Excessive Use of Force by Police Personnel

Excessive use of force by police personnel has become a key issue in modern police departments. Various cases of excessive use of force have sprung up and the judiciary has to deal with such cases more often. These incidents gain the most media attention, which can unfortunately overlook successful police operations. Therefore, this paper will dig deeper into the escalation of use of force by police personnel. It seeks to define what “excessive force” means, and the various methods in which the police use to subdue a suspect. Lastly this paper will look into how departments seek to reduce excessive force incidents within its ranks (Kitaaeff, 2011).

We can isolate various elements of force and look at each element separately. First and most obvious is the use of a weapon. Weapons include but are not limited to guns, batons, pepper spray and tasers (although the last three are usually not lethal). The use of such weapons falls unanimously within the bracket of “force”. Guns obviously constitute a heightened degree of force than other weapons such as batons, tasers or pepper spray. The question is whether having a gun can be construed to constitute use of force, or does the mere removal of the gun and pointing it towards a suspect serve as a use of force. In some cases even police canines can be considered a use of force if they are used to subdue a suspect. Another element of force is restraints. Restraint includes handcuffs, leg cuffs and more radical form of restraint such as body cuffs (Johnson, 2007).

Perhaps one of the most famous and landmark cases for excessive application of force by police officers was the Rodney King case in 1991. In this case, Los Angeles police officers were accused of applying unreaso...

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...orce should be used only when need arises, and the situation calls for lethal force. The police force should use this power discretely. In light of this, legislation and policies should seek to regulate the use of lethal force rather than do away with it. Preventing the police officers from using force would render then incapable of dealing with adverse and violent situations. Further, advocating for the use of non-lethal force would give criminals an upper hand as their use of lethal weaponry is unrestricted (Jefferis, 2011).

Hopefully this wasn’t too boring or the third paper you read on this topic. I recently found out my first born will be here May, 24th, next month we’ll find out the gender and I couldn’t be more excited. But don’t go by my facial expression to gauge my excitement level, 12 years of military service has more or less left me stone faced.