What Happened: This week, the Associated Press wrote an article which detailed the shooting of a 34-year-old Florida man — a suspect with a long criminal history — who emerged from a doorway and “pointed a black and chrome object at a deputy. Police say the deputy feared for his life and fired five times. The object turned out to be a stapler.”
In somewhat related news, the Wall Street Journal wrote about the increased number of prosecutions of police officers for alleged inappropriate use of force in 2015 compared to years prior. The article, entitled ‘More Police Go to Trial in Killings, but Convictions Remain Rare’ said, “More U.S. police officers have been charged with crimes for deadly on-duty shootings in 2015 than in any year going back a decade. But not a single officer has been convicted of murder or manslaughter this year. Experts say bringing such cases remains challenging for prosecutors, with judges and juries loath to second-guess decisions made by police in the line of duty.”
Why it’s Significant: These two articles in the mainstream print media are revelatory about public perception of police use of force.
When subjects comply with lawful orders by police, shots are not fired. However, when they not only are non-compliant but actively resisting or making movements indicating themselves to be a threat (of death or great bodily harm), shots become a very real possibility.
Addressing the above mentioned OIS involving the stapler, Polk County (Fla.) Sheriff Grady Judd said, “We don’t choose to shoot people. People choose for us to shoot them.”
It’s fair to say that judges, prosecutors, district attorneys, and even civilian grand juries are well-versed in things like Graham v. Connor, the objectively reasonable standard, and what police use-of-force policies are. However, the general public — and the officials they elect to hold public office at every level of government — generally speaking know very little about those things, and therefore repeatedly judge incorrectly the actions of police officers in shootings and other uses of force.
The public cry out for criminal charges against police in shootings that, during a criminal proceeding, are found to be completely justifiable under the law and agency policy.
Top Takeaways: These two articles demonstrate the distance we — as law enforcement trainers, educators and professional practitioners — must still traverse in teaching the citizens we serve about what happens in a rapidly unfolding, high-stress, potentially life-threatening deadly force encounter, as well as whatever legal proceedings follow such an event.
- We must take every opportunity to tell the public about the life-saving power of ‘comply and complain.’ We must work closely with community influencers (church pastors and school administrators, for example) to educate people that when told by police to do something, the best and safest course of action is to do it. In the event that an individual feels their constitutional rights have been violated, they may seek redress, remediation and remuneration after the fact.
- We must redouble our efforts to educate the public about the fact that an officer’s actions are ‘objectively reasonable’ in light of the facts and circumstances confronting them at the time — not with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. When a camera and a microphone are present, or when there’s a podium before you, talk about the Supreme Court’s ‘Reasonableness Standard’ as stated in Graham v. Connor, and about the fact that juries must adhere to it during deliberations.
One of the dangers of having questionable cases brought to trial — only to result in not-guilty verdicts — is the small but vocal fraction of citizens already arrayed against the police will be further frustrated by what they perceive to be “injustice” when in fact justice has prevailed. This is why it is so critically important that we keep working to educate the public.
What’s Next: As the Journal stated, there has been a significant increase in the number of use-of-force cases which have gone to trial this year — 12 so far, compared to an average of five per year over the past decade — and this trend will continue. Prosecutors are elected officials, and wanting to stay elected, they will continue to bend to political pressure from the public to bring cases to court.
It’s highly probable that some poor cop is going to get hung out to dry by a jury stacked with people whose minds are made up before the case even begins, but police use-of-force cases will overwhelmingly result in not-guilty verdicts.
This is because police officers know the law, they know their agency policy, they adhere to their training, and the vast majority of the time they are doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons.
The same cannot be said of the violent offenders who confront them on the street.
