This book is divided into two main sections with two smaller sections.
The first, “Training,” shows what officers learn and how they are taught to think about Force. It will essentially be an introductory Use of Force class as it would be taught in many police academies. There will be some differences. Different jurisdictions have different policies. Another instructor might not emphasize what I do. What you will read in section one is almost exactly what you would experience if you were a rookie I was training.
Section two is a bridge. At the Academy, Use of Force is taught in a complicated web of other skills: gathering and preserving evidence, relevant law, driving, report writing, cross-cultural communication, etc.
You won’t get that matrix of skills from a single book or even a dozen. There are a few things officers are taught that do pertain directly to force decisions and some things that will help you, as a civilian, put things in context. There will be an overview of how much time the officers spend on force skills, such as shooting and defensive tactics, at the academy.
Section two will also cover what happens when an officer is accused of breaking the rules. There will also be a short section on how self-defense law differs for civilians, in case you are interested.
The third section, “Experience,” will describe how officers begin to see the world that they live in and how they feel about it.
It is artificial to separate training from experience, and there will be many places where I wish the human brain could read two things at once and blend and contrast them. There are some things taught in training (such as the difference between levels of force and levels of resistance) that often don’t make sense, even to officers, until they come in contact with the real world. There are other issues, such as ‘active shooter’ tactics, where the doctrine flies in the face of experience.
Somewhere in the fog between training and experience, the officer has to make a decision. Sometimes the decision will be made in a fraction of a second on partial information. Sometimes the decision will change the lives of everyone involved forever.
The last section is a short piece about applying what you have read. It will probably hurt your feelings, since in much of it I will talk to you as if you were a suspect. Try to keep an open mind anyway. The easy part will cover what you should have learned. The hard parts will be about why community action fails and what can really be done—which is hard work and risk, not meetings and press conferences—and how you should behave when faced by an officer.
You are already a citizen and have your own experiences and points of view. In the bulk of the book, I will try to put you in the headspace of an officer to give you an overview of his training and a taste of his experience. In the very last section, I will try to let you feel like a suspect. That’s a lot of mind-bending for one book. Get plenty of sleep and drink lots of water.
I took my initial Use of Force training a very long time ago. There were a couple of hours of pre-service training when we were hired, some on-the-job training, and then the academy. We were given refresher training, usually one hour, at our annual in-service training after that.
Use of Force gets trained a lot because it is one of the “high-liability” subjects—the things that agencies commonly get sued over. It needs to be pounded into recruits and senior officers alike because high-speed judgments under stress are the meat of the job. Most of the rest of the things we do could be done by others—there’s a lot of community service, helping stranded motorists, a lot of giving directions. Some counseling. Lots and lots of writing reports.
But the thing we do that others don’t is face down angry, enraged, and often armed people. If the average person has trouble telling a salesman ‘No,’ he will have far more trouble telling an enraged meth addict swinging a chain ‘No.’ That’s the job. And it’s not enough to merely stop the bad guy. Most times anyone with a shotgun could stop anybody else. It is doing it in such a way that no one is offended, and that is hard because any use of force looks shocking to the uninitiated.
Everything that comes later will revolve around this concept. This is the basic tenet of using force for both civilians and officers:
You are expected and required to use the minimum level of force that you reasonably believe will safely resolve the situation.
Almost every word in that sentence is a legal concept.
A civilian is expected to use the minimum force—no more—that is necessary to resolve the situation. The officer, however, may be required to use that level of force. This hinges on the “Duty to Act,” a concept that will be discussed at length in section 1.3.
The minimum level of force will be discussed in section 1.6, “The Force Continuum.”
‘Reasonably believe’ can be very subjective, and there is a lot of case law trying to narrow it down. In any situation there is an almost infinite number of things that can happen: decisions that can be made, actions that can be taken. The reasonable person rule requires that whatever decision was made falls within the ballpark of what another reasonable person (ideally the jury members) might have done.
The rule is slightly different for Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs). The ‘reasonable person’ is exchanged for the ‘reasonable officer’ rule. The courts recognize that the difference in training and experience between an average reasonable citizen and an experienced officer can be vast. An officer who has been in a hundred fights will not see the situation the same way as a citizen who had one fight in junior high school, thirty years ago.
Further, courts and sensible people everywhere acknowledge that the officer can only be responsible for what he could have reasonably known at the time. He will never know if the three-hundred-pound man trying to take his gun has a heart condition, or that the drug dealer running from him is basically a nice person. He cannot fight differently or choose different ways to avoid fighting based on things he doesn’t know.
Monday-morning quarterbacks and armchair generals are clichés in our society. The academic expert on application of force is no more credible.
Officers “are often required to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary…”*
HARD TRUTH #4
Sometimes an officer will be forced to make a decision in a fraction of a second on partial information where the BEST choice will leave a corpse, a widow, two orphans, and someone who needs therapy.
Listen up, recruit—
You will make mistakes. A lot of them. You will have only the information you can gather in a few seconds and you will act on that partial information in a heartbeat. Almost every time, you will make the best decision you could have made. You will, however, be judged by people who have the leisure and resources to do research.
Where you saw a man acting angry, confused and ignoring your attempts to communicate, they will identify, perhaps, a deaf man who was despondent over a lost job or a family illness.
When he swung his fist at you and you had to decide what to do in a fraction of a second, the theorists will have hours or even days to think of a response that they believe would have worked ‘better’—that is, more safely