Reimagining the Use of Force by Police in a Post-Floyd Nation
DOI | 10.1177/10986111211049372 |
Published date | 01 June 2022 |
Date | 01 June 2022 |
Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Police Quarterly
2022, Vol. 25(2) 228–251
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/10986111211049372
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Reimagining the Use of Force
by Police in a Post-Floyd
Nation
Michael R. Smith
1
Abstract
At this important juncture in American policing, this essay sets forth a framework to
encourage law enforcement leaders and scholars to reconceptualize the use of force
from the ground up. It begins by outlining changes needed in police culture and how
police view their mandate to use force in society. It next addresses use of force policy-
making and synthesizes recent reviews of the policy landscape, including a rec ent
analysis of the deadly force policy from one the nation’s largest county police agencies.
It then suggests ways that better training can improve decision-making and produce
better outcomes when force must be used. The essay concludes with a challenge to law
enforcement leaders and policy-makers to leverage momentum from the tragic death
of George Floyd to make fundamental changes in how police in America think about,
train for, use, and manage coercive force in society.
Keywords
police, use of force, police culture, police training, use of force policy
Introduction
Policing in America is at an inflection point not seen in the nation’s 245-year history. To
be sure, there have been other watershed moments when police-related crises sparked
public outrage, significant media attention, and calls for change (National Advisory
1
Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA
Corresponding Author:
Michael R. Smith, University of Texas at San Antonio, 501W. Cesar E. Chavez Blvd, San Antonio, TX 78207,
USA.
Email: m.r.smith@utsa.edu
Commission, 1968;Rushin, 2014), but never before has the nation witnessed police
reform efforts as widespread as those taking place in the aftermath of the death of
George Floyd in spring 2020 at the hands of several Minneapolis police officers. In
response to the unprecedented pace of policy change, the National Conference of State
Legislatures created a new database for tracking police-related bills and executive
orders across all 50 states and the District of Columbia (NCSL, 2021). A May 2021
analysis of that database found that in the year after George Floyd was murdered, 21
states passed new laws focused on police oversight or reform and similar legislation
was pending in 17 more (Buckholz, 2021).
Reflecting upon this unique moment in American policing, it is worth briefly re-
visiting what brought us to this place before turning to the main thrust of this article,
which is how law enforcement agencies and policy-makers at the state and federal
levels might reconceptualize the use of force in response to evolving public expec-
tations about the limits of police power. In his well-known expository on the functions
of the police in society, Bittner (1970) suggested that “the role of the police is best
understood as a mechanism for the distribution of non-negotiably coercive force
employed in accordance with the dictates of an intuitive grasp of situational exigencies”
(p. 46) and further asserted that the boundaries of the lawful use of force by the police
were, at that time, almost entirely undefined and unbounded. Much has changed in the
use of force landscape since Bittner penned those words 50 years ago, and in particular,
the regulatory environment surrounding the use of force has expanded exponentially.
Historically, those changes can be traced to the increased bureaucratization and
professionalization of policing that characterized the professional era of American
policing during the first half of the 20
th
century (Kelling & Moore, 1988;Uchida,
2021). However, it was the widespread civil unrest of the 1960s driven by protests in
U.S. cities over racial inequality and the Vietnam War that drove home the need for
police agencies to manage and guide the use of discretion by officers, including their
use of force (President’s Commission, 1967;Walker, 1977).
In the decades between Bittner’s (1970) observations about the foundational role of
the police in society and George Floyd’s death, the Supreme Court decided two
landmark cases dealing with the use of force by police, one that limits the authority of
the police to use deadly force in apprehending fleeing felons (Tennessee v. Garner,
1985) and the other that established an objective standard of reasonableness for judging
the amount or degree of force police may use consistent with the Fourth Amendment
(Graham v. Connor, 1989). After Michael Brown was killed by police in 2014 (Raice,
2019) and destructive protests spread outward from Ferguson, Missouri, then President
Obama commissioned a Task Force to examine policing in the 21
st
century; its report
included recommendations for clear and comprehensive policies on use of force and
increased training on de-escalation and alternatives to force (President’s Task Force,
2015). In response, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) released its Guiding
Principles on Use of Force (2016), and professional police organizations issued
consensus policy guidance on the use of force (International Association of Chiefs of
Police, 2020). Recent reforms undertaken at the state and local levels in the wake of
Smith 229
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