Supreme Court Intervention: Nondeadly Force
Officers must be able to distinguish between nondeadly and deadly force. In police street confrontations this is no easy task, especially when dealing with intense emotional situations. Generally, nondeadly force requires nondeadly strategies; for example, when a citizen engages in passive resistance during a demonstration, generally two officers simply restrain and handcuff the individual and place him or her in the police van to be transported to jail.
Active resistance requires the appropriate level of force for the situation; for example, if a suspect tears the badge off the officer’s uniform, the officer may respond with a nondeadly physical response that requires restraining techniques. If the resistance continues to escalate, the officer’s response may include the use of mace, a nightstick, or other nondeadly strategies. However, after the subject is subdued, a nondeadly or deadly force response would not be appropriate. Once resistance ceases and the subject is handcuffed, the use of additional force would be illegal.
A scenario involving nondeadly force may escalate to deadly force under certain circumstances; for example, an offender may attempt to seize the arresting officer’s weapon during a struggle. What appears to be a nonviolent situation can quickly turn into a deadly force incident. Consider, for example, the following scenario: An off-duty officer responds to a scene of disorderly conduct, identifies himself as a police officer, and attempts to detain one of the suspects. The officer enters into a physical struggle with the suspect, now the arrestee, who soon overpowers and begins to strangle the officer. The officer starts to lose consciousness and fears that he may lose his weapon and die in the struggle. In the twilight of semiconscious, the officer reaches for his revolver, shoots the resisting subject, who falls over and dies.
As noted above, deadly force is appropriate if the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses significant threat of death or serious physical injury to officers or others. In addition, the severity of the crime, uncertain conditions or rapidly evolving circumstances, and a suspect actively resisting arrest may enter into the ”objective reasonableness” standard. In other words, the Court views the situation from the officer’s perspective, evaluating the objective reasonableness of the officer’s response to the unfolding events.
Directly related to the police deadly force issue is nondeadly force, occasionally interconnected and evolving from the same scenario. In 1989, the issue of non-deadly force emerged in Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386. The U.S. Supreme Court established the standard of ”objective reasonableness” where the use of deadly force applied by an officer could be evaluated by the ”reasonableness at the moment.” The Court ruled that the evaluation of the decision to use force should be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, not with the benefit of retrospective analysis.
The following example from the case illustrates the objective reasonableness standard. The police officer focused on what he believed to be suspicious behavior.
Imagine what would happen if you thought this way about all those people who get arrested?
God damn, man.