1 At a minimum, they have a handgun, but they may be wearing a duty belt or tactical vest outfitted with pepper spray, a baton, or a TASER; they may be carrying a shotgun, a rifle, or a transparent shield and a riot baton. You may even have pictured an officer using force, mentally replaying one of the many videos of police shootings or other uses of force that have been prominently featured in the news.
The fact—and we are confident enough in our predictions to call it a fact—that you pictured an armed officer demonstrates what academics and officers themselves have long recognized: the use of physical force is inherent in and inseparable from modern policing.2 How could it be otherwise? Society invests officers with the legal authority to invade privacy and to restrict freedom, to deprive people of their basic liberties. Predictably, people do not always respond well to being deprived of those basic liberties. But police authority is backed by the threat of state-sanctioned violence; if an individual resists an officer’s attempts to exercise their authority, the officer may well use physical force to fulfill their duties.
Police violence has proven to be a challenging and divisive issue in the United States, although the use of force, especially the use of deadly force, is relatively rare. Indeed, the vast majority of police–citizen encounters are insipid interactions that do not involve problematic coercion or result in complaints. According to the best available data—which admittedly is not as robust as we would prefer—only a small percentage (1.8 percent) of the more than fifty million police–civilian contacts every year involve a threat or actual use of force. Even in the context of interactions that involve the types of inherently coercive police action that are most likely to elicit civilian resistance, such as arrests, violence is the exception, not the rule. Studies have estimated that out of some thirteen million arrests, only about 4 percent involve the use of more force than necessary to handcuff a compliant subject.3 And on those occasions when officers do use force, the vast majority of incidents involve low-level violence with little potential for injury: grabbing, shoving, and the like.
Why, then, should society care about the use of force? There are at least two different answers to that question: one philosophical, the other pragmatic. Philosophically, the use of government violence against civilians runs counter to our most basic democratic notions of individual freedom, liberty, security, and autonomy. Our system of democratic republicanism is premised on the belief that a non-tyrannical government can rule only with the consent of the governed. A sophisticated civilization must balance individuals’ interest in liberty and privacy against society’s interest in order and security, but if our democratic ideals are to mean anything that balancing must be carefully managed. The tension between the need for governmental infringement on freedoms and the need for protection from governmental abuse is particularly acute in the context