answers to that question, four evaluative standards that can be—and are—used in different contexts. Chapter 1 provides a detailed roadmap of constitutional standards, where the propriety of police force is regulated by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable seizures. Chapter 2 supplies an overview of state law, which sets out criminal and civil standards. Chapter 3 explores the administrative standards that individual police agencies create through policy, procedure, and training. Chapter 4 discusses what we term the “community expectations standard,” an important, if informal, way to evaluate police uses of force through the lens of public expectations. In each chapter, we engage in a detailed discussion of one relevant standard, identifying the contexts in which that standard applies, describing the precise behaviors that each standard regulates, and exploring how each evaluative standard is used to assess the propriety of any given use of force.
In the final two chapters, we provide key information about the choices police make in use-of-force situations; understanding these choices is essential for applying any of the evaluative standards. In chapter 5, we discuss police tactics: the decisions that officers make and the actions they take as they approach and interact with civilians, both of which can contribute to whether and how force is used. In chapter 6, we explore the various ways officers use force, describing the role various techniques, tools, and weapons can play in use-of-force situations, and highlighting the continued development of tools and technologies that may shape when and how officers use force.
These discussions about the evaluative standards, and the additional information that is necessary to apply those standards effectively, are situated within a broader conversation about governmental accountability, the role that police play in modern society, and how officers should go about fulfilling their duties. We acknowledge the value of, but do not here explicitly engage in, those more extensive themes. This book does not claim to resolve, or even to address, all of the problems in policing; indeed, our focus on the evaluative frameworks that can be applied to use-of-force incidents is quite limited. This book explores how individual use-of-force incidents are evaluated, but we do not here examine how the use of force is or could be evaluated in the aggregate. That is to say, we explore different answers to the question, “How can society assess a particular shooting?” but not to the broader question, “How can society assess police shootings in the United States taken as a whole?”
We are cognizant that our focus on individual incidents excludes controversial and important aspects of police uses of force, including, for example, the racial dynamics of the criminal justice system generally, of policing, and of the use of force specifically. There is good reason to think that the use of force is not evenly distributed along racial lines. In a survey administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1.3 percent of white respondents reported being subjected to a use of force, compared to 3.3 percent of black respondents, which suggests that there exists, at a minimum, a racially disproportionate perception that officers have used force. While force was perceived as “necessary” by roughly the same percentage of blacks (32 percent) and whites (32.4 percent), the perception that force was “excessive” was reported more often by blacks (59.9 percent) than whites (42.7 percent). Further, data gathered by the FBI and various media outlets suggests that this is not just a matter of perception, at least in the context of officer-involved homicides: 13.4 percent of the US population, but more than 30 percent of individuals killed by police, are black.
These observations are deeply troubling, implicating longstanding concerns about racial equality—or, more accurately, the lack thereof—in the United States and the manner in which policing as an institution has perpetuated inequity, both historically and today. They give rise to a series of challenging sociological quandaries. There is, of course, the very real possibility that individual officers act out of racial animus on at least some occasions. The picture is almost certainly more complicated than that, though. It is almost certainly the case that if officers are more likely to interact with black individuals, then, all other things being equal, we would expect them to use force at a higher rate against that population group. That, however, does nothing to explain why officers are more likely to interact with black individuals. The answer is likely systemic, reflecting the correlation between urban poverty and crime and a long, distressing history of race-conscious, and often overtly race-motivated, choices relating to education policy, housing policy, and economic policy, not to mention criminal justice policy. The looming role that race has played, and continues to play, in shaping how we define a “threat” or “threatening behavior” undoubtedly affects police uses of force. This is true at the wholesale level, where the identification of certain substances, but not others, as “illicit drugs” or the distinction between drugs and “hard” drugs is rife with racial overtones; consider the Federal Sentencing Guidelines’ 100:1 disparity—later reduced to an 18:1 disparity—between crack cocaine and powder cocaine, in which possession of one gram of crack (a drug associated primarily with black users and dealers) was punished at the same severity as one hundred grams of powder cocaine (a drug associated primarily with white users and dealers). Or consider the difference in the law enforcement-oriented response to the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s, when the drug was largely confined to poor, inner city (read: predominantly black) communities and the public health–oriented response to the modern heroin epidemic, which has spread into middle- and upper-class suburban (read: predominantly white) communities.
It is impossible to entirely disaggregate the social dynamics of race and class from policing and the use of force, and we do not attempt to do so. We do, however, consciously avoid tackling head-on such complex and complicated issues: that discussion is very much needed, but it is simply outside the scope of what we set out to do in this book.
To reiterate, our focus in this book is narrow: we seek to explore how individual police uses of force are evaluated. Nevertheless, this book is both necessary and a significant contribution to public and academic debates about police violence. Police uses of force are the single most visceral and divisive aspect of contemporary policing. Police kill almost three people a day,8 and people have responded with protests, civil unrest, and horrifying ambushes that have resulted in the murder of police officers in Texas, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and elsewhere. And yet, the public conversation about police uses of force has focused almost exclusively on whether individual officers who used excessive force in individual incidents should be criminally punished, without much, if any, broader discussion about how to determine whether the force used was excessive.
This is even more remarkable in light of the observation that the use of force by police has been studied for more than fifty years. There was only limited academic interest in the subject until the 1960s, when scholars like James Fyfe began conducting research and building a budding literature. Even then, the use of force was not the subject of sustained academic attention until 1980. That year, interest was energized by the publication of volume 452 of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; that volume was a special edition that brought to the attention of a broad academic community the nature and scope of existing academic work on use-of-force issues.9 Since then, there have been marked improvements in the academic literature.10 Today, the use of force by police is an accepted topic for researchers and practitioners alike. Indeed, a volume of the Annals to be published in 2020 will be dedicated to research on fatal police shootings. These important research questions continue to develop, and interested scholars and practitioners investigate them and report their findings,11 but scant attention has been paid to the analytical topics we address in this book: the various evaluative standards for use-of-force incidents and the tactics and tools of police violence.
Part I
Standards for Evaluating Police Uses of Force
In August 2014, an officer working for the municipal police department in the then-little-known St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed Michael Brown,
