Editor’s note: What Mom, Dad and the Academy Didn’t Teach You is a nine-part career survival series from Gordon Graham and Bruce “Coach Sok” Sokolove, two self-described “geezer cops” with more than seven decades of law enforcement experience between them. Drawing on what they’ve learned as officers, supervisors, trainers and observers of the profession, the series explores the everyday decisions that can protect — or quietly derail — a law enforcement career. Each installment tackles one lesson they believe officers should learn early, rather than the hard way.
Between the two of us, we have more than seven decades in this profession. We have been officers, supervisors, trainers and, in the later chapters of our careers, observers — watching good cops make entirely avoidable mistakes.
Not bad cops. Good ones.
The academy teaches you to do the job. Arrest techniques, firearms qualification, criminal law and first aid. What it does not teach — and what nobody seems to teach, at least not plainly and early enough — is the ecology of a law enforcement career: the legal, professional, social and personal environment in which that career will either survive or get quietly dismantled.
This series shares nine practical lessons that too many officers learn the hard way. In this installment, we look at why use of force can be legally defensible and still end an officer’s career, and what officers need to know about articulation and the aftermath of an incident.
Lesson 6: Use of force
Graham v. Connor (1989) is the constitutional framework for analyzing law enforcement use of force. Under Graham, force is assessed by the objective reasonableness standard: Would a reasonable officer in the same situation, with the same information, have used the same level of force? The analysis considers the “totality of the circumstances”, including the familiar “Graham factors”:
- The severity of the crime
- Whether the subject posed an immediate threat
- Whether the subject was actively resisting or evading
What many officers learn too late is that force which is constitutionally permissible under Graham can still be terminable under departmental policy.
The single most consequential skill in a use of force encounter is not tactical — it is articulation. The ability to explain, in specific and detailed language, why you perceived a threat and why the force you used was proportionate to that threat is what determines outcomes in review. “He looked like he was going to” is not articulation. “He reached toward his waistband with his right hand while maintaining eye contact and shifting his weight toward me, consistent with a pre-attack indicator I was trained to recognize” is articulation. It also translates what the observation meant to you based on your training and experience. Practice the language before you need it.
Post-incident protocol is widely misunderstood. After a significant use of force, report the basic “public safety” facts to your supervisor, and make no further formal statements until you have spoken with your union rep or attorney. This is not an expression of guilt. It is a recognition that something very serious has happened and you are responding seriously and deliberately to ensure the facts are precise. Statements made in the immediate aftermath of a high-stress event are often imprecise in ways that become permanent record. department’s critical incident protocol before you need it, not the morning after.
Previous lessons
- Lesson 1: Your digital footprint can be a professional liability
- Lesson 2: Your free speech rights narrowed the day you were hired
- Lesson 3: Integrity is infrastructure, not aspiration
- Lesson 4: Write every report for a federal courtroom five years from now
- Lesson 5: The $20 rule is a myth: How small financial decisions can cost cops their careers
Continue learning on Police1
- What can cause officers to lose qualified immunity for excessive force?
- Pre-seizure conduct in use of force cases
| Want more career lessons from Gordon and Bruce? Watch their on-demand webinar: 9 Career-Saving Lessons for Cops
