Police and The Excessive Use of Force Research Paper

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The excessive use of force by police is often a difficult phenomenon to identify, as well as a difficult concept to define. Unlike corruption that is motivated by profit – which is generally impermissible by its very nature – excessive use of force often resides at the marginal end of the acceptable use of force continuum. That is, because society authorizes the police to use physical coercion to carry out their mandate, it is often unclear when, along the use of force continuum, the acceptable use of force becomes excessive. Perhaps this is why excessive force, or brutality, often seems to occur unchecked in communities that are unable to advocate for themselves, making it difficult to hold police officers accountable for the use of unauthorized violence.

Several classic police scholars have developed occupational templates to help describe the circumstances under which some police officers engage in brutality. These perspectives try to account for police-suspect interactions, the police working environment, and dangers therein; while others locate the causes in the personalities of the officers, or the agencies in which they work. By understanding some of the causes of police brutality, society and policy-makers have a better chance of developing prevention strategies that can minimize the use of excessive force, particularly in the most vulnerable communities. Currently, these prevention strategies are rooted in the areas of recruitment and training, as well as the proper supervision of officers in the field.

Introduction

When two officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were shown on tape beating the motorist Rodney King with batons – after their field supervisor had already exposed King, with little effect, to the Taser, a conductive energy device designed to “stun” suspects into submission – even while he was rolling on the ground and seemingly defenseless – few observers were left with any doubt that they had just witnessed an example of police brutality. Some experts (e.g., Skolnick and Fyfe 1993; Toch 1996), however, who viewed the entire tape – as opposed to simply its last 7 s – saw a more nuanced escalation of force that ultimately became excessive. Rodney King had broken a primary subcultural rule in policing: When initially contacted by the team of California Highway Patrol officers who attempted to stop his vehicle for speeding on Interstate 210 in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, he failed to pull over for them. Indeed, King would later report that he fled from the CHP cruiser because he was driving while intoxicated and feared that an arrest would violate the provisions of his parole (the result of an earlier robbery conviction) (Skolnick and Fyfe 1993). For his failure to submit to police authority in ways that satisfied the five LAPD officers at the scene, King was “Tazed” once, struck with police batons 56 times (several of which were blows to the head), and kicked six times by officers (Independent Commission 1991). To date, the beating of Rodney King represents the archetype of police brutality, and it encapsulates multiple conceptual perspectives – from the levels of the social interactionist, workgroup, and cultural – aimed at explaining why some police officers resort to excessive force during their encounters with members of the public.

Excessive use of force by police is a tricky phenomenon to identify and explain. Even in the most “obvious” and infamous examples of police brutality, it is frequently the case that at some point during the violent encounter, some force on the part of police was justified – perhaps even necessary – to preserve officer and/or public safety. As such, excessive force by police is substantively distinct from other forms of misconduct, such as profit-motivated corruption because, while the later is usually wrong on its very face (e.g., police officers are not permitted to extort money from drug dealers or motorists; and they are not permitted to steal jewelry off corpses they encounter during health-and-welfare checks), they are allowed, and in many cases even expected, to use coercive force as part of their role in society. In fact, it as a virtual axiom in policing that the use of force is a “tool,” whose use should be regulated but not taken away.

Several leading scholars have developed frameworks to explain why the excessive use of force occurs and how it may foster in some police departments. Van Maanen (1978) identifies the “asshole” as one lens through which to view the use of force encounter. He argues that when a suspect commits an “affront” to a police officer’s authority, the officer – under certain circumstances – may respond with violence as a way of (re)establishing control over the police-suspect event. Muir (1977) takes a more individualistic approach, observing that some police officers have an “enforcer”-type personality borne out of their inabilities to (1) empathize with people whom they contact under the worst of circumstances, and (2) communicate in ways that may de-escalate potentially violent encounters.

Skolnick and Fyfe (1993) view the excessive use of force from an organizational-level, noting that certain police departments develop and foster a so-called “siege mentality” in which officers are made to feel outnumbered, outgunned, and unwelcome in the communities they serve. Indeed, the siege mentality – which stems from the top levels of police department administration – views officers as a collective occupying force deployed in dangerous communities inhabited by dangerous people. As a result, officers in such locations are often made to believe that the only way for them to maintain order is through the use of highly aggressive enforcement strategies that may translate into excessive force.

This research paper examines the use of excessive force by police through the perspectives offered above while also noting the difficulty and complexities involved in defining police brutality. As alluded to above, identifying excessive force is made allthe-more difficult by virtue of the use of physical coercion that is a large part of how the police fulfill their mandate in society. In addition to discussing these conceptual issues, the paper also describes how legal mechanisms, such as judicial review and the US Code, have made the excessive use of force difficult to prove at an acceptable legal standard, which may inadvertently stifle efforts to redress abusive police practices and reform police departments in need of reforming. The paper closes with a discussion of how to prevent and control the excessive use of force.

The Excessive Use Of Force Prism

Before trying to define the excessive use of force by police, the reader might first start with a more fundamental question: Why do we have the police in our society? It is common knowledge that at times, some police officers use more force than is necessary on suspects they encounter; some engage in profit-motivated misconduct and then lie on the witness stand to protect their corrupt enterprises; and these practices often take place in the most socially and economically vulnerable communities (Kane 2002). So, again, while most people understand that some police officers, as well as some departments, have the propensity to engage in brutality, the question is again begged: Why have the police in the first place?

American citizens enjoy – perhaps more than those of other developed nations – almost unfettered access to their court system. They have the ability to report crimes directly to their local District Attorney’s Offices, and they have the right to request protective orders and other forms of injunctive relief directly from magistrates in open court. In short, American citizens under the best of circumstances have the ability to mobilize government on their behalf in ways that could theoretically bypass the police entirely, and yet, most Americans – even those who have had bad experiences with them – would scarcely advocate dissolving the police as a public institution. Why? As cited by Klockars (1985), we maintain a collective police force because of what Egon Bittner wrote in 1970: “something-ought-not-to-be-happening-aboutwhich-something-ought-to-be-done.. .NOW!!” That is, although it is possible to mobilize the government without using the police, it is often not feasible to do so. In highlighting this reality, Klockars (1985) notes that if a crazy resident goes into the yard of his neighbor to chop down a prized apple tree with an axe, seeking an injunction against such an intrusion likely will not prevent the destruction of the apple tree. In such events, therefore, the point of the police is to stop – or at the very least – freeze a moment in time in order for the courts to gain the opportunity to properly adjudicate the case. The police accomplish this mandate by exercising their “general right to use coercive force” (Klockars 1985) – a right bestowed upon them by the American public through the Executive Branch of government. And it is this general right to use coercive force that makes possible both the best and worst practices of policing. At their best, the police use their coercive authority to improve the life chances of people they contact – often under the most abject social and economic conditions imaginable. At their worst, police use their coercive authority in ways that abuse, denigrate, and otherwise “tread on the human dignity” (Carter 1985, p. 322) of people they encounter.

Although the American public grants police the general right to employ coercive force, it does so with few guidelines as to the boundaries of its proper use, making it difficult for evaluators of police behaviors to determine – for example – when appropriate force may have become excessive, or when excessive force was used when no force was necessary. The following serve as instructive examples:

Incident 1: Two police officers on foot see a man on a public sidewalk who matches the description of a robbery suspect. They attempt to contact the man, but as they summon him their way, the man turns and runs. Both officers engage the suspect in chase. The man leads them on a 5-min foot pursuit through alleys, over fences, and across a vacant lot until they finally catch him in an open field. At the point of contact, the man physically resists the officers’ efforts to subdue and handcuff him. He swings and kicks at them, making glancing contact, until one of the officers makes two baton strikes to the man’s body, sending the suspect hard to the ground. One of the officers is bleeding slightly from a scratch on his face, the other suffered a hyperextended knee. As the suspect writhes on the ground from the pain of the baton strikes, one of the officers kneels to handcuff him, while the other officer kicks the man twice in the ribs. Even after the suspect is securely cuffed and clearly incapacitated, the other officer punches him with a closed fist in the kidney two times just after the other officer pulled him from the ground.
Incident 2: A police officer working traffic duty sits in his marked cruiser at mid-day. The car is parked in a somewhat concealed position relative to the corner of an intersection governed by a four-way stop. When he observes a pickup truck roll confidently through the intersection without stopping, the officer ignites his engine, activates the light bar, and pulls quickly away from the curb to initiate a vehicle stop on the truck. After a few hundred yards, and two siren “chirps,” the driver of the pickup truck finally pulls to the curb. The officer exits his vehicle, walks to the truck, and instructs the driver to put down his window. The officer observes that the driver and his one passenger are teenage boys, most likely between the ages of 16 and 18 years. The officer waits with expectancy while the driver – who is wearing a smirk on his face – finally begins to slowly roll down his window. The officer, losing patience, asks for the driver’s operating license. After a pause, the driver says, “Why do you need that? I am just taking my buddy home.” The officer again requests the young man’s license, and although the driver complies, he does so slowly. Suddenly, the officer reaches in through the window, grabs the young man by the hair, and swiftly pulls him through the window and out onto the street. The officer then drags the young man – still by the hair – around the front of the truck to the sidewalk, where he slams the young man’s head against the hood of the truck. The young man screams in surprise and pain, while the officer repeats the motion of bashing his head against the hood. The officer then drags the young man back around the front of the truck, opens the driver’s side door, and roughly deposits the young man back into the truck, slamming the door closed. The officer then advises, “The next time a police officer asks for your driver’s license, I suggest you give it to him the first time.” Then officer then turns, walks back to his patrol car, enters, and drives away.

The above scenarios indicate two types of situations during which excessive force may be used by police, and both have their own definitional difficulties associated with them. In the case of incident #1, it is clear that the two officers involved in the foot chase were justified – even compelled – to use force in the apprehension and control of the suspect. The suspect, in fact, used physical force to prevent his apprehension, swinging, kicking, and striking the officers as they attempted to subdue him. The officers were probably justified in the use of their batons while the suspect was fighting them, but what about the subsequent kicks and blows once the suspect was handcuffed and effectively restrained? At what point did the appropriate use of force by the police become excessive? Different people – e.g., police officers, police administrators, community residents, and promoters of law and order – may have different answers to this question. For some, the baton strikes may have been regarded as excessive, considering there were two officers and the suspect was not at all armed with a weapon. To others, the kicks and punches delivered by officers at the conclusion of the encounter were not excessive, but rather “just desserts” visited upon a “victim” who should have cooperated with the police in the first place.

The events described in incident #2 suggest perhaps a less ambiguous evaluation of the use of excessive force. Although the driver of the pickup truck was not physically combative with the officer who stopped him, he was defiant, and he failed to comply with the lawful order of police officer, namely, to produce his operator’s license. In doing so, the driver of the pickup truck left the officer with two categories of choice: (1) make a tactical retreat, perhaps to his vehicle where he could have radioed for a supervisor to join him at the scene in an effort to avoid the use of force; and (2) increase the dosage of coercion in order to secure the driver’s compliance. From the description of events in incident #2, the officer clearly chose the latter by using physical coercion to neutralize the young man’s defiance. And again, commentators of police behaviors may disagree as to the appropriateness of the officer’s actions. Some would conclude that the force used by the officer was unnecessary, excessive, and perhaps even illegal; others may conclude that the officer rightly punished a smart-aleck kid who needed to be taught to respect authority.

Despite potential differences in assessments of the excessive use of force across incidents 1 and 2, the hypothetical events share a common link: From the perspective of responding officers, both victims may have “deserved” it. That is, in both cases described above, an argument can be made that both suspects-turned-victim forced a confrontation with the police, which led to the excessive force. This is another feature of many use of force incidents that makes identifying brutality or excessive use of force difficult. As Walker (2010) has argued in his criticism of drug-war policing, when police officers use excessive force during their encounters with the public, they usually do so on socially marginalized and/or otherwise “undesirable” suspects, often rendering it unlikely that the victim of brutality can successfully hold officers accountable for their actions. Thus, despite the procedural and legal constraints (discussed in the following section) placed on officers’ authority on the use of physical coercion, the sociology of use of force encounters often challenges society’s definition of the excessive use of force, particularly when the force may have been used on someone who at least initially defied the police.

The following section discusses several of the legal issues associated with defining the excessive use of force, which adds further difficulty of successfully defining excessive force and brutality.

Excessive Force Through Legal And Social Lenses

Moving more thoroughly into an evaluation of the excessive use of force by police requires some definitional clarity. In general, police use of force can be categorized into four types: (1) appropriate, (2) deadly, (3) excessive, and (4) unnecessary. Once these types of force are defined, the paper focuses on excessive force, also commonly referred to as police brutality (e.g., Skolnick and Fyfe 1993).

The appropriate use of force occurs when police officers use physical coercion that is proportional to a suspect’s resistance to gain compliance and/or diffuse a violent or potentially violent encounter. Though perhaps commonly believed, police officers are not required to match a suspect’s resistance incrementally with force that follows a use of force continuum (Graham v. Connor 1989). Rather, police officers are legally (and usually administratively) permitted to “skip” steps on the use of force continuum in order to overwhelm a suspect – within reason – to achieve custody. Society and the courts do not require police officers to engage in fist fights with suspects in order to gain compliance. Indeed, most police officers are trained to control many suspects – whether armed or not – from a safe distance, often via the threat or use of chemical spray, a conductive energy device (e.g., Taser), or a firearm. To provide a framework for assessing the appropriateness of the use of force, the Supreme Court applied an “objective reasonableness” standard (via the Search and Seizure Clause of the Fourth Amendment) in the case Graham v. Connor (1989), holding that the legality of the use of force must be evaluated based on the judgment of a “reasonable” officer at the scene of the event rather than through a “retrospective” lens. The Court reasoned that when police officers become involved in violent or potentially violent encounters, they frequently have just seconds to decide how to apply coercion, often in self-defense and/or in the defense of others. As such, the fairest assessment of the legality (and administrative permissibility) of the application of force must be made from the perspective of someone at the incident who would have had to make a force decision in the heat of the moment – just as the actual officer did.

Deadly force – i.e., “force that kills or is likely to kill” (Fyfe 1979) – and which is usually, but not always, the result of a firearm discharge – is governed largely by the same objective reasonableness standard as nonlethal force (the standard appears to change to a test of “deliberate indifference,” as governed largely by the Eighth Amendment, if deadly force is used on a suspect while in a custody facility), though with an extra restriction. In the case Tennessee v. Garner (1985), the Supreme Court abolished the common law custom that had historically allowed police officers to use deadly force against fleeing suspects who posed no threat to life. In abolishing this practice – which was known as the “fleeing felon rule” – the Court reasoned that using deadly force to apprehend a person suspected of having committed a felony, but who seemed to pose no imminent threat to life – constituted an unreasonable seizure of the person under the Fourth Amendment. Despite this landmark decision that made the “defense of life” standard the law of the land, the Court in Garner failed to outline circumstances under which deadly force was permissible. Thus, Garner allows officers to determine the meaning of “life” threatening: The risk to life need not be real at the time of the incident; it must be apparent.

Among all the dimensions of the use of force construct, “unnecessary” force is perhaps the most difficult to assess and the most controversial to condemn. Unnecessary force usually represents the proper use of force at the immediate moment of application, but which could have been avoided had officers not allowed, or caused, the incident to escalate (Fyfe 1986). Thus, rather than representing the product of malice or the inclination to “punish,” unnecessary force generally results from police officer’s professional incompetence. A typical example of this occurs when police respond to a man with a gun call. They might arrive on the scene to find an agitated man pacing in his front yard with a pistol in hand. Because officers neglected to find cover and concealment (i.e., failing to position themselves behind parked cars or out of direct line of fire), they shoot the man when he makes a furtive movement. When focusing on the last point in the encounter – i.e., the instance immediately preceding the shooting – the force used may be justifiable since the police were compelled to protect their lives and perhaps the lives of bystanders. When considering, however, the events that led to the shooting, professional incompetence left the officers at risk of being shot in the first place. Had they found proper cover, they might have been able to wait and persuade the man to drop the gun, which would have averted the use of violence. Although the examination of unnecessary force is largely beyond the scope of this research paper, it is important to at least identify because (1) it represents a component of the overall use of force construct, and (2) likely happens more frequently than does excessive force, often without the subsequent application of accountability remedies (Fyfe 1986).

As the above discussion should suggest, police brutality is physical force that breaches the con fines of legally permissible physical coercion. Because police brutality is often committed out of malice, disrespect, and/or officers’ desires to reassert their authority over a suspect (e.g., Skolnick and Fyfe 1993), several academic researchers often regard excessive force as an example of police abuse of authority (e.g., Carter 1985) rather than a mere “excess” of force. This is because police brutality often stems from the same theoretical processes that lead to verbal chastising and psychological abuse during police interrogations (e.g., Carter 1985) – both of which are abusive but not physical.

Although most state criminal codes in the United States include statutes that specifically make police brutality under “color” of state authority illegal, the most common legal remedy for parties attempting to redress the alleged excessive use of force by police is Title 42, Section 1983 of the US Code. This is the Federal civil rights statute that allows persons alleging harm by police (and any representative of the State who may have acted under color of authority) to seek damages from both the individual officer(s) and the government agency that employed them. The reason why Section 1983 is likely the most common legal mechanism invoked in excessive use of force claims is because the statute relaxes the usual requirement placed on plaintiffs that they exhaust all lower administrative and legal outlets before filing a claim in Federal court. Although the statute does not require proof that a police officer intended to harm the victim (that is, the plaintiff need not prove an officer’s psychological state of mind), it does require the plaintiff to successfully demonstrate that the government entity (e.g., municipal police department) that employed the officer maintained official policies and directives that directly resulted in the harm caused, or that the entity had established informal customs and practices that led to the harm. For this reason, Section 1983 lawsuits are often colloquially referred to as “patterns and practices” suits and generally allege that the brutality (or other problematic behaviors) occurred because the police agency failed to train and/or supervise the officers properly and/or negligently retained the officers as employees.

Thus, integrating the Section 1983 statute with Supreme Court decisions results in plaintiffs gaining ready access to Federal court for the purposes of attempting to hold police officers and the agencies/governments that employed them accountable for brutality, though trial courts must adhere to Graham’s “objective reasonableness” requirement of evaluating the use of force from the standpoint of a reasonable officer at the scene. The net effect has been that, while it is relatively easy to sue police officers and police departments, it is highly difficult to win such cases due to the “reasonable officer at the scene” requirement (Skolnick and Fyfe 1993). Moreover, as research has shown, even when plaintiffs are generally successful in proving police brutality at an acceptable legal threshold, juries historically have been reluctant to decide against police officers due to generalized public support for the police, and the fact than many plaintiffs who allege brutality occupy dubious social positions relative to the officers they are accusing. Perhaps the best example in modern history was the Rodney King case in which all officers accused of brutality were found not guilty in the first trial.

Classic Templates To Explain Excessive Use Of Force

As noted in the opening pages of this research paper, police brutality – or excessive use of force – occurs for myriad reasons across multiple levels of analysis: the psychological, sociological, social contextual, and organizational. Since William Westley (1970) published his classic ethnography of police in Indiana (which was actually published 20 years after his dissertation work that produced the findings) in which he described for the first time the importance officers and police organizations placed on making felony arrests, several researchers have replicated Westley’s methodology in an effort to highlight several aspects of the police occupation that previously had been generally unknown. The result was the publication of classic statements on police coercion that described the processes by which police officers may commit, and why police departments sometimes attempt to hide, police brutality. This research paper considers these perspectives as occupational templates and describes the most important of these below.

Starting at the individual-level, in his largely ethnographic study of the police in “Laconia” (a pseudonym), Muir (1977) interviewed and then observed a group of police officers in an effort to understand how they responded to “critical” incidents in their work settings. It is now commonly known that “Laconia” was Oakland, CA, a large city that employed 800 police officers at the time of Muir’s research, and which was characterized by high levels of racially concentrated economic resource deprivation and crime. During his research, Muir observed four police officer personality “types” that were differentiated by two elements: the abilities to (1) empathize with those whom they encountered on the street, and (2) morally reconcile need to use force in certain circumstances. For example, the archetypal officer in Muir’s typology was the “professional” – i.e., a collective group of officers who could place themselves psychologically in the life circumstances of the suspects they encountered, and although professionals did not care to use force to resolve most conflicts during their engagements with members of the public, they used force when necessary to stop conflict, protect lives, and restore order. Once the situational exigencies were neutralized, professionals ceased their use of physical force. A key attribute of professionals was their ability to communicate effectively with suspects in ways that often minimized, de-escalated, or even eliminated the need to use force during many incidents.

In contrast to the professionals were the “enforcers:” Officers who had the highest propensity to use excessive force against suspects because they (1) generally lacked the capacity to fathom the often “tragic” conditions that characterized the lives of many people they encountered, and (2) were quick to resort to violence when they perceived minimal threats to their safety or when they felt compelled to assert police authority. Muir (1977) noted that, unlike the professionals, enforcers usually lacked the communication skills necessary to de-escalate and/or otherwise avoid the need to use force in certain circumstances. As a result, enforcers often created situations where other officers near them were forced to use violence against suspects because of the degree to which enforcers provoked violence during their contacts with the public. Thus, and as Muir notes, enforcers were problematic to police workgroups partly because they frequently engaged in excessive force, and partly because they often caused potentially violent encounters to escalate into actual violent encounters.

Perhaps the most interesting and important element of Muir’s (1977) typology was the recognition that officers might slide between one personality type and another based on cues in the social environment. For example, officers regarded as professionals – and who usually conducted themselves appropriately during most police-citizen encounters – sometimes became enforcers during certain incidents. Muir, for example, identified one “professional” officer among those he studied who was highly communicative and restrained in virtually all street encounters except when he responded to sexual or domestic assaults against female victims. These events tended to trigger an uncharacteristic response in the officer – perhaps due to family history or other personal experience – leading him to take on the attributes of the enforcer: He was quick to use violence as an initial response when contacting an alleged domestic or sexual assault offender. Thus, although Muir’s typology was largely psychological, it recognized the importance of social context when analyzing street-level behavior of officers.

Although no identified studies have found reliable empirical support for Muir’s typology (see, for example, Hochstedler (1981)), none has tested the typology in a setting that replicates that in which Muir conducted his research. It may be that Muir’s findings hold primarily for postindustrial port cities with large urban African-American populations that live predominantly in poverty conditions, socially isolated from the larger urban matrix. Such are the conditions that most often allow officers to engage in abuse of authority – including excessive force – with little fear of recourse (e.g., Kane 2002; Kubrin and Weitzer 2003). Moreover, despite scant support for the typology itself, at least one study has found that – like Muir’s findings – officers who exhibit certain personality characteristics (diffuse though they may be) often “slide” between profiles as the social contexts in which they work vary (Hochstedler 1981). This finding supports Muir’s observation that even socalled professional police officers may become “enforcers” under the circumstances that elicit particularly strong responses, and perhaps where local social constraints are wanting. Such findings demonstrate the importance of the social ecological contexts in which officers work as determinants of their behaviors. At the very least, Muir’s typology provides a useful taxonomy for efficiently describing certain officer characteristics that are easily recognized – i.e., enforcer.

Residing one level up from Muir (1977) on the social ecological progression is Van Maanen’s (1978) “asshole” perspective. This framework is so-named for the colloquial usage of the term by police officers as a shorthand for suspects who – through speech or gesture – “deny” a police officer’s “definition” of the power structure that characterizes their interactions with the public – namely, that officers are in charge. Van Maanen argued that the line officers he studied tended to classify members of the public into three groups: “suspicious persons” (suspected criminal offenders), “assholes” (people who challenge police authority), and “know nothings” (people who do not fit the previous two categories and who are also not police officers). Whereas police officers usually have little or no cause to use coercion against know nothings, and they generally use coercion only as necessary to control and/or gain the compliance of suspicious persons, they may use coercion – i.e., force – against those labeled assholes as a retaliatory mechanism to redress an affront to an officer’s authority (Van Maanen 1978).

Van Maanen (1978) observed that a suspect’s initial response to a police officer’s inquiry determined the officer’s categorization of him (Van Maanen never clarifies as to whether the template applies to female suspects), as well as the subsequent police reaction. Suspects who appeared to reject the officer’s definition of the situation – thereby challenging the officer’s authority and legitimacy – were labeled assholes and were often subjected to a violent response as a form of punishment or reassertion of authority. From an officer workgroup standpoint, police officers who labeled a suspect an asshole were justified, and perhaps even expected, to use violence to reestablish control.

Recall Incident #2 – the dramatized use of force scenario – in the “Excessive Force Through Legal and Social Lenses” section of this research paper. The officer’s response to the youthful driver’s verbal resistance was a quintessential example of how a person may become labeled an asshole under Van Maanen’s model. Importantly – and as shown in Incident #2 – when officers label a suspect an asshole, and to the extent that the officers use brutality to redress the affront, they often do so to impose police authority typically at the expense of formal sanctioning (e.g., arrest). As such, some suspects – particularly those engaged in illegal behavior when contacted by the officer – may accept the brutality in lieu of a formal sanction because if they reported the brutality, they would also have to report their activities that led to their initial contact with the police.

Though it is the case that occupational templates-perspectives often fail to yield empirical support, at least one recent study has offered some empirical validation of Van Maanen’s (1978) “asshole” thesis. In a study of how the occupational goals of police may sometimes conflict with rule of law practices, Kane and Cronin (2011) examined the extent to which police officers used force in situations that may have been characterized by the “asshole” process. Through the use of discriminant function analysis, Kane and Cronin reported that during coercive exchanges with suspects (i.e., situations that ultimately ended in arrest), suspects who demonstrated “verbal antagonism” toward officers – but not physical resistance – were likely to be “punched” and “kicked” during the incident. Interestingly, when suspects demonstrated physical resistance, but not necessarily verbal antagonism, they were usually subjected to more “normal” types of force, such as chemical sprays, baton strikes, or basic joint locks (Kane and Cronin 2011). Verbal antagonism appeared to elicit “asshole” responses in the form of punches and kicks – use of force techniques that usually do not exist on a police use of force continuum.

Whereas Van Maanen (1978) operationalized the “asshole” perspective as one rooted primarily in the social interactionist tradition, there is evidence that the asshole process also may be driven in part by police subcultural pressures. In his observational study of how the Los Angeles Police Department controls space within its vast jurisdictional boundaries, Herbert (1998, p. 347) adds a conceptual dimension to Van Maanen (1978) with his identification of normative orders: a collective subcultural belief system “.. .oriented around a common value.” Herbert argues that police officers working in small groups develop informal work and productivity standards within the context of six normative orders that include law, bureaucratic control, adventure/machismo, safety, competence, and morality. Herbert (1998, p. 347) observes that officer workgroups place differential values on the normative orders in ways that “provide guidelines and justifications for” workgroup enforcement activities. For present purposes, Herbert notes that normative orders – such as law and safety or law and competence – may conflict with one another as officers use their coercive authority to satisfy one normative order (e.g., competence), perhaps at the expense of another (e.g., law or bureaucratic control).

Herbert’s normative order system, which he referred to a police subculture, may be integrate with occupational templates because it explains how situational circumstances may trigger police responses designed to satisfy occupational goals. For example, officers confronted by a suspect they label as “dangerous” will likely invoke the normative order of safety to minimize the threat of violence. Similarly, officers who enter into a coercive encounter with a bellicose suspect – an “asshole” in Van Maanan’s (1978) taxonomy – may seek to demonstrate their competence to other officers in their workgroup by using excessive force or brutality, which may be regarded as situationally justified to reassert police authority over a noncompliant suspect. Again, such an application of coercion may conflict with rule of law orders, but may be regarded as occupationally necessary if officers achieve the objectives of their primary normative value.

Finally, to understand how police agencies themselves may create a culture that fosters, if not encourages, the excessive use of force by their officers, it is important to consider the research on police organizations. In Los Angeles, the Christopher Commission assigned to investigate patterns of excessive violence in the LAPD in the wake of the 1991 beating of motorist Rodney King identified a “siege mentality” that was prevalent among officers of that department (Independent Commission 1991, p. 95). This siege mentality, the Commission argued, led officers to view their relationship with the community at large as adversarial (the “us vs. them” perspective) and appeared to legitimize the excessive use of force by police against suspects in an environment that all but guaranteed immunity from accountability (Skolnick and Fyfe 1993). The confidence that officers placed in their ability to freely “punish” suspects who committed affronts against police authority was perhaps best illustrated by the routine exchanges among officers via their mobile data terminals in which anecdotes describing violent activities – often in racist terminology – were openly exchanged (see: Independent Commission (1991)).

Appealing to occupational templates to help explain the processes by which excessive force may be used and legitimized by police officers is instructive because they offer a social ecological context within which to interpret police brutality that is often absent from the empirical literature that examines excessive force. Templates, such as Muir’s (1977) extortionate transaction model, Van Maanen’s (1978) “asshole” perspective, Herbert’s (1997) identification of workgroup “normative orders,” and Skolnick and Fyfe’s (1993) elaboration of the “siege” mentality, show that police brutality may be influenced at every level of a police officer’s contextual occupational life. Moreover, they offer insight into how some officers who may be disinclined to use brutality on suspects may operate in layered contexts that favor, or even expect, them to use excessive against certain suspects under certain circumstances.

Some Consequences Of Police Brutality

Perhaps the most obvious consequences of police brutality are the direct effects endured by victims. Although there are no national data on the subject, it seems clear that people who experience police brutality can suffer physical harms ranging from minor aches and pains to serious injury, and in some cases, death. It is also likely that people who experience physical abuse at the hands of police may suffer emotional trauma. In the United States, however, police agencies are not required to report use of force – let alone excessive force – incidents to any centralized authority, leading researchers and policy-makers to make guesses about the frequency and severity of police brutality. This problem could be ameliorated by the implementation of a national reporting system on the police use of force.

In addition to the direct effects of police brutality to those who experience such abuse, there are often broader sociological consequences that may result when police engage in the excessive use of force, particularly when the force is systemic in nature and occurs in communities whose residents perceive that they have been socially and legally marginalized by their municipal governments. Among these, perhaps the gravest consequence is the loss of legitimacy police forces can experience when officers are viewed as brutal or abusive, and when community residents perceive little or no recourse to control them.

Tyler (1990) has argued that societies are more likely than not to comply with the law when they believe in the morality of the law and in the legitimacy of the government making the law. For a society to accept law as moral and the government as legitimate, its members must believe in the fairness of the law-making process (Tyler 1990). This model of procedural justice generally argues that the way a state achieves and maintains legitimacy is by distributing its authority through consensus-based processes without regard for the social and economic statuses of societal subgroups. If the public becomes polarized over issues related to the distribution of legal authority, the government may lose legitimacy and find it difficult to fulfill its “regulatory role” in society (Sunshine and Tyler 2003, p. 515) without having to resort to the frequent use of physical coercion. This issue is important for municipal authorities, as some members of the public, particularly those residing in communities characterized by racial segregation and/or systemic economic resource deprivation, may perceive inequities in the distribution of police resources in violation of procedural justice expectations (Jacob 1971).

Kubrin and Weitzer (2003) were among the first researchers to find social scientific evidence supporting the above arguments. In their study of retaliatory homicide in St. Louis, Kubrin and Weitzer found that certain types of homicides predicted subsequent homicides in the form of retaliation, suggesting that, had the initial homicide been stopped, the net reduction in many cases would have been two, given that the retaliatory homicide also would have been negated. In the qualitative portion of their study, Kubrin and Weitzer found through unstructured interviews that the initial homicides were allowed to occur in large part because community residents refused to share information related to criminal activity with the police due to their distrust of law enforcement authorities. This distrust stemmed from perceived abuses – including brutality – of community residents by police over a number years. Kubrin and Weitzer’s (2003) findings were largely consistent with Anderson’s (1999) observations of the so-called Code of the Street. Anderson argued that the Code – in which respect was valued as a social good, earned and maintained by the threat and/or use of violence – prevailed in the north Philadelphia community he studied in part because the police had virtually no legitimacy due to their perceived abuses of authority.

Kane (2005) made similar findings in New York City in his examination of the consequences of “over-policing” and police misconduct (including violence) on violent crime. For present purposes, Kane found that in economically stable communities, police misconduct had no effect on violent crime. In economically disadvantaged, and “extremely” economically disadvantaged, communities, police misconduct (including violence) led to subsequent increases in violent crime. Kane attributed this relationship to the same processes driving Kurbin and Weitzer’s (2003) findings: As residents of socially/economically marginalized communities perceived increases in police abuses, they likely ceased sharing crime-related intelligence with authorities, allowing violent crimes to occur that may have been otherwise prevented.

In his classic lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” Max Weber (see: Weber et al. 2004, pp. 78–79) argued that because the State “claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of force” to enforce its laws, politicians who hope to gain the “obedience” of those whom they govern need not simply do the right thing; politicians must appear to do the right thing. Weber’s arguments are made salient by Kubrin and Weitzer (2003) and Kane (2005): Failure of the police to “govern” effectively the territories they serve may lead to noncompliance on the part of people who reside in communities characterized by the perceptions of police abuse of authority. In the “everyday” sense, citizen’s noncompliance may manifest in the form of people failing to readily yield to police authority during traffic stops and stopand-frisk events – both of which may create a context of hostility and distrust on the part of the police and members of the public. In the broader and more extreme sense, generations of police abuse, including unchecked or redressed brutality, may lead to urban violence. Indeed, two of the most destructive urban riots in American history have been attributed to long-standing patterns of police abuses, including unchecked brutality.

On August 11, 1965, a white California Highway Patrol officer stopped an African-American motorist in the Watts section of Los Angeles for suspected Driving While Intoxicated. Even at that time, Watts was an area of Los Angeles, characterized by racially concentrated economic resource deprivation, which had a difficult history with the police. The motorist – Marquette Frye – resisted being taken into custody, which led to an escalating confrontation with police (Barnhill 2010). As more officers arrived on scene, the crowd of bystanders also grew until someone finally began throwing bottles and other objects at the officers, who continued their struggle to subdue Frye (Barnhill 2010). In the process of taking Frye into custody, officers also arrested his mother and brother for unlawfully interfering with the arrest, which led the crowd to switch from throwing bottles to throwing rocks and other large items at police (Barnhill 2010). This inciting incident led to 6 days of rioting in Watts, leading to 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, and over 3,000 arrests (Barnhill 2010). Although post-riot analyses generally concluded that poor living conditions and the social marginalization of African-Americans in Los Angles represented the root causes of the Watts riot (e.g., California Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots 1965), some researchers concluded that years of police abuse and brutality in Los Angeles – particularly during the tenure of Police Chief William H. Parker, during which the LAPD transformed into highly aggressive paramilitary police force – was largely responsible for the riot (Skolnick and Fyfe). Indeed, the McCone Commission, empanelled just a few months after the riots and charged with identifying the causes, noted from its many interviews of AfricanAmerican Watts residents:

—–“Police brutality” has been the recurring charge. One witness after another has recounted instances in which, in their opinion, the police have used excessive force or have been disrespectful and abusive in their language or manner (Governor’s Commission 1965, p. 40)

The social and economic costs of the 1965 Los Angeles riot were eclipsed only by those of the 1992 Los Angeles riot, which occurred in the immediate aftermath of two white police officers being acquitted for beating motorist Rodney King. During the 1992 riot, the LAPD and the California National Guard killed 53 people. More than 2,000 people were injured, and over 1,000 buildings were destroyed by fire (Wood 2002). The fact that both riots occurred in Los Angeles was no surprise to Jerome Skolnick and James J. Fyfe – two of the nation’s leading scholars of police authority and accountability – who argued that since William Parker was appointment police chief of Los Angeles in 1950, the LAPD became increasingly insular, aggressive, and unaccountable to the mayor and city council (Skolnick and Fyfe 1993). The unaccountability was particularly pronounced under Chief Daryl Gates, who enjoyed civil service protection and indemnity from lawsuits (Skolnick and Fyfe 1993).

It seems clear that, while people subjected to direct forms of police brutality suffer the most immediate harm from such abuse, those residing in communities – even cities – in which the police engage in the excessive use of force with little accountability also experience the resulting harms. Violent incidents in Los Angeles (1965 and 1992), Detroit (1967), Chicago (1968), Liberty City-Miami (1980), Cincinnati (2001) – even Tulsa in 1921 – were not so much riots as they were urban rebellions. In each event, the triggering incident was related to some form of police abuse, and all post-riot analyses identified abusive police practices, largely in communities characterized by racially concentrated economic resource deprivation and social marginalization, as major causal factors (see: Independent Commission 1991; Kerner Commission 1968; Skolnick and Fyfe 1993).

Preventing Excessive Use Of Force

As previously alluded to, people who experience police brutality or the excessive use of force have recourse through the conventional mechanisms of police accountability: the citizen complaint process, mediation, and the courts. Each of these avenues of recourse has varying chances of success, depending on the several factors related to the event, including the social desirability of the accuser, the degree to which the incident occurred in the public realm and/or in view of credible witnesses, the extent to which the accuser may have attempted to initially evade or who otherwise resisted police officers, and in many cases the quality of the accuser’s legal counsel. While individual plaintiffs may prevail in their attempts to hold police accountable for the use of excessive force, most would probably argue that best recourse would be the prevention of police brutality before it occurs. The most immediate methods by which to control and/or prevent the excessive use of force by police are probably rooted in the recruitment of police officers, training and supervision, and the establishment of organizational cultures within police departments that value the protection of life over the enforcement of law as a primary function.

The personnel processes police departments use to recruit and hire officers play a crucial role in shaping subsequent organizational behavior, but in ways that are perhaps more subtle than they are apparent. Police department hiring practices are generally designed to screen out undesirable applicants, which is substantively different from trying to screen in desirable applicants. These so-called screening-out practices are rarely evidence-based; and they are often not followed consistently over time or across police recruiters or background officers. Moreover, to the extent that the excessive use of force is a relatively rare event within police organizations, it is difficult to accurately predict who might have become “problem” officers over the course of their careers were they allowed to join the force. Although emerging evidence supports the practices of screening out applicants on the basis of employment and criminal histories to prevent general misconduct (see: Kane and White 2012), there is virtually no evidence that “violence-prone” (Toch 1996) police officers can be identified and effectively screened out through the normal recruiting process.

Screening methods that favor recruits whose education, experience, cultural identities, and world views would create police department cultures not dominated by a single gender or ethnic group, and it would raise the possibility that members of all subgroups would contribute to the development of a sensitive workforce tolerant of people across race and class. Empirical findings support this claim: In their study of career ending misconduct in the New York City Police Department, Kane and White (2012) found that from 1975 to 1998, as the NYPD became increasingly racially and ethnically diverse, it also became better behaved. Rates of misconduct decreased as diversity increased, independent of external factors that often influence organizational rates of misconduct. Although the NYPD over that time period may not have systematically recruited persons with diverse characteristics or personal histories, the results of bringing diverse pools of recruits into policing are clear: Organizational misconduct declines.

In addition to recruitment, supervision of police officers is also critical in preventing excessive use of force – particularly in communities that historically have had difficult access to the conventional mechanisms of police accountability. For example, in a study of police misconduct in New York City police precincts, Kane (2002) found that the traditional antecedents of social disorganization – particularly, structural disadvantage – predicted increased rates of careerending police misconduct. Precincts characterized by the highest rates of racially concentrated structural disadvantage also had the highest rates of police misconduct. This finding led Kane (2002, p. 891) to conclude that, “The very communities likely in need of the most protection by the police.. .(are also) in need of the greatest protection from the police.. .” One way to offer that protection is through the supervision of officers.

In many American police departments, the average staffing ratios call for one sergeant for every nine patrol officers (Walker and Katz 2010), and while scant research highlights what supervisors actually do, at least one study suggests that low spans-of-control (i.e., high ratio of supervisors to officers) decreased excessive force (Terrill 2001). Although modern organizational police theory generally argues that low spans-of-control are inefficient to the administration of police departments (making the assumption that “flatter” organizations function more efficiently than “tall” organizations) (e.g., Walker and Katz), in communities where the risk of misconduct may be higher than average, it seems that lower spans-of-control would reduce the risk of brutality as supervisors have more contact with line officers in the field. Indeed, under such conditions, what may be sacrificed in terms of organizational efficiency may be gained in effectiveness.

Finally, recruitment and supervision to limit police and the excessive use of force seem to have their highest probabilities of success if the overall police department culture supports the structural efforts in place to guard against brutality. The tone must be set at the top through the implementation of progressive policies that strive for transparency in the disciplinary review process and promote model tactics and strategies. In addition, evidence suggests that when line officers are involved in the development of use of force policies and field tactics designed to reduce police officer violence (i.e., Fyfe 1997), then the use of force within departments tends to decrease, partly because police officers view themselves as contributors to the policy development process, rather than simply as people who need to be controlled.

Once the chief administrator implements an infrastructure of progressive policy and gains the “buy-in” of line officers, the message of progressive policing must filter through all layers of the police organization. One method by which to accomplish the process of communicating the department’s value system is via the field training officers (FTOs). Toch (1996) argued that for the purposes of controlling police violence, field training officers were instrumental in bridging the gap for new officers between the messages they received in the training academy and the messages they received from their peers once on the street. Toch argued that FTOs serve a crucial organizational role because, among other functions, they help probationary police officers practice their recently acquired skills in live settings while under highly structured supervision. During this formative period in a police officer’s career, FTOs can help new officers interpret street encounters in ways that allow them to learn and practice good policing through the metaphorical lenses of a protection of life mandate. Once they complete their field training programs, police officers may continue to practice good policing and the protection of life in both patrol and specialized settings.

Successfully preventing the use of excessive force by police likely requires a multilayered approach that considers the social ecology of the total police organization. While the chief administrator is an important part of the process within the organization, it must be noted that the chief also represents the will of the community. Chief administrators for police departments are usually chosen by the elected bodies of local governments (e.g., city councils, county boards of supervisors, etc.), often for their stated positions on certain issues, such as violent crime, fear of crime, urban disorder, etc. Excessive use of force will be minimized only if governing boards select chief administrators who are actively interested in controlling and preventing excessive use of force. Moreover, the governing boards themselves need to share the same commitment to police accountability if excessive force is to be controlled and prevented in a police organization.

Conclusions

Evaluating the use of excessive force by the police tends to be much more difficult than other forms of misconduct, such as profit motivated corruption. Unlike other forms of police deviance, which tend to be wrong by their very occurrence, the roots of police brutality reside in the legitimate use of force – a tool society gives police to accomplish its mandate. Therefore, when an officer is accused of brutality, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to determine where the justified use of force may have become excessive. Even in the infamous, and unquestioningly brutal, Rodney King case, the police officers who contacted King had cause to use some physical coercion in their initial attempts to bring him into compliance. This research paper identified classic occupational templates of the police use of force in an effort to identify context within which the excessive use of force may be considered. Although these templates have received little empirical validation, they are meaningful because in many cases, they offer a shorthand for describing the conditions under which police officers may resort to brutality. Although police departments can use recruitment as a tool to prevent the excessive use of force by their officers, the best prevention is likely based on a multilevel approach that involves local governing bodies selecting chief administrators with strong commitments to transparency and the virtues of “good” policing.

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