By Lori Kurtzman and Jennifer Smith Richards
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Handcuffed, locked in the back of a police cruiser — sometimes, it’s not enough to stop a suspect from thrashing around.
Sometimes, officers use force. A Taser. Pepper spray. A well-placed punch.
It’s allowed. It’s just not ideal.
“I don’t think we should Mace someone who is in handcuffs in the back of a cruiser,” said Grove City Police Chief Steve Robinette.
So Grove City is trying to find a better way. Over the past few weeks, officers there have been testing a restraint system, a solution that arose because Robinette did what some police agencies don’t do: He studied his department’s detailed use-of-force incident reports. A Dispatch review of 69 central Ohio agencies found that not all departments collect as much information as Grove City does on the force police use against citizens.
And not all are introspective.
In fact, some of the agencies didn’t gather reports of force in a way that could be analyzed at all. And of the 43 agencies that provided reports to The Dispatch, the information they collected varied wildly. (Seven departments said they had not used force within the timeframe the newspaper studied — 2011 through fall 2014.)
Nearly one-third of the reports did not note the race of the suspect, and many others didn’t track a suspect’s age. Two-thirds didn’t specify whether the suspect was drunk or otherwise impaired. Most did not explicitly indicate whether police tried verbal commands before using force.
There were inconsistencies in defining force as well.
Delaware officers, for instance, seemed to draw their guns a lot. But that’s because the department tracks that action closely. Very few others do. Columbus police pull their guns daily, but they aren’t required to report that as a use of force.
Sometimes, information was collected but not easily compared. The Fairfield County sheriff’s office kept all use-of-force reports in deputies’ personnel files. Circleville and Utica police attached use-of-force reports to regular incident reports, which meant that only a review of every arrest report would yield information about how often those agencies used force.
Smaller departments said they don’t use enough force to justify analyzing it.
Fairfield County Sheriff Dave Phalen said his department has logged only five use-of-force incidents so far this year. In Utica, Police Chief Cliff Bigler said his village department staffs just one officer per shift and typically uses force to break up bar fights or handle drunken drivers.
“Really, we’re kind of graced enough not to have the hassle” of big cities, he said.
Still, given the increased scrutiny police have been facing recently, even tiny Utica is looking into separate use-of-force forms to track its incidents.
That information can prove crucial to agencies that want to cut back on excessive force or halt worrisome trends. Grove City’s close attention to force reports meant that officials there noticed a disturbing trend: Many force incidents were happening after suspects were already in custody.
In response, police began outfitting each cruiser with a hook behind the back-seat headrest and a restraint system that works like a seat belt for the chest. Officers can work a thrashing suspect into one, and he won’t be able to reach the windows or the cage, which means the struggle could end there.
“The one thing we constantly stress is you only use as much force as is necessary to accomplish the task,” said Robinette, the Grove City chief.
In Columbus, force is tracked through the Employee Action Review System, which looks for patterns of behavior. It’s a kind of early-warning system, said Columbus Police Sgt. Rich Weiner, something that will raise a red flag if, say, “You’ve got one guy using a Taser a whole lot.”
Departments including Grove City, Hilliard and Newark log vast details about each use of force — the suspect’s gender and race, whether anyone got hurt, whether drugs or alcohol or mental-health issues were a factor.
Whitehall maintains “suspect resistance forms” that outline the size, age, race and actions of both the officer and suspect. Westerville has a committee of police staff members who scrutinize every force report.
“We hold everyone accountable for their actions,” said James Mosic, the police chief in Worthington, which has doubled its training budget over the past four years. “Our use-of-force review is not just a sign-off. It’s a thorough review at each step. If we see something, whether it rises to the level of discipline, we have an open dialogue and discussion about how we’re going to do things better in the future.
“We’re going to make mistakes. We’re only human,” he said. “But in the future, we’re going to fix it.”
A handful of agencies are turning to training to help keep officers and suspects safe — and, if possible, to avoid using force at all.
Whitehall’s officers are soon to take “verbal judo” courses that emphasize talking through emotionally charged situations. Westerville’s police employees — all of them, even the civilians — go through crisis-intervention training so that their responses to people who are mentally ill or impaired or having a particularly bad day are consistent and less likely to escalate the tension.
“Ten years ago, people in crisis quite often were arrested and taken to jail,” Westerville Police Chief Joe Morbitzer said. It’s also common for officers to undergo so-called shoot/don’t shoot training, during which they’re making split-second decisions about whether deadly force is needed. That training commonly happens with paper targets, though some departments use computerized simulators. In Grove City, officers can train in front of a movie screen where actors play out hundreds of scenarios. In one, a drunken man becomes combative and refuses to leave. In another, two kids exit a bus while jostling a gun they have found.
In the training, the officers are armed with guns that have been retrofitted to use laser beams instead of bullets or Taser barbs. Sensors log their reactions to suspects. An officer at the back of the room at a computer can choose what happens next.
That simulator — Columbus has one, too — is key to training officers not just in technique, strategy and safety but also in thinking about using the minimum amount of force necessary. Reality-based training helps correct behavior in a controlled environment rather than out on the streets, Morbitzer said.
Ohio officers are required to take 20 hours of in-service training each year. At the Franklin County sheriff’s office, deputies have more than that. Some training has officers respond to “good guy/bad guy” targets, deciding whether to shoot, but there’s no focus on trying to reduce the number of incidents in which deputies use a Taser, baton, pepper spray or other force.
In addition, officers are not trained to meet force with equal force. Punch a cop, and something worse is probably coming your way. This isn’t supposed to be a fair fight.
“We train our officers to respond with what’s appropriate,” said Chief Deputy Michael Flynn, who oversees the sheriff’s office administration and does hostage negotiations.
In Whitehall, some reviews of force have revealed that officers were too lenient.
“You were tap dancing with this guy,” Whitehall Deputy Chief Mark Newcomb has said. “You should have been smacking him in the head.”
In one such case last year, a Whitehall officer confronted a woman suspected of stealing dog food from a Wal-Mart who tried to stab him with a screwdriver. She drove off with him trapped in her car door, striking three cars before he was thrown off.
The officer used a Taser to try to subdue the woman. The reviewing supervisor said he would have been justified in shooting her.
In another Whitehall case, a new hire was asked to resign after he overlooked a gun during a traffic stop. “Great guy,” Newcomb said. “He was super-passive. ... It was a situation where he was just waiting to get himself hurt.” Above all, police chiefs say they’re trying their best to keep their officers and the public safe.
“People do some pretty bad things, but the officers are responsible for the safety and security of that individual, and that’s what you’re sworn to do — protect, no matter who it is,” Westerville’s Morbitzer said.
“Officers in general have very controlled and restrained responses. We look at these cases going on in the country right now, it’s less than 1 percent of the officers in the encounters that we’re talking about.”
Several of the people interviewed for this story said that citizens who suspect otherwise should see for themselves. Many police departments hold citizens academies, which give residents an up-close look at what it means to be a law-enforcement officer.
“I really believe we’re better now than we’ve ever been,” Grove City’s Robinette said. “There’s a big effort on the part of law enforcement to do the right thing.”
Copyright 2015 The Columbus Dispatch