Force Decisions

A Citizen's Guide to Understanding How Police Determine Appropriate Use of Force

Rory Miller

• Publisher: YMAA Publication Center
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781594392443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Korruption & Fehlverhalten

Cooperation, Compliance, Control.

In a free and peaceful society where so many have been taught that all violence is wrong, citizens are often confused and dismayed when officers use force, even when the force is perfectly lawful and justified.

This book allows you to 'take' a basic USE OF FORCE class just as if you were a rookie at the police academy. Below are some highlights of what is included in 'your' basic use of force class:

SECTION 1. TRAINING. I explain policy and laws that officers are taught. We examine use of force, how to define a threat, and the difference between excessive force and unnecessary force.

SECTION 2. CHECKS AND BALANCES. This section explains how an officer's decisions are examined if suspected of being bad decisions.

SECTION 3. EXPERIENCE. We explore how officers see the world that they live in. Somewhere in the fog between training and experience, the officer has to make a decision. Sometimes decisions will be made in a fraction of a second and on partial information. Sometimes a decision will change the lives of everyone involved—forever.

SECTION 4. ABOUT YOU. Review what you should have learned. Why does community action fail? What is it that can really be done? Know how to behave when faced by an officer. Until this section, I have tried to put you in the headspace of an officer, giving you an overview of his training and a taste of his experiences. Now 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.

Any civilian, law enforcement officer or martial artist interested in self-defense, or anyone wanting to understand the duties and responsibilities of civilians and police officers needs to read this book.

Section 1: Training

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.

1.1 The Bottom Line

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 and more effectively. From their point of view, with these advantages in time and knowledge, almost every decision you make can be called a mistake.

You will make mistakes, by their standards and by your own standards as well. As your instructors, we will do what we can to make sure that you make these mistakes safely, in training.

Training is the place for mistakes.

Years ago, we designed and ran a “Confrontational Simulations” course. In a ConSim course, the goal is to present realistic, high-stress situations and force the student to make hard decisions under extreme pressure. The goal of this particular class was to bring Corrections Officers, who were accustomed to being unarmed in a relatively controlled environment, up to speed on decisions and survival skills when they were working fully armed and outside the jail.

Many of the scenarios were intense: walking into armed robberies, former inmates wanting attention (good or bad), assassination attempts on high-profile offenders. Some were designed to draw a bad decision: in one case, exactly mimicking the assassination attempt, the ‘threat’ was a reporter with a microphone.

One scenario was just an elderly lady crying on a park bench. The officers were good and compassionate people. Most who went through the scenario spent endless energy trying to engage her in conversation, or provide some sort of help. The goal of the scenario was to remind the officers that not everything is their problem.

One of the officers, who shall remain nameless, asked and talked and even pled with the old woman. He finally ordered her to quit crying and tell him what was wrong. She continued to howl and sob. He repeated the order. She kept crying.

He pulled his pepper spray and hosed her down!

We ended the scenario. The officer then had to turn to a jury of his peers (the other officers taking the course) and justify his actions. He couldn’t, of course. No reasonable officer would have done anything similar.

Neither would this officer, in real life. The situation was designed to ramp up his adrenaline. Even more, in the class setting he thought, with impeccable logic, that given a problem, his job was to find a solution. When everything else failed (and only when everything else failed), he tried force. It never occurred to him, in a classroom setting, that he was allowed to walk away, that not every situation is a situation requiring action.

You are expected and required to use the minimum level of force that you reasonably believe will safely resolve the situation.

‘Safely’ is very specific, and something hard for people raised on western movies and concepts of fair-play to grasp. I’ll hit it again in section 1.2 on the “Three Golden Rules,” but you deserve a taste here.

Real violence, real fighting, and real applications of force are not games. There is no reset button. There are no do-overs. A professional in this situation cannot afford some misguided idea of chivalry or fair play. Were the officer to indulge in that illusion, the bad guy would win half the time and go on to victimize more of the innocents the officer is sworn to protect.

At the swearing-in ceremony, when the Chief handed me my badge he said, “Once you pin this on, you are never allowed to lose. Never.”

The more force you use, the safer it is for you. Do the math. The threat^* comes at you with no weapon, and you may try to wrestle with him and you might win. Or you may hit him upside the head and you may win. Or you could hit him with a club and you will probably win. Or you could pull a knife or gun and almost certainly win. The higher the level of force you use, the safer for you.

The key is that you must judge the lowest level that will safely work. An experienced officer with decades in martial arts specialized in joint locks could handle many things, safely, at a lower level than other officers.

So, officer or civilian, you do not go into a situation at the level of force in which you believe you might prevail. You go into it as hard as you need to in order to go home safely.

‘Safely,’ as you see, modifies ‘minimum level.’ It is one short sentence, but it gets very complicated, especially in application.

Lastly, to ‘resolve the situation’ can mean something different in almost any encounter. The level of force needed to stop a man from kicking another man to death may be different from the level of force necessary to stop a sniper from pulling a trigger, and will definitely be different from the force needed to get handcuffs on a drunk and drive him to detox. The goals of a Use of Force (broadly to gain compliance or get control) are extremely variable, and that modifies everything.

You are expected and required to use the minimum level of force that you reasonably believe will safely resolve the situation.

1.2 The Three Golden Rules

1. You and your partners go home safely at the end of each and every shift

2. The criminal goes to jail

3. Liability free

The three golden rules, first written by Dep. Paul McRedmond of the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, must be the basis of all officer training. The fact that they exist, that they are explicitly taught, and that they needed to be stated so clearly says something about the profession.

Rule #1: You and your partners go home safely at the end of each and every shift

In most professions, staying alive and uninjured during the workday is more or less expected. Statistically, this is true for officers also. Most days, most go home fine. But some days, they don’t. They are paid to sometimes deal with less-than-fully-socialized people in volatile situations. Officers are expected to walk (or run) into places where people with more common sense are running away.

Rule #1 is a pipe dream. The only safe way to do the job is to NOT do the job. Some officers do use this strategy and get away with it. We’ll talk about Lops in “Experience,” section three. The essence of Rule #1 is not to make the job any riskier than it is. Don’t take stupid chances.

You might die, but you should never die because of your own stupidity or bravado. You should never get your partner killed because you couldn’t keep your ego in check. And you should never, ever, die in such a way that other agencies use it for training films.

A short list of things to remember:

• You are not Superman and bullets do not bounce off you. This is one of the Hollywood Effects. By the time you join a police agency, you have watched thousands of hours of television. In the television world, being the good guy seems to magically protect you from serious injury. This isn’t true. We all know it isn’t true, but seeing it a thousand times can hit the brain at a very deep level and rookies often act like it is true.

• Keep your ego in check. This is a job, not an identity. Criminals will try to bait you, or try to make you angry. If you lose control, they can manipulate the situation. It is your job to manipulate the situation. You have to do everything in your power to stay above the game, so that you can see and think clearly.

• Never take it (almost anything) personally. You are going to be interacting with people on their worst days. They will be angry, frightened, and indignant. It’s not about you. If someone needs to get his sense of masculinity back by calling you names, stay cool. It’s better than if he gets it back by beating his wife or children, which might be his normal method.

• Don’t get too excited to watch your back. This is a hard one to teach and a hard one to do. When the adrenaline hits, you will get tunnel vision and physically be unable to see things in your peripheral vision. Another factor is that attention is naturally drawn to the point of action or the greatest perceived threat. You will want to look at what is going on. Sometimes it will be your job to make sure no one comes up from behind. Even if it isn’t, make a conscious decision to look around and see if the situation has changed.

• Do not compete with criminals. You do not have to show that you are more manly than a wife beater. You do not have to be more clever than a con man.

• You are not alone. Long nights on solo patrol it is easy to forget that you are part of a team. You have a radio, use it.

• More than that, not just in the day-to-day stuff but also in a serious crisis, you are not alone. Your agency has decades or centuries of experience to draw from. Never be afraid to ask for advice or guidance, or just tips on how to do a better job.

• You have a radio for a reason. That ties into the above. Just add—don’t get lazy. Call in every stop. Just because the last three hundred stops went fine is no indication that the next one will. Someone needs to know where you are and what you are doing. You will use the radio far more than you will use any weapon or force option. Get good at it.

• It is not a game. There is no ref, no time limit, and the stakes are higher than any game. Do not go into this thinking in contest terms. The job gets done. There is no “I’ll be the best cop I can, and he’ll be the best crook he can, and we’ll see who wins.” There is no ‘see who wins.’ You get the job done. You are not permitted to lose or draw. You have a responsibility to the citizens.

• You don’t need to prove your masculinity. I think I’ve said this three different ways now. Sinking in?

You have a responsibility to keep yourself safe. You have a job to do and you cannot do it if you are dead or injured. A dead officer is not just a heroic or tragic icon, a dead officer is also a wasted resource.

The most succinctly I have ever heard this concept explained was at Combat Medic traini...