Читать книгу Force Decisions. A Citizen's Guide to Understanding How Police Determine Appropriate Use of Force онлайн

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Use of Force gets trained a lot because it is one of the “high-liability” subjects—the things that agencies commonly get sued over. It needs to be pounded into recruits and senior officers alike because high-speed judgments under stress are the meat of the job. Most of the rest of the things we do could be done by others—there’s a lot of community service, helping stranded motorists, a lot of giving directions. Some counseling. Lots and lots of writing reports.

But the thing we do that others don’t is face down angry, enraged, and often armed people. If the average person has trouble telling a salesman ‘No,’ he will have far more trouble telling an enraged meth addict swinging a chain ‘No.’ That’s the job. And it’s not enough to merely stop the bad guy. Most times anyone with a shotgun could stop anybody else. It is doing it in such a way that no one is offended, and that is hard because any use of force looks shocking to the uninitiated.

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Everything that comes later will revolve around this concept. This is the basic tenet of using force for both civilians and officers: