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
