Earlier this fall in Force Science News #374, we reported on the legal subtleties of responding to suicidal-subject calls and quoted Advanced Force Science Specialist Mike Ranalli as cautioning against taking impulsive aggressive action toward a subject “who isn’t committing a serious crime and isn’t an active threat to anyone other than himself.” Now comes a case...Read More
Your first priority in using deadly force is to survive the life-threatening circumstances that prompted you to pull the trigger. Then there’s surviving the aftermath…. Some officers claim that can be even more stressful, and certainly it’s a more extended test of survival skills of a different kind, considering that shooting cases can drag on...Read More
With threatened and completed suicides dramatically on the rise, LEOs are increasingly facing challenging and complex calls about people in perilous crisis. The overwhelming response objective, of course, is to save lives. But if officers don’t understand the legal realities of these dicey situations, they run the risk of making matters worse, with the officers...Read More
The problem of officers failing to activate recording equipment before or during a force encounter can be a thorny one with multiple potentially negative consequences. But a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit has tried to push the issue to a new and radical extreme. The incident in question began in the snowy, predawn hours of...Read More
The persistent urge by police critics to tighten restrictions on the use of force surfaced again this month after a controversial shooting in Sacramento, California. A state legislator told a press conference that she will introduce a bill to change the legal standard for law enforcement in California from using “objectively reasonable force” to “necessary...Read More
The attorney general of Texas issued an opinion recently that an officer is legally entitled to see all footage from his body camera, as well as that from the cameras of other officers at the scene, before giving an official statement about an incident the officer was involved in. Police critics were quick to allege...Read More
In the first study of its kind, a research team has comprehensively documented the risk of barbed darts from conducted electrical weapons penetrating the eyes of suspects. While certainly cringe-inducing, the risk, in fact, is small: only 1 in every 123,000 CEW discharges in the field results in eye injury, the study reports. But the...Read More
In a snapshot preview of a book he’ll publish this summer, prominent researcher Dr. Darrell Ross recently offered law enforcement trainers a provocative update on one of the rarest events in policing, yet one of the most vexing: arrest-related death. In a presentation running nearly four hours at the annual training conference of the International...Read More
Facing a medical emergency and a use-of-force dilemma, did this sheriff’s deputy do the right thing? The deputy, working road patrol for the Oakland County (MI) SO, responded one June afternoon to a call at a residence near Detroit where four paramedics were struggling to help a man overcome a life-threatening diabetic crisis. According to...Read More
Police officers are granted special considerations under current use-of-force laws–a fact that some reformers want to change. If that happens, “the result will be a catastrophic deterioration of law enforcement services and more violent and other crime,” according to a compelling article on police legal rights appearing recently in a magazine for criminal defense attorneys....Read More
