Reimagining the Use of Force by Police in a Post-Floyd Nation

• Author: Michael R. Smith
• 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