Key takeaways
- The objective reasonableness standard from Graham v. Connor should not be reduced to a checklist — officers must be trained to evaluate the totality of circumstances.
- Under stress, officers may misperceive threats, forget actions, or struggle to adapt, making real-time use-of-force decisions far more complex than academic review suggests.
- Most police defensive tactics training doesn’t reflect the speed, unpredictability, and resistance officers face in real-world use-of-force incidents.
- Public and prosecutorial perceptions of police use of force often focus on outcomes rather than what a trained, reasonable officer would perceive in the moment.
The objective reasonableness standard for the use of force by a government agent was established in Graham v. Connor and is used as the foundation for law enforcement agency policies.
The specifically enumerated factors for the calculus of reasonableness — the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight — often become the entirety of a force evaluation by law enforcement rather than the totality of the circumstances that Graham prescribes. Law enforcement must regularly train in a way that takes into account the totality of circumstances.
The problem with relying on the “big three” of Graham
A quick example I use for training. An officer reports to a home for a stabbing. Upon arrival, the officer sees an adult female who is bleeding from the abdomen and face. She immediately starts screaming, “He’s in the kitchen, he has mental health issues, please don’t hurt him.” The officer quickly determines that her son had stabbed her and that there are other family members in the home. The officer enters the home to find a six-foot teenager holding a bloody knife who ignores commands to drop said knife and rapidly approaches the officer while screaming incoherently. Can the officer mag dump him?
Using the big three from Graham:
- Severity of the crime? High. Aggravated assault/malicious wounding.
- Immediate threat to the safety of officers or others? Yes. At risk of serious bodily injury or death if stabbed by approaching subject.
- Actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight? Yes, ignoring commands to drop the knife while approaching.
Almost universally, officers agree that deadly force is reasonable given this set of facts. There is no hesitation when they arrive at this conclusion.
However, in the same scenario, if the officer enters to find a small child holding a bloody knife who ignores commands to drop it and rapidly approaches the officer while screaming incoherently. Can the officer mag dump him?
Training for one scenario doesn’t prepare officers for all
While the same Graham measures apply, officers do not universally agree on the application of deadly force given this simple, yet significant, change to the fact pattern. Few readily assert the reasonableness of deadly force, and some say it is not reasonable. Responses, however, are less sure and take longer. You can see officers’ mental effort as they wrestle with the question, which is what makes it a great intellectual exercise.
In the real world, officers would be under time pressure and influenced by acute stress while trying to predict the appropriate response for the anticipated threat. Even officers assured of the reasonableness of shooting the child in a classroom would likely have a very different resolve to do so in real time. These circumstances are described in Graham as tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving – the type of environment where conditioned, habitual, intuitive, or automatic responses emerge. These responses are shaped, among other things, by training. In the above scenario, have officers considered the second possibility? Have different approaches been modeled? Have they been tested?
Why officers behave differently under pressure — even in training
Reasonable officers frequently disagree about what is objectively reasonable force even in an academic setting. This is because academic settings lend themselves to opinions about what a person thinks (or hopes) they would do, rather than what they would do. Even training environments bear this out. Officers (and people in general) will do things under training-induced stress that they would swear they would never do just moments before — shoot the wrong person, throw wild punches instead of skilled techniques, and fail to notice information right in front of them for minutes (like their sim gun has the slide locked to the rear).
Instructors often hear “I don’t know” or “I didn’t think of that” to the questions, “Tell me why you did that?” or “Did you consider X?” in the immediate aftermath of a training scenario. Again, these same people would claim to make different behavioral or action choices under the same conditions just an hour before or an hour later, before stress has been induced or after it has abated. They may have even demonstrated different decisions and actions during walkthroughs of the same type of training. The difference, of course, is stress, which can impact the ability of a person to access information, process changes in the scenario that would or should change their approach, and which biases the conditioned, habitual, intuitive, or automatic responses mentioned above.
However, a dead five-year-old would drive automatic responses of a different sort from the public.
The public and (some) prosecutors evaluate police force events based on optics, without a clear understanding of how violence can unfold, often conflating outcomes with intentions. This reduces evaluations of what reasonable officers on the scene would do to what the public or prosecutor observer believes the result of the encounter should have been, a very different prism. It has been my experience that decisions/behaviors of police officers in use of force contexts stem from multiple influences and the evaluation of such can be a more involved undertaking than simply matching training with performance. Individual officer differences — most specifically what knowledge and skills they actually access versus those that they are expected to access, under time-pressure and under stress — can result in a significant reasonable officer continuum, as a practical matter.
How training habits are formed — and distorted
This brings us to training and observations of officers during training for use of force. The largest allotment of time for this is generally during the academy. In practice, officers do not demonstrate proficiency of techniques in a live or competitive environment. Instead, they are asked to demonstrate individual techniques or sequences in a very structured and predictable format — at reduced speeds. Only toward the end of defensive tactics training are “live” or competitive scenarios enacted, with instructors as the role-players. Instructors tend to make these engagements unintentionally challenging because they do not want to get hurt, or intentionally because they want to make the officer perform the correct technique or expose them to how fatigue will impact performance.
When new officers run into these challenges, they tend to use more force; they are nothing if not committed to executing some variation of a technique at full power. This happens for several reasons, but usually it is the result of fear, inexperience and fatigue. Like most new people to competitive grappling or sparring, there is no throttle, it is all or nothing and can be dangerous. Increasing strength applied is more easily understood by an officer to solve the problem in the moment than fixing the technique. We have all seen this in a different context: watching a conversation between two people who don’t speak the same language and are frustrated at the inability to communicate — one person will almost inevitably say the same things, only LOUDER to bridge the communication gap.
Strength becomes the default when skill is lacking
In short, most officers do not know the techniques well enough to apply them at the right time or in the right way at speed and make up for lack of skill/confidence by using more power. This is compounded by practicing techniques when they are tired, a commonly created condition, because this requires greater effort (perceived and real) for the same level of output. Officers learn that more power is necessary to successfully perform a technique or overcome resistance.
As an example, a person who only learns to shoot free throws when their muscles are physically fatigued will develop the recruitment of muscles and effort necessary for this condition. When they are not fatigued, this same effort results in too much force and a missed basket. Importantly, the stress and uncertainty of physical confrontation drives bodily changes which promote maximal physical output in strength and speed — even in a training environment.
When instructors fight sober but act drunk
This combination can be catastrophic if a joint lock is precisely applied, and an officer does not recognize it as such. Because of this, in training, instructors will anticipate and defeat techniques or respond in ways that untrained people would not during live exercises.
For example, a role-playing instructor may act very drunk, slurring words and stumbling around while ignoring the officer’s commands. The moment the officer goes to take control of the role-player with some semblance of a very forceful straight arm bar takedown, the role player does not fight or react like they are drunk — they display remarkable resistance and balance to the force applied. In other words, they act drunk but fight sober. Instructors also know how to fall in a way that limits impact/injury while already safer because they are on a padded mat.
The unintended result of these interactions is that many officers do not learn moderation or scaled approaches to physical interventions because their only experience with controlling subjects has been met with skilled resistance, overcome largely through strength. This can lead to significant injury to a person when an officer expects to be met with skilled/directed resistance, applies a technique correctly, and uses maximum force on a non-resisting and balance-impaired subject on pavement.
Intentions aside, the outcome can result in accusations of unreasonable force and place an officer in legal jeopardy of one sort or another. As importantly, many, if not most, final “fight” scenarios require the instructor role-player to let the officer arrest them and the students know it, leading them to learn (deep down) the wrong lesson — that the techniques do not work unless scripted, when faced with a physical confrontation. See above for how that plays out.
Why changing training is more realistic than changing perception
Hoping that the public, judges and prosecutors will include an informed understanding of the effects of stress in their valuations of the reasonable officer for decision-making, action choices and event outcomes in a use of force context is a longer term (and less promising) goal than changing the way LE trains officers.
To limit the risk of unintended outcomes, law enforcement must begin to look at and train for the “totality” of the circumstances under the stress and speed that approach real-world application. Those who repeatedly train in stressful and taxing environments tend to access responses consistent with their training more readily — and reduce stress as a function of the officer’s confidence in that environment. This presupposes that the officers are exposed to, experience and recognize accurate cues that can change their approach to a subject.
Recognizing that someone has impaired balance should temper an officer’s approach to controlling the person. Recognizing that a person is just trying to get away and not actually “fighting” an officer should temper an officer’s approach to control. This cannot happen without regular training driven by realism throughout the training experience — high stress, high speed and accurate instructor cues will bias results toward those anticipated by officers and the public — aligning expectations more consistently with outcomes. To do any less is a disservice to officers and the public and will lead to predictable and recurring criticisms of LE practice.
