When is a police officer authorized to use force?
When is a police officer authorized to use force?
The question didn’t often come up before 1992. But in that year, because of a group of overzealous Los Angeles police officers, a man named Rodney King and an amateur videographer, the question wound up on nearly everyone’s lips and changed forever the way Americans look at law enforcement personnel.
“This is one of the most controversial issues in law enforcement,” Hollister Police officer Dave Hackman told the seventh class of the Hollister Citizens Police Academy Wednesday night. “It’s not until you’re in this job and really doing it that you know when use of force is justified and what the repercussions are from use of force.”
The Rodney King incident did not, however, change police policy regarding use of force against a suspect. It did prompt most departments in the U.S. to reevaluate how they train officers in that policy and how they enforce it.
But most American police departments had well-defined policies regarding use of force long before King’s brutal beating.
In any case, “force,” in a law enforcement dictionary, has multiple definitions. Hackman, a former LAPD officer and Marine Corps sergeant, gave the class a chart developed and used by the LAPD to define five different levels of “force.”
In lower-level situations, “force” can and should be as simple as an officer’s stance, body language, tone of voice and choice of words. It’s part of a system known as “de-escalation/escalation” that’s designed to give an officer the advantage to subdue a suspect, from a cooperative individual to a violent felon.
Hackman, who’s been with the HPD for 10 months, described a situation he encountered last weekend that illustrated the formula. Hackman and his partner chased a suspect who was already under arrest for intoxication through a house and into a back yard.
“He was trying to climb the fence,” Hackman said. “I went from verbal (force) to pepper spray when the suspect became combative.”
But the pepper spray didn’t do its job.
“He grabbed his face and came out in a fighting stance,” Hackman said. “So we’re getting into intermediate use of force.”
Restricted in a breezeway about the width of a dog run, Hackman couldn’t use his baton because there wasn’t enough room to employ it. Instead, he used wrestling moves and “leg sweeps” while continuing verbal force, and the suspect was finally handcuffed.
Other techniques to subdue aggressive or combative suspects include use of “beanbag” guns, which fire a shotgun shell that’s literally a small beanbag. Hackman described the impact as “like being hit with a 100 mph fast ball.”
The most dangerous use-of-force situation an officer can encounter is the one they all dread – when the actions of a suspect are life-threatening. In such situations, the use of deadly force might be called for – but only, Hackman said, when every other means has been exhausted.
While with other police departments, Hackman has been involved in three deadly force situations. In one, the suspect was shot and killed.
Whether to use deadly force is the toughest decision a police officer will make in his or her career.
“It’s so difficult,” Hackman said. “When you go over immediate defense of life, it’s split seconds. It’s a difficult decision to make, but if you’re not able to make that decision, you may not go home that night to see your family. That’s why we have all the training.”
A cross to go with her badge
It’s hardly a secret that one of the by-products of police work is an incredibly high level of stress. Partly to help officers deal with stress, many departments employ a chaplain.
But the first days on the job can bring stress to the one wearing the cross as well.
“They weren’t thrilled about having a chaplain,” Rev. Ardyss Golden recalled about her early ride-alongs with Hollister police officers in 1999. “They thought I was going to get in the car with a Bible.”
Golden, pastor of the Hollister United Methodist Church, said she never takes her Bible into what she called “their office.”
“At first, they weren’t really sure what to do with me,” she said. “They chose one of the hardest officers for me to ride with to see how this was going to go. It was real clear that I wasn’t an exciting part of his night.”
But Golden passed.
“At the end of the night,” she said, “he told me, ‘If I had a problem, I’d be willing to call you. You’re all right.'”
Officers do call Golden. She also calls them, usually on the referral of one of their superiors, who understand that the officer needs the ear – and the spiritual sense – of someone not wearing blue.
Golden is the HPD’s official chaplain – she has a jacket and badge to prove it – but also works with the Hollister Fire Dept. and, until Father Ed Fitz-Henry of Mission San Juan Bautista volunteered for the job two weeks ago, with the San Benito County Sheriff’s Department.
“I use it (the badge) sometimes,” she said. “When I see kids riding without a helmet.”
Golden, who’s also on the Juvenile Justice Commission, rides with an officer for a full 10-hour shift at least once a week, both to get to know the officers and to familiarize herself with what they go through.
Every word she shares with an officer is confidential.
But her role goes beyond a police car or a phone call. It takes her into the streets, into the sometimes tragic situations that are part of police work.
Golden, who’s in the process of becoming a member of the International Conference of Police Chaplains, was called to the scene on Fourth St. last year when two members of a family were killed by a drunken driver.
“When you’re there and you’re willing to listen, to reach out and touch people, and when they see this cross, everyone’s willing to let me be there,” she said.
When four people were killed in an October airplane crash in the hills south of San Juan Bautista, Golden met with the owner of the ranch where the crash occurred and with sheriff’s deputies who investigated the grisly scene.
“In the end, what we decided was we’d declare that ground as holy ground,” she said. “We’d do a service and plant poppies. You look up there now and you see it’s all grown again. Those poppies will bloom in memory of those people.”
The most effective war against drugs
Though the D.A.R.E. program has been criticized in its 19-year history, Sgt. Greg Thul, who’s been one of the HPD’s D.A.R.E. officers for eight years, is quick to defend it.
“You may have heard good things about D.A.R.E. and you may have heard bad things,” the 18-year police veteran said. “For everything negative said about D.A.R.E., there are five things positive. It’s the most effective war we have right now to fight drugs. The only way to turn people away from something is to educate them.”
The program – which was started in 1982 by the Los Angeles Police Department and southern California educators and is now in 44 countries – is constantly reviewing and upgrading its curriculum, Thul said. As such, D.A.R.E. – Drug Abuse Resistance Education – will adopt a new curriculum developed by the University of Akron from a $13.7 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“We want to take the knowledge gained through prevention science and see it applied in the real world,” said Nancy Kaufman, vice president of the foundation, in a press release. “D.A.R.E. is the perfect vehicle. We have designed a state-of-the-art program and will test its effectiveness.”
Currently designed to educate fifth-grade students on the dangers of drugs, the new curriculum will take D.A.R.E. into middle and high schools, where drug abuse is already a problem. Already, the program has been revamped to address the abuses of alcohol and tobacco, as well as tackling problems of teen violence, in addition to its original concentration on drug abuse education and prevention.
“The educators said to take fifth-grade kids,” Thul told the class Wednesday night. “In junior high and high school, they’re already into drugs.”
Of the millions of kids nationwide who go through D.A.R.E.’s 16-week program, some do fall prey to peer pressure and media campaigns that target beer at 12- and 13-year-olds, Thul said. But the program’s lessons stay with many times more.
“By the time they get to graduation, kids pretty well know they can control their destiny,” Thul said.
One of his students learned so well that he made it a matter of life and death.
“I was in Nob Hill on a rainy Sunday,” Thul said. “I was pushing the cart through the store and I saw this young man. I saw he wasn’t acting normal, and this young woman with him came up to me and said ‘I’m his sister.'”
It turned out that Thul’s former student had undergone three surgeries for a brain tumor. Because of his D.A.R.E. experience, he’d had a bit of a problem with the anesthesiologist.
“He was fighting with the surgeons,” Thul said. “He was saying, ‘Sgt. Thul says you’re not supposed to take drugs.'”
Thul said other former students come up to him on the streets.
“They say ‘I remember you in fifth grade. You really made me feel good.'”
“That warms you up,” Thul said. “It makes you want to cry.”
