Introduction
The police use of power is perhaps the most sensitive subject in law enforcement and criminal justice in America. Although force may be used in only a few cases of police-citizen interactions, it creates an impression of how society views and reacts to police officers. Facing the recent many tragic killings of civilians by police, for example, the George Floyd case in 2020, which unavoidably came into publicity, the questions of police’s use of force and the changes necessary for that were brought to the forefront between display of worry and an outcry for change, nevertheless, in a vast majority of allegations about what time, where, and how much power police use, the claims are simplistic, lacking essential aspects, or not entirely true. For instance, studies show more unarmed Black Americans are killed are more than white Americans. Still, many people wrongly think that over 1000 unarmed Black Americans are killed every year by police, while the actual number of unarmed people killed by police is small (Nix et al. 2017).This disconnect between perceived and actual scope has implications for calibrating an effective policy response. Despite increased attention, a rigorous examination of the empirical evidence on strategies to reduce excessive police use of force is lacking.
Literature review
A core challenge in addressing this issue is defining what constitutes excessive or unreasonable force by police. One of the fundamental issues related to this problem is reaching a consensus as to what type of force, frivolous or otherwise, is regarded as excessive or unreasonable by police. Under federal law, excessive force is defined as an officer exceeding what a reasonable person would use in similar circumstances (McLean et al., 2022). Nevertheless, pinpointing such predictions accurately is confounded by the fact that threat assessment is both context and situational-driven. Historically, what has been used to measure the effectiveness of police force is the level of a person struggle or ability to be hostile against the use of force. However, some academics hold the view that by concentrating on resistance, the interpreters may overlook all the circumstances that may consider force to be justified or not depending on the situation (McLean et al. 2022).
Specifically, some scholars have more recently put forth an analytical subject threat perspective as the leading factor in operational force decisions, and the perceptions of subject threat as three areas: the subject’s ability, opportunity, and intent to cause harm (Stoughton et al. 2020). Here, the initial study, directly addressing the modified threat model, followed an experimental approach, and officers judged the subjects’ threat and resistance levels according to body camera footage scenarios (McLean et al. 2022). A study showed that there is a significant correlation between officers supporting the use of force, even escalating the levels of violence, versus subjects, which were viewed as more threatening. This held true even when the levels of resistance were taken into consideration. Furthermore, the team of Krajewski et al. (2023) studied an extensive data set of real-life narratives on the use of force in which the authors found each element of subject threatening – power, opportunity, and intent – that would predict the rise in police power above that of just subject resistance. The logical conclusion of their research is the significance of the assessment of threat which, ,together with force resistance, is taken into consideration with a view to determining what can be considered as an objectively reasonable force in a particular situation.
The documented underrepresentation of certain races in the humankind that experiences police use of force has gone before extensive awareness. According to a couple of national datasets, Black Americans become a target of force more often when compared to white Americans and they experience a higher level of force including weapons pointed at them, physical restraints, strikes, dog bites, and lethal force (Fryer 2016; Nix et al. 2017). These inequities are progressing corruption even more while we consider other involved intersections. Motley and Joe (2018) also established markedly different risk of being exposed to police use of force among Blacks; they found that Black males from low income were hugely at increased risk compared to Blacks that are more affluent. While Laniyonu and Goff (2021) found that, the population at risk of experiencing any police use of force in serious mental illness was 10-12fold higher than the general population in their sample consisting of over 800,000 residents in nine large American cities.
Furthermore, racial disparities in police use of force have been explained as due to ignorant factors such as officers’ prejudices and biases, higher crime rates in low-income neighborhoods that make citizens’ interactions with police differ, and police cultures that temper the reaction of any officer to the use of force. The concentration efforts to diminish the disparities, initiatives that have received considerable traction for the aim of transmuting the demographic composition of the police force have come up. A sizable body of research supported by studies have shown that Black police officers as well as female officers tend to use less force altogether compared to white male officers and in that, way they apply brushing force less against black citizens (Fryer 2016). Hence, as race and gender in heterogeneity of police departments can be perceived as a viable method of decreases race disparities in police use of force.
Other reform strategies that are quite common nowadays include requirements for officers to wear body-worn cameras and intensification of training programs that emphasize skills like de-escalation methods and the ways of dealing with implicit biases. On the other hand, results from implementation of such strategies have been that satisfactory on the other side. Studies of the use of body-worn cameras at the beginning did not consistently aim at a decline of violence against violence (Laniyonu & Goff, 2021). This was because the officer could turn off the camera. However, revised investigations propose that body-cams are effective in significantly reducing the number of bravery cases and civil complaints when police officers cannot take control of the camera. The reason is probably that police officers feel accountable for their actions. While in regards to de-escalation and implicit bias training programs and alike have reported comparatively low results of reducing actual force, these results are varied and insufficient to generalize (Bechtel et al. 2023).
Greater studies point to a relationship, which can be justified by the implementation of tighter force application use policies, besides the case of reduction of the rates of police force application. Particular strategies for instance prohibiting the use of displacing weapons such as chokeholds/strangleholds, insisting on leveraging force de-escalation techniques and requiring verbal warnings before using deadly force have proven to be rather efficient per the set performance indicators (Laniyonu & Goff, 2021). As these discrepancies in both gun ownership and gun control laws continue to exist, so will the unequal number of police shootings and use of force rates across jurisdictions, with zones where civilian engagement with law enforcement is less threatening likely being where more extreme force is used or where officers use their firearms more often (McLean et al., 2022). On the one hand, the issue arises due to inconsistent data collection; different policies definition and the time when the national level use of force data from many police agencies are not transparent. Thus, it becomes hard to conduct accurate analysis on a national scale. Lack of integrated data on the bias and patterns of use of force, which along with its characteristics, is a critical barrier to building a holistic evidence base for guiding reforms (Bechtel et al. 2023; McLean et al. 2022).
Conclusion
The subject of misuse of power by the police is a troublesome issue that needs quick, evidenced-based-approach to solve it in all communities. While the differential experience of force in the racial context is indeed well established, its multi-tiered underpinning is probable, and it is likely that it is based on implicit biases, neighborhood crime variations and even organizational culture impact. The reasonability of force use is significantly affected by the subject identify, and the resistance shown by him or her. Nevertheless, there is number of practical reform strategies advised, and that evidence base is quite disappointing now. Policy changes such as stricter use of force policies, body-worn camera programs for accountability, diversity programs focused on recruiting more diverse officers, and the identification of areas that require more training show some promising results.
Only policy measures catering to several factors including policy-level restrictions, extra training, quality assessment, and culture change will work effectively. At heart, more clarity and benchmarking protocols for the conduct of use of force statistics should be vital for the evidence-based theories to be implemented in future initiatives. It is imperative to sustain the scientific research of reform programs by carrying out thorough evaluations of interventions outcomes in order to recognize most successful reforms that also bring to the officers the highest satisfaction by their citizens. Heavy cost of excessive force is priceless and so the status quo is not to be an option.
References
Bechtel, T., Ostfeld, M., & Shaefer, H. (2023). EVIDENCE ON MEASURES TO REDUCE EXCESSIVE USE OF FORCE BY THE POLICE. https://sites.fordschool.umich.edu/poverty2021/files/2023/01/final-Policing-pb.pdf
Fryer, R. G. (2016). An empirical analysis of racial differences in police use of force (No. w22399). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
Krajewski, A. T., Worrall, J., & Scales, R. M. (2023). Threat Dynamics and Police Use of Force. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224278231194711
Laniyonu, A., & Goff, P. A. (2021). Measuring disparities in police use of force and injury among persons with serious mental illness. BMC Psychiatry, 21(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-021-03510-w
McLean, K., Stoughton, S. W., & Alpert, G. P. (2022). Police Uses of Force in the USA: a Wealth of Theories and a Lack of Evidence. Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41887-022-00078-7
Motley, R. O., & Joe, S. (2018). Police Use of Force by Ethnicity, Sex, and Socioeconomic Class. Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, 9(1), 49–67. https://doi.org/10.1086/696355
Nix, J., Pickett, J. T., Wolfe, S. E., & Campbell, B. A. (2017). Demeanor, race, and police perceptions of procedural justice: Evidence from two randomized experiments. Justice quarterly, 34(7), 1154-1183. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2017.133480
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