Читать книгу Force Decisions - Rory Miller - Страница 7
ОглавлениеI took my initial Use of Force training a very long time ago. There were a couple of hours of pre-service training when we were hired, some on-the-job training, and then the academy. We were given refresher training, usually one hour, at our annual in-service training after that.
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.
Everything that comes later will revolve around this concept. This is the basic tenet of using force for both civilians and officers:
You are expected and required to use the minimum level of force that you reasonably believe will safely resolve the situation.
Almost every word in that sentence is a legal concept.
A civilian is expected to use the minimum force—no more—that is necessary to resolve the situation. The officer, however, may be required to use that level of force. This hinges on the “Duty to Act,” a concept that will be discussed at length in section 1.3.
The minimum level of force will be discussed in section 1.6, “The Force Continuum.”
‘Reasonably believe’ can be very subjective, and there is a lot of case law trying to narrow it down. In any situation there is an almost infinite number of things that can happen: decisions that can be made, actions that can be taken. The reasonable person rule requires that whatever decision was made falls within the ballpark of what another reasonable person (ideally the jury members) might have done.
The rule is slightly different for Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs). The ‘reasonable person’ is exchanged for the ‘reasonable officer’ rule. The courts recognize that the difference in training and experience between an average reasonable citizen and an experienced officer can be vast. An officer who has been in a hundred fights will not see the situation the same way as a citizen who had one fight in junior high school, thirty years ago.
Further, courts and sensible people everywhere acknowledge that the officer can only be responsible for what he could have reasonably known at the time. He will never know if the three-hundred-pound man trying to take his gun has a heart condition, or that the drug dealer running from him is basically a nice person. He cannot fight differently or choose different ways to avoid fighting based on things he doesn’t know.
Monday-morning quarterbacks and armchair generals are clichés in our society. The academic expert on application of force is no more credible.
Officers “are often required to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary…”*
HARD TRUTH #4
Sometimes an officer will be forced to make a decision in a fraction of a second on partial information where the BEST choice will leave a corpse, a widow, two orphans, and someone who needs therapy.
Listen up, recruit—
You will make mistakes. A lot of them. You will have only the information you can gather in a few seconds and you will act on that partial information in a heartbeat. Almost every time, you will make the best decision you could have made. You will, however, be judged by people who have the leisure and resources to do research.
Where you saw a man acting angry, confused and ignoring your attempts to communicate, they will identify, perhaps, a deaf man who was despondent over a lost job or a family illness.
When he swung his fist at you and you had to decide what to do in a fraction of a second, the theorists will have hours or even days to think of a response that they believe would have worked ‘better’—that is, more safely and more effectively. From their point of view, with these advantages in time and knowledge, almost every decision you make can be called a mistake.
You will make mistakes, by their standards and by your own standards as well. As your instructors, we will do what we can to make sure that you make these mistakes safely, in training.
Training is the place for mistakes.
Years ago, we designed and ran a “Confrontational Simulations” course. In a ConSim course, the goal is to present realistic, high-stress situations and force the student to make hard decisions under extreme pressure. The goal of this particular class was to bring Corrections Officers, who were accustomed to being unarmed in a relatively controlled environment, up to speed on decisions and survival skills when they were working fully armed and outside the jail.
Many of the scenarios were intense: walking into armed robberies, former inmates wanting attention (good or bad), assassination attempts on high-profile offenders. Some were designed to draw a bad decision: in one case, exactly mimicking the assassination attempt, the ‘threat’ was a reporter with a microphone.
One scenario was just an elderly lady crying on a park bench. The officers were good and compassionate people. Most who went through the scenario spent endless energy trying to engage her in conversation, or provide some sort of help. The goal of the scenario was to remind the officers that not everything is their problem.
One of the officers, who shall remain nameless, asked and talked and even pled with the old woman. He finally ordered her to quit crying and tell him what was wrong. She continued to howl and sob. He repeated the order. She kept crying.
He pulled his pepper spray and hosed her down!
We ended the scenario. The officer then had to turn to a jury of his peers (the other officers taking the course) and justify his actions. He couldn’t, of course. No reasonable officer would have done anything similar.
Neither would this officer, in real life. The situation was designed to ramp up his adrenaline. Even more, in the class setting he thought, with impeccable logic, that given a problem, his job was to find a solution. When everything else failed (and only when everything else failed), he tried force. It never occurred to him, in a classroom setting, that he was allowed to walk away, that not every situation is a situation requiring action.
You are expected and required to use the minimum level of force that you reasonably believe will safely resolve the situation.
‘Safely’ is very specific, and something hard for people raised on western movies and concepts of fair-play to grasp. I’ll hit it again in section 1.2 on the “Three Golden Rules,” but you deserve a taste here.
Real violence, real fighting, and real applications of force are not games. There is no reset button. There are no do-overs. A professional in this situation cannot afford some misguided idea of chivalry or fair play. Were the officer to indulge in that illusion, the bad guy would win half the time and go on to victimize more of the innocents the officer is sworn to protect.
At the swearing-in ceremony, when the Chief handed me my badge he said, “Once you pin this on, you are never allowed to lose. Never.”
The more force you use, the safer it is for you. Do the math. The threat* comes at you with no weapon, and you may try to wrestle with him and you might win. Or you may hit him upside the head and you may win. Or you could hit him with a club and you will probably win. Or you could pull a knife or gun and almost certainly win. The higher the level of force you use, the safer for you.
The key is that you must judge the lowest level that will safely work. An experienced officer with decades in martial arts specialized in joint locks could handle many things, safely, at a lower level than other officers.
So, officer or civilian, you do not go into a situation at the level of force in which you believe you might prevail. You go into it as hard as you need to in order to go home safely.
‘Safely,’ as you see, modifies ‘minimum level.’ It is one short sentence, but it gets very complicated, especially in application.
Lastly, to ‘resolve the situation’ can mean something different in almost any encounter. The level of force needed to stop a man from kicking another man to death may be different from the level of force necessary to stop a sniper from pulling a trigger, and will definitely be different from the force needed to get handcuffs on a drunk and drive him to detox. The goals of a Use of Force (broadly to gain compliance or get control) are extremely variable, and that modifies everything.
You are expected and required to use the minimum level of force that you reasonably believe will safely resolve the situation.
1. You and your partners go home safely at the end of each and every shift
2. The criminal goes to jail
3. Liability free
The three golden rules, first written by Dep. Paul McRedmond of the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, must be the basis of all officer training. The fact that they exist, that they are explicitly taught, and that they needed to be stated so clearly says something about the profession.
Rule #1: You and your partners go home safely at the end of each and every shift
In most professions, staying alive and uninjured during the workday is more or less expected. Statistically, this is true for officers also. Most days, most go home fine. But some days, they don’t. They are paid to sometimes deal with less-than-fully-socialized people in volatile situations. Officers are expected to walk (or run) into places where people with more common sense are running away.
Rule #1 is a pipe dream. The only safe way to do the job is to NOT do the job. Some officers do use this strategy and get away with it. We’ll talk about Lops in “Experience,” section three. The essence of Rule #1 is not to make the job any riskier than it is. Don’t take stupid chances.
You might die, but you should never die because of your own stupidity or bravado. You should never get your partner killed because you couldn’t keep your ego in check. And you should never, ever, die in such a way that other agencies use it for training films.
A short list of things to remember:
• You are not Superman and bullets do not bounce off you. This is one of the Hollywood Effects. By the time you join a police agency, you have watched thousands of hours of television. In the television world, being the good guy seems to magically protect you from serious injury. This isn’t true. We all know it isn’t true, but seeing it a thousand times can hit the brain at a very deep level and rookies often act like it is true.
• Keep your ego in check. This is a job, not an identity. Criminals will try to bait you, or try to make you angry. If you lose control, they can manipulate the situation. It is your job to manipulate the situation. You have to do everything in your power to stay above the game, so that you can see and think clearly.
• Never take it (almost anything) personally. You are going to be interacting with people on their worst days. They will be angry, frightened, and indignant. It’s not about you. If someone needs to get his sense of masculinity back by calling you names, stay cool. It’s better than if he gets it back by beating his wife or children, which might be his normal method.
• Don’t get too excited to watch your back. This is a hard one to teach and a hard one to do. When the adrenaline hits, you will get tunnel vision and physically be unable to see things in your peripheral vision. Another factor is that attention is naturally drawn to the point of action or the greatest perceived threat. You will want to look at what is going on. Sometimes it will be your job to make sure no one comes up from behind. Even if it isn’t, make a conscious decision to look around and see if the situation has changed.
• Do not compete with criminals. You do not have to show that you are more manly than a wife beater. You do not have to be more clever than a con man.
• You are not alone. Long nights on solo patrol it is easy to forget that you are part of a team. You have a radio, use it.
• More than that, not just in the day-to-day stuff but also in a serious crisis, you are not alone. Your agency has decades or centuries of experience to draw from. Never be afraid to ask for advice or guidance, or just tips on how to do a better job.
• You have a radio for a reason. That ties into the above. Just add—don’t get lazy. Call in every stop. Just because the last three hundred stops went fine is no indication that the next one will. Someone needs to know where you are and what you are doing. You will use the radio far more than you will use any weapon or force option. Get good at it.
• It is not a game. There is no ref, no time limit, and the stakes are higher than any game. Do not go into this thinking in contest terms. The job gets done. There is no “I’ll be the best cop I can, and he’ll be the best crook he can, and we’ll see who wins.” There is no ‘see who wins.’ You get the job done. You are not permitted to lose or draw. You have a responsibility to the citizens.
• You don’t need to prove your masculinity. I think I’ve said this three different ways now. Sinking in?
You have a responsibility to keep yourself safe. You have a job to do and you cannot do it if you are dead or injured. A dead officer is not just a heroic or tragic icon, a dead officer is also a wasted resource.
The most succinctly I have ever heard this concept explained was at Combat Medic training at Fort Sam Houston. The instructors drilled a simple truth into our heads: A dead medic never saved anybody. This simple truth is just as true for officers.
An officer who gets himself killed or seriously injured becomes part of the problem. He can’t help anyone else. He can’t save the damsel in distress. Worse, the people needed to save the damsel now need to allocate resources to saving the stupid guy too.
When an officer gets killed in the line of duty training units and individual officers all over the country will try to find out what happened in as much detail as possible. Hoping to find out where the officer made a mistake. Mistakes can be fixed. Bad luck can’t.
Long ago, an officer and friend sent a message out into cyberspace. A friend of his had been killed. The friend was a good officer: fit, alert, well-trained, good judgment. Everything you would want in an officer and a partner. He had come around a corner and been shot in the face. Game over.
When an officer dies, we always hope it was a mistake, because we might be able to protect ourselves and our rookies from a mistake. Getting our heads blown off coming around a corner…not much you can do.
The Immutable Order was originally codified for hostage rescue. It is a cold and logical assessment of who is more important—the officer, the hostage, the bystanders, or the threat. It is not about love or duty or nobility, but simply a cold look at goals and resources.
The operator (officer)’s safety comes first because the officer is needed to save the hostages. If the officer becomes a casualty, not only is he out of the equation but also every other operator, accessory, and piece of equipment needed to save him cannot help to save the hostages.
Second come the hostages. They are the reason for being there.
Third come the bystanders and civilians. Yes, they are important. Yes, they shouldn’t be hurt…but they also shouldn’t be there at all. They should be safely away. Unlike the hostages, the bystanders have a choice and have some responsibility if stray bullets or collapsing buildings come their way.
Lastly are the hostage takers. All life is precious and all that, but the bad guys (BG) created the situation. The primary job is making sure that no citizen dies for the BG’s anger, greed, or stupidity. If the only way to ensure that is with the death of the bad guy…sorry, pal. You should have made a different choice.
Putting the officer first seems cold and it is—but do the math.
The “Immutable Order” is not a statement of value. It is not saying that the life of the officer is more valuable than the lives of the hostages. It is the way the resources, goals, and obstacles must be prioritized in order to get the job done. If an officer in a hot patrol area really valued his own life over even random strangers, he wouldn’t be in this business.
At the Columbine School shooting, the first responding officers started to go in and were called back by cooler-headed administrators. They were told to do what policy said: Set up a perimeter and wait for the SWAT team. More children died while they waited.
There was a huge outcry from citizens, the media, politicians, and even the officers themselves. Doctrine was changed, and, almost nationwide, the current standard for an active shooter scenario is to go in, immediately, with the first four officers on the scene. (This is changing too, and some agencies are experimenting with going in with the first officer or first pair on the scene.)
Everyone involved felt like they were doing the right thing: The first officers followed their instincts—very little hits you harder at a gut level than someone killing kids. The administrators who called them back were doing what they had trained, and what they had been taught was the best solution. The citizens and politicians and media were rightly outraged, and demanded change, and they got it.
But I have trained this scenario a lot—usually playing the bad guy. Every time, EVERY TIME, all of the responding officers die,* and I am free to go back to shooting kids. But it’s policy now, and that makes it officially the right thing to do.
This example isn’t about politics, or who is right, or who is wrong. It is about something you will see every day on the job—screwed-up situations where every last person involved is trying to do the right thing. I’ve trained the scenario. I know the officers die. But in my heart, I’m with the first group of officers who went in anyway.
Rule #2: The criminal goes to jail
This isn’t worded the same for all branches of law enforcement. For Corrections, the criminal stays in jail. For Parole and Probation, you try to prevent the criminal victimizing more people. For bailiffs, you keep the courtroom under control.
The essence is that you have a job to do. Do the job. Sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s boring and sometimes it’s terrifying and sometimes you don’t care. Tough. Do the job.
This is an easy job to burnout on. You see the worst of humanity at its worst. People lie to you. Even people who are good people get a little nervous when talking to cops and they try to make themselves sound better. It’s human nature to distrust and even dislike people who lie to you.
Dealing with the victims will hit you harder than dealing with the predators. Sometimes a predator is so cold as to seem alien. He or she can shake your assumptions about what it means to be human. You will meet predators who do not distinguish between a mate, a child, and a toy: They are all just possessions to be used. It will bother you, but it doesn’t hurt. Dealing with the victims, with the tears and blood, will hurt. Sometimes, it will seem easier to quit paying attention, to quit caring.
Rule #2 is simple. (Don’t forget that Rule #1 is the prerequisite—If you are injured or dead, you can’t do the job.) Do the job. Do it well. Do it like a professional. Not like a crusader. Definitely not like a self-righteous, angry prick. No matter how you feel, do a professional job. You get more convictions that way.
These concepts have to be hammered into new recruits hard and are an integral part of training. Most rookies come to the job with a hero complex. They want to save the world. They want to make a difference.
That’s great. One of the big goals of training is to preserve these dreams but implant the practical skills necessary to make the dreams work.
HARD TRUTH #5
You can’t achieve a dream by dreaming.
Training will never be quite right. It will never be enough—not enough to ensure that all the rookies will make good decisions or even that all the rookies will survive. All of us come to the job with assumptions built into the image of doing the right thing. We think that if we save a life, it will be a good person or an innocent child, and they will be grateful, and the world will be a better, safer place. We aren’t ready for saving a bum from drowning, and having him complain because we let him get wet. We aren’t prepared for the day we actually stop a rape in progress, and the rapist sues because his neck or elbow hurt afterwards.
Once in a great while, you will hear, “Thank you.”
This is the real secret: The people who do this job well for a long time don’t do it for the rewards or the recognition. They don’t do it (after the first year or two) for the rush. They don’t even do it to make the world a better place.
They do it because they can and most people can’t. Every shattered body they see, every terrifying brawl in the dark, and every interminable wait for blood tests to see if they have been exposed to a disease that might change or end their lives, are experiences that no one else needs to have.
Rookies need to learn to do the job, and do it like a professional, not like a TV hero. That way lies madness.
Litigation is a hallmark of modern society. From their earliest training, officers are taught to fear lawsuits. They are taught that anything they do can be twisted in court, and cost them their house, their savings, and their retirement.
In reality, that is rarely the case. As long as the officer stays within his or her agency policy and law, any liability stays with that agency. Reality doesn’t make the fear any less real. In the excellent book, Deadly Force Encounters, Alexis Arwohl and Loren Christensen point out that in actual shootings, with bullets flying at them and their lives in imminent peril, officers were almost universally plagued with the thought, “I’m gonna get sued.” That’s not a thought you can afford when your life is on the line.
There has been a sea change since I started in this profession. Years ago, there was a presumption that the officers were the good guys and the criminal was the bad guy. It seems to a lot of officers that this has changed.
One of the ways it has affected the job is in how reports were written. When I started this job, I was specifically told that when we used force, the reports were to be as minimal as possible. I was told, “What you don’t put in, they can’t use against you.” “They,” of course, were civil litigation attorneys, internal affairs…anyone who might have a reason to scrutinize what you did. We also were often told to write reports only on incidents that were likely to result in scrutiny—“No blood, no foul.”
It was wrong and must have made it much easier to cover abuses when they did happen…but thinking had already begun to change. Attorneys are smart and they fully understand that there are lies of omission as well as commission. Now, the reports are expected to be excruciatingly thorough, to cover everything you did and everything you saw. It was a big change, but it resulted in an important lesson.
The key to Rule #3, to being successful in litigation, or prevent litigation altogether is to make good decisions, to carry them out properly, and then to write a damn good report. Failure at any one of these three steps can really hurt you.
Making good decisions has two different meanings. Most officers, most of the time, make good decisions because they are good people. That holds true for anyone. When a decision must be made in a split second that decision will be based on who you are. Somewhere in the balance of fear and internal ethics, the person will make a decision (or fail to make a decision). Good, ethical people make good, ethical decisions.
Good decision-making is also a product of training, experience, and good policy. As much as officers need to be taught how to drive in an emergency, how to shoot, how to preserve evidence, and a thousand other things, they also have to be taught how to think, how to prioritize what they see, and how to make decisions. This will all be refined and expanded with experience.
Good policy is critical as well. One private company that regularly deals with violent mentally ill people has decided that they can’t be sued for hugging. The company has made it policy that the only self-defense technique allowed is to hug the attacker until he or she calms down. The environment is not designed for security and the clients have access to a number of things that can be altered to become weapons. Hugging someone trying to stab you is one of the less effective options. A bad policy, and this is a very bad policy, can put the employee in the position of following the rules or dying.
Carrying out your decisions properly is a matter of training. Knowing what to do is not the same as knowing how to do it. As an example, an agency that allows punching in their force continuum must train the officers in how to punch, or they will be sending officers to the hospital with broken hands. That violates the first golden rule.
Then, whatever your decision and action, you must write it well. You must be able to explain to your peers, superiors, and, if necessary, a jury exactly what you did; why you did it; and why it was the best option. Federal Air Marshall Guthrie says, “Your report can’t make a bad shoot good, but it can make a good shoot bad.”
No matter how much you twist or massage the words of your report, you can’t turn a bad decision into a good decision. Maybe you can fool some people, but it is still a bad decision. Like polishing a turd, it still stinks.
A bad report can sink you. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason can change a heroic act to a crime. “He was going to hit the baby with the hammer so I shot him,” is justified. “He was an ass, so I shot him,” is homicide.
Using a higher level of force might require explaining why a lower level of force would not have worked: “I was too far away to tackle the suspect before he hit the baby with the hammer. I had no choice but to fire my weapon.”
Make a good decision. Execute it properly. Write a good report.
The Three Golden Rules
1. You and your partners go home safely at the end of each and every shift
2. The criminal goes to jail
3. Liability free
Let’s say you, as a citizen, see someone in your front yard, acting strangely, staring and shouting and singing songs about John Lennon and Satan. Instead of calling 911, you go out on your front porch and yell, “Hey! What are you doing? Get out of my yard!” The Emotionally Disturbed Person (EDP) takes off and runs.
As a citizen, you’ve solved the problem. He may be in somebody else’s yard, but he’s not in yours. You aren’t responsible for him or for his actions.
As an officer, you have a duty to act. This can be really specific or really vague, depending on the policies of an individual agency and current tactical training. Once an issue comes to the officer’s attention, the officer is not only responsible for what he does, but for what happens if he chooses to do nothing.
Crazy guy runs and leaves a citizen’s yard because the citizen yelled. Fine. Crazy guy then slaughters a few people at the neighbor’s house: No liability or responsibility to the citizen.
The officer has to think of consequences—crazy, running guy might launch himself in front of a bus. Or hurt someone else. Or be wanted for a previous crime. Or desperately need psychiatric meds.
This is just an example, but the officer will respond to clues inherent in the scenario. Most people don’t run at the approach of an officer, hence it’s reasonable to believe that if someone runs, there is a reason. The subject might have a mental stability issue, in which case the officer may need to get medical help. Or the runner may have a warrant out for his arrest (no one wants to be the officer/agency who let a wanted felon go because they didn’t take the time to check for warrants). It may be because he has weapons or drugs on him that he is afraid they will find…
So the officer chases, and it is reasonable. Furthermore, if he wants to do the job, he has no choice. Many of the disconnects between police and citizen perceptions of force incidents center here. The citizen asks if the force was really necessary.
For a citizen, it wouldn’t have been necessary. Citizens aren’t required or expected to rush toward danger. Citizens are not responsible for the safety of the people around them and citizens, usually, can’t be censured or disciplined if they fail to stop someone else’s bad acts.
If a man with a knife runs toward an occupied house, the citizen has no responsibility to the people inside. An officer does and may need to make a choice to shoot a man in the back and live with the consequences of that choice…or to not shoot him and live with the possibility that the threat might kill children in the house.
There are no perfect answers in most tense situations. There are few, if any solutions where all parties involved are going to walk away with a smile in their hearts. Sometimes there aren’t even good answers. Sometimes there will be orphans. The officer’s duty in those situations is to try to choose the least bad answer.
To call a decision ‘bad’ we must have an alternate answer that we are sure would have resulted in less tragedy.
This is not a choice that a citizen is likely ever to make. It is one that officers have made. And they have had to live with the consequences. It is nothing short of choosing between nightmares—you will either live with the consequences of your actions or the consequences of your inaction. You will never know if the other choice would have been better or worse.
Not every police decision involves life or death. The officer needs skills that cover everything from mediation and calming down enraged EDPs to hand-to-hand skills, hand weapons, chemical sprays, and firearms.
Because of the duty to act, officers need skills that rarely enter into civilian self-defense. The things that can be handled with a wristlock or an escort hold are also the situations that a citizen can likely avoid.
Not only do officers need high-end self-defense skills and are more likely to use these skills than most civilians, they need an entirely separate set of skills for defending a third party or breaking up a fight.
Duty to act not only puts more moral pressure on the officer, exposing him or her to ugly, no-win situations, but also increases the complexity of those possible situations. It requires a broader base of skills than are needed by people who can choose to simply leave.
Duty to Act When You Can’t Do Anything
Sometimes, there is nothing the officer can do. Or nothing he or she can safely do. Or there is a good chance immediate intervention without proper training, equipment, and support will make matters worse. In cases like these, the duty to act can be satisfied by getting to a safe place, keeping an eye on the threat, and calling for help.
Very few officers are trained in hostage negotiations, for instance. When a lone officer stumbles into something that either is or becomes a hostage situation, it is safer for everyone, in most cases, for the officer to pull back and call the specialists. Amateur hostage negotiators can make matters worse. Storming a barricaded subject, with or without hostages, is a dangerous specialty. Individuals being heroic can quickly become hostages themselves.
At the heart of these kinds of decisions is “officer discretion.” Every situation is different, as is every officer and every threat. Officers must cultivate the judgment and be empowered to make the decisions when they are presented with a situation.
This is inherently risky and one of those factors that can make citizens very uncomfortable. It makes officers uncomfortable, too. Officers are rarely required to make an arrest or issue a citation in misdemeanor cases. It varies by policy, but in most places, if an officer happens to see a six-year-old shoplift a candy bar, the officer can tell the kid to give it back and apologize.
That discretion—to give the kid guidance or start a juvenile record and get a bunch of agencies involved—is a huge power. It is both feared and necessary. Too often, it also feels like a trap, a trap with no right answers.
On the feared side, turning a blind eye is also a form of discretion. An officer can avoid confrontation just by not doing the job. Discretion to let a minor lawbreaker go could be based less on whether the message was sent (the verbal warning for a traffic infraction) than on who it was—friend, family, another officer. Discretion is also the crack that people of power try to pry at: “Do you know who my father is? Can’t we just make this go away?”
Fear can be rationalized as discretion. Stopping a high-speed chase or not engaging in a Use of Force or not chasing a running suspect can all easily be rationalized—they can be dangerous, and sometimes the danger to the threat, yourself, and bystanders, isn’t justified by the potential result. What level of force would you be willing use for a city noise ordinance? For a car theft, are you willing to risk tearing through a school zone at lunchtime at 90 mph? There are good and bad reasons for making any of these decisions.
At the extreme, discretion can become abuse of authority. The “reasonable officer” rule is vague. It has to be, because the situations in which you need it are impossible to script. In that vagueness, it is possible for a bad or fearful officer to perceive justifications for things he wants, not needs, to do.
There is no easy answer for this one, no line that can be drawn that will make everyone happy. We all want ‘justice’ but that is a hard concept to define. If ‘justice’ were based simply on results, motivation wouldn’t matter and there would be no difference between intentional murder and accidental manslaughter. Justice-as-retribution collides with the concept of ‘behavior modification.’
Once upon a time I was driving a marked patrol car* and passed a car with a young couple in it. The wife was in the passenger seat with a toddler on her lap. Big no-no in my state with a very hefty fine. I passed, made eye contact with the driver, got a ways ahead and pulled over. The couple stopped their car and put the baby in the child seat. They drove on past, and I waved.
In a world with no officer discretion (and a jurisdiction where Corrections Officers had arrest powers), I might have been required to pull them over and write a ticket. There was nothing about their car to indicate that they had money to burn on fines or court fees. The kid was safe. What more did I want?
There are some areas and some laws where discretion has been outlawed—‘will arrest’ rules. For instance, if someone calls in a domestic violence complaint in many jurisdictions, someone has to go to jail, at least for the night or until bail is posted. Officers have made mistakes in judgment that had tragic results, most famously when Konerak Sinthasomphone briefly escaped from Jeffrey Dahmer. Officers responding to a naked, dazed, and raped fourteen-year old boy decided it was a ‘lover’s spat,’ and returned the boy to the serial killer cannibal, who did what serial killer cannibals do.
So, removing discretion in this case is good, right? Sort of. Except bad people have an amazing ability to use good things for bad ends. The ‘will arrest’ rule has become a harassment tool in divorce cases, and a way to empty a house for burglary while one spouse is in jail and the other is trying to arrange bail. It is one of the few issues where no evidence is needed for an arrest. The expectation is that there will be no serious repercussions unless found guilty at trial, so no harm, no foul. In theory.
But what if you have a job where you can be fired for missing a day? What if a day in jail causes you to miss a mandatory custody hearing? A lot of well-meant legislation can have unintended consequences.
Force is a form of communication, the most emphatic possible way of saying, “No!” or “Stop that!” or “Do it now!”
An officer enters any use of force with a goal in mind: to get the handcuffs on; to remove the drunk from the premises or the car; to get out of the ambush alive. The preferred goal is always cooperation, where the citizen wants to do what the officer has already determined is necessary. You usually get this from citizens (citizens being slang for normal, good people):
Officer: Sir, please move to the other side of the street.
Citizen: Oh, of course. (Sometimes they even say, “thanks!”)
If you can’t get cooperation, an officer will settle for compliance where the citizen (or threat) may not be happy about it, but does what he or she needs to do:
Officer: Mr. Smith, we have a warrant for your arrest. I have to take you into custody.
Mr. Smith: This is fucking bullshit! I took care of that warrant a month ago!
Officer: Possibly, but I have to take you in. Will you turn around and put your hands behind your back?
Mr. Smith (turning around and putting hands behind his back): Fuck you. I hope this makes you feel like a big man you fucking punk.
Mr. Smith is not happy, but he is compliant. In section three, “Experience,” we’ll talk more about criminals and the criminal subculture. Certain criminals will always be verbally abusive with officers. For some it is part of their identity; others know that verbal resistance combined with physical compliance is safe—the officer won’t hurt him but his peers will see him as a tough guy. So many, many arrestees will act like Mr. Smith. But so will many citizens.
For some ordinary citizens, contact with the police will be associated with very bad events, such as being a victim of a crime. For many it will be the unpleasantness of a traffic ticket. Basically, even ordinary citizens usually come into contact with police on a bad day. That can influence the citizen to act in ways that they would normally never consider.
For both officer safety reasons and legal “fair and equal treatment” reasons, all fresh bookings into jail are treated the same. Murderer or drunk driver, we treat them exactly the same because, truth to tell, just because someone got arrested for Driving Under the Influence of Intoxicants (DUII) doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a bunch of bodies buried in his crawl space.
We take everyone’s shoe laces because some people attempt suicide with them. We search everyone thoroughly because some people try to get weapons and drugs into the housing units. We take off wedding rings because you may be housed in an area where someone is willing to bite your finger off for something shiny.
Consistently, in booking, some of the worst fights we have are with first-time offenders who feel that they aren’t “real criminals” and should be dealt with differently. They stand up for rights that not only do they not have, but for rights that we are prohibited by policy to extend.
This is often compounded by the officer’s indifference. I almost wrote “seeming indifference” but in many of the day-to-day calls, the indifference is real: going to jail may be the most traumatic experience of your life, but I’ve booked, as a corrections officer, over sixty arrests in one night. I won’t be as excited as you are, I guarantee it.
If neither cooperation nor compliance is an option, the officer must take control. This is sometimes referred to as ‘forcing compliance’ but I am trying to keep the language clear.
Most of this book is about the nuances of how an officer gains control. ‘The least force necessary to…’ In general, control is considered established when the threat is handcuffed or placed in a cell—restrained or contained, respectively. Restraints limit the threat’s means; containment limits his opportunity.
Force is never to be used for punishment. Legally and ethically, the duty of an officer is to bring the threat to the justice system for his guilt to be determined and for the courts to set punishment. Punishment is not the officer’s job.
There is another, deeper reason that experienced officers come to understand—a very practical reason why force is never to be used as punishment completely separate from theories of justice or ethics. We will discuss that insight in section 1.9, “Scaling Force.”
Force is always used on a person and that person is called the Threat. There are several good reasons for that word. First and foremost, it is a reminder that it is the person’s actions and capabilities that justify force. Not appearance, not smell, not history (though history can enter the equation). The Threat’s ability to harm, to escape, sometimes just to sit there, is what justifies force.
In order to be an “immediate threat” the Threat must have Intent, Means, and Opportunity. And, the officer must be able to explain how he knew it.
Intent simply means that the Threat wanted to do something bad. Pointing a gun indicates Intent. Yelling, “I’m gonna kill that bitch!” indicates Intent. Balling up a fist indicates Intent. Going limp or just sitting when ordered to leave indicates Intent.
Just as a homeowner can order you to leave his house, a business owner or event organizer can ask the police to order you to leave. In most jurisdictions, you must comply when an officer asks for ID. When Immigration asks to see your passport, you do not have the right to refuse. These are all lawful orders.
A citizen does not have any right to refuse a lawful order. Officers can and, in some cases, will be required to use force to ensure the order is followed.
Intent for what? To harm someone, including the officer, or a third party or for the threat to harm him- or herself. Or to break any law. Or to disobey a lawful order.
The Threat must also have Means. The officer needs to be able to explain why he reasonably believed that the Threat had what he needed to carry out his Intent. If a ninety-year-old woman struggling with a walker snarls, “I’m gonna tear your head off and shit down your neck,” the words indicate some pretty serious Intent, but she probably lacks the Means. Tearing off a head is pretty difficult.
The third piece is Opportunity. The Threat must be able to reach you with the Means. If someone who has a gun and hates your guts is on another continent, he can’t reach you. You can’t justify nuking him. This comes up quite often in jail, where a threat in a cell screams threats at the officers. Locked in a cell, he lacks Opportunity and can’t be treated as an immediate threat—and it is unprofessional to open the cell and give him the Opportunity.
In the officer’s arsenal, handcuffs are meant to eliminate or limit Means; cells limit Opportunity.
What the officer sees, the Intent, Means, and Opportunity inherent in a specific threat at a specific time, establishes a level of resistance. The level of resistance is the primary factor in the officer’s decision of what level of force to use.
In order to be compliant, a person must actually comply. If an officer lawfully orders someone to leave the premises and the person does not, the person is NOT complying. Even if he says, “Just a minute.” Even if he yells, “Don’t touch me. I am complying!” Actions matter, not words. Failure to comply is static resistance.
We had an arrestee down and he was biting, kicking, and trying to punch and scratch. The whole time he was yelling, “I’m not resisting! Police brutality!” One of the witnesses (fortunately only one) completely disregarded what she saw and reported what she heard.
Levels of force and levels of resistance have different names in different agencies. Don’t get hung up on names.
Levels of resistance are scaled as None, Verbal, Static, Active, Ominous, and Lethal.
None. A person not breaking any laws, not harming any person or thing and obeying any instructions from the officers is showing no resistance. No force, therefore, is necessary to stop the person from doing something bad or to make the person do something necessary. The person is compliant, even cooperative.
Verbal. In an incident of verbal resistance, the threat is doing what he needs to do—desisting from harm or obeying an order—but is being verbally abusive about it. It is common for low-level criminals to attempt to save face by threatening or insulting the officers. Most are experienced at getting arrested; they know our policy and can act tough with nearly complete confidence in their safety.
Some threats hope for a lawsuit in their favor. A desire for publicity will lead some to attempt to provoke officers into an unjustified use of force.
A local photographer told me she had attended classes run by a protest group specifically on how to bait officers into making a motion that would look like a strike on camera. For example, one protester would pretend to fling a cup of liquid at the officer. The cup would be empty, but when the officer’s hand flinched up to protect his face, a photographer would be waiting at an angle such that the motion would look like a strike.
In general, force is not justified against a threat only exhibiting verbal resistance. This is not true in a correctional setting. In jails and prisons, the staff is routinely outnumbered by dozens and sometimes more than a hundred to one. The laws have recognized that under these conditions and with the necessity to maintain order in a population that is far more violent than the norm, the staff cannot safely allow anyone to incite others. Verbal resistance in a correctional institution, especially when viewed as an attempt to incite other inmates to action or show or gain leadership status with the inmates can and usually will be met with force.
Static. A threat refusing to comply with lawful orders, even if doing no harm, is exhibiting static resistance. Static resistance authorizes pain-compliance techniques. (See section 1.6, “The Force Continuum.”)
As much as the average person has a problem with force at all, most can get behind the idea of using force to stop force. Using force to stop nothing is a little harder to accept.
Here’s the rationale:
American or not, you don’t have the right to do anything you want. Your rights stop where they interfere with another person’s rights. People cannot take your things without permission. They cannot use your things without permission. Also, they cannot prevent you from using your things or prevent your lawful use of public things. Neither can you. Rights work in both directions.
Protesters who block traffic are infringing on the rights of every other citizen to use the road. Loud, angry people using foul language are infringing on everyone else’s right to be in that place in peace. The politically impassioned heckler who decides that his insults and questions for a candidate are more important than the agenda is infringing on everyone else’s rights.
Note well: In almost all cases an officer can’t or won’t intervene until he has been asked. In a private place, such as a business or rented lecture hall, the request must come from someone with site authority, such as the owner or manager.
Officers are sometimes forced to make decisions with incredible speed. They are often high-stakes decisions with a glance’s worth of data. Is the threat pulling away to run or pulling away to hit me? That question takes me just under two seconds to say aloud. In that space of time, a completely untrained person could hit you eight times. I have several friends who could draw a knife and stab you eight times in under two seconds.
Those are high-stakes decisions. Imagine dropping a piece of toast. Before it hits the ground, you have to decide if it will land with the butter side up or down, and you must do something before it hits…and the action you should take is based on which way it will hit.
Same speed, same amount of information. The stakes are just higher—take a chance on being injured or take a chance on hurting someone who just may be a scared kid trying to get away.
This is the standard that officers are often held to by the media and some civilians. It is beyond human ability in speed and analysis.
In order to protect the rights of others, officers are authorized and sometimes required to use force.
Active resistance is whenever the threat uses physical force to prevent the officer from doing the job. Running away is active resistance. Hanging on to a door jamb or a steering wheel to prevent being taken into custody is active resistance. Pulling away as an officer tries to apply handcuffs is active resistance; however, pulling away is also exactly what a threat who has decided to attack the officer might do and is often met with an appropriately higher level of force.
An ominous threat is trying to injure you, pure and simple. That can be any unarmed attack and some attacks with weapons (though most weapon attacks are lethal). Biting, also, is termed ominous behavior, although with concerns about blood-borne pathogens, some officers argue that biting should be considered lethal resistance.
Lethal threats, of course, are trying to kill you. Mechanism makes no difference: kicking a person in the head when he is down, shooting, stabbing, throwing someone off a building or into traffic.
An officer’s intent in a deadly force situation is not and can never be “to kill.” The intent is always to ‘stop the threat.’ This can appear to be mincing words. In a way, it is. Killing is certainly stopping, and many of the ways a threat is ‘stopped’ that come to media attention are kills.
There are two reasons why that wording is important in application and training. ‘Dead’ is a term with very specific meanings—something that is sometimes difficult to establish in the field. Modern medicine has saved many people who would have been declared dead fifty years ago. A ‘reasonable officer’ can be expected to determine when a threat has stopped; he cannot be expected to determine ‘dead,’ and that simple change in wording might require the officer to use more force, just to be sure that he met the standard.
The second reason is for the benefit of the officer in the aftermath. This will be covered more in section three, but for now know that there is a cost, sometimes a terrible cost, in the taking of a human life. No matter how brutal the person or under what circumstances, converting someone from living to dead is not something the normal person can do without grave psychological repercussions. Reminding someone that they needed to stop the threat, that his or her intent was to make the threat stop, not to kill, may, in some tiny way, ease the healing process. Or so we hope.
A lethal threat authorizes deadly force.
Often, even if the threat’s intent is manifestly not lethal, but his or her actions place someone in mortal danger, the officer may use deadly force. In this context, think of force not as force intended to kill, but as doing anything it takes to stay alive. A threat struggling to escape on a narrow, slippery fire escape several stories off the ground, a threat trying to drive away from a traffic stop with the officer stuck halfway through the window, or a developmentally disabled 300-pound man struggling to escape from a small room and crushing the officer may all justify deadly force.
The basic concept of the force continuum is that different types of threats can be handled with different tactics. Not everything can be solved with a kind word or a wristlock and not every situation requires a gun. The force continuum is an attempt to scale needs to actions so that administrators, juries, and other interested parties can estimate whether the force used in a situation was appropriate.
The simple fact is that fights, especially some of the ugly ones that last a long time or involve extreme levels of force, are extremely chaotic and don’t fit easily into boxes. Built into Use of Force training, along with all the levels of the force continuum, are all the reasons to depart from it.
As I write this, there is a debate raging in many agencies about whether to abandon the concept of a force continuum altogether. The argument for maintaining it is mentioned above: it makes certain elements of force application and policy easy to explain and to teach.
The arguments against are more varied. The most common complaint I hear from officers and trainers is that some officers and many juries will be led to believe that since the continuum is presented in steps, the officer is required to try every level, starting at the bottom, in every situation.
The attitude seems to be that if it is written into policy as a continuum, the format alone could influence citizens to believe that the officer is required to tap an armed hostage taker on the shoulder, and then attempt a takedown or wristlock, and then try a baton before shooting to save the hostage.
I have never actually seen someone who believed this, just heard rumors.
Another argument stems from the legal world. Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989) is one of the fundamental findings that define force law and policy in the United States. One of the most far-reaching and important implications in Graham is the understanding that force incidents are so chaotic and unpredictable that it will never be possible to decide in advance, or to present a formula about what is and isn’t appropriate.
In that hierarchy of preferences, there are a few that civilians express concern over that make sense to officers. The first is tangible harm versus emotional harm.
Certain segments of our society honestly believe that “words can cut like a knife.” No one could believe that who had ever seen a knife wound. In order to accomplish a legitimate goal I will, if necessary, scream, insult or even demean rather than touch. I would rather, by far, hurt someone’s feelings than someone’s body. It is a lower level of force. It is preferable to be rude and have the offensive drunk leave on his own power than to be nice and push him out. Nice and no touch combined are better of course, but only if it works.
The second is the difference between injury and pain. Finger locks hurt. OC (pepper spray) hurts. Tasers hurt a lot. The injuries from these are minimal. Loud screams of pain bother people, and they should, but they are qualitatively different from the wet pop of a ligament tearing or the sickening thump of a head hitting concrete.
Some consider the continuum to be an attempt to write a cookie-cutter answer to a chaotic problem, explicitly against the guidance in Graham.
The most compelling argument, to my mind, is that with proper training, the continuum may not be necessary. The bottom line: You are expected and required to use the minimum level of force that you reasonably believe will safely resolve the situation plus understanding the “Factors and Circumstances” of section 1.7 gets to the same place.
I will be describing a continuum here. As a friend once said, “Models are models. Many are useful. None are true.”
The reason is that models make some very important things easy to teach. They are common sense, but sometimes common sense needs a little explanation:
The officer doing absolutely nothing is the preferred use of force: people doing the right thing because it is the right thing and they are good people.
An example of a Force Continuum.
If that fails, the next best option is a gentle reminder, probably just a look.
If there must be interaction, it is better to engage reason than to hurt feelings, better to hurt feelings than to touch, better to touch than to hurt, better to hurt than to injure, and better to injure than to kill.
The force continua are just ways to put that order of preference into words.
What follows is just an example. Different agencies use different Force Continua and not all include the same things at the same levels. For instance, using pressure on the sides of the neck to cut off blood to the brain is considered by some agencies to be deadly force and by others to be a control technique.
The Levels of the Force Continuum
An officer has a reasonable expectation that when he shows up at the scene people will stop misbehaving. This works in most instances. A cop car in your rear-view mirror is one of the more effective traffic control devices. Most normal people do not break laws in front of uniformed officers.
Officers are taught early in their careers that a professional appearance enhances their presence. It is easier to disrespect or ignore a slob than someone who looks like he takes the job, and therefore his duties, seriously.
Presence is a very powerful but very subjective attribute. In On Killing, Lt. Colonel David Grossman pointed out that even major military battles are won more often by display than by a physical destruction of the enemy. An impressive show of force—whether a line of musket men in bright coats with hats that make them look seven feet tall or a phalanx marching in perfect order—does more to break the will of the enemy than to increase killing efficiency, especially when combined with the confusion, smoke, and dust of real battle.
Officers use these concepts as well—lights and sirens, the black armor of the riot squad, and even the starched uniform, peaked hat, and shiny badge are all aspects of presence. If the presence is sufficient, you rarely have to use physical force. That’s a good thing.
Few rookie officers are taught much beyond this. What skill they develop in projecting presence is learned on the job or by watching older officers.
There is also a danger here—many rookies and even some experienced officers come to count on the power of the badge and the uniform. Most people quit being bad when they see an officer. Most follow directions. Some officers come to expect this and are surprised—and injured—when they presume threats will comply.
A small number of officers expect the uniform to do the job for them. We call it ‘hiding behind the badge.’ It doesn’t work very well. As an officer, you need to develop the skills, experience, and reputation to earn respect. That is real presence.
There is more skill and more variation at the verbal level than at all other levels combined. SWAT tactics don’t approach the complexity of a good debate, much less the nuance of talking down an emotionally disturbed person (EDP) in crisis, or eliciting a good description from a traumatized child.
In a law enforcement career, you will never run into a useless piece of information. You might discuss the philosophies of Locke and Rousseau with protesters; global economics with a pimp; mathematics with an arsonist; and string theory with a murderer—all in the same month. Building rapport is a matter of common ground and a skill.
Prior to a Use of Force, if there is time, we try to talk the threat into complying. Ask, Advise, Order, and Check is a common and useful system.
Ask: “Sir, you are under arrest and you must go to jail. Please turn around and let me handcuff you.” Asking does no harm. It works a surprisingly large percentage of time. At this stage, if you are polite, it is hard for the threat to convince himself that you are the enemy and he is righteous. ‘Please’ is a magic word, just as they said in kindergarten.
Advise: “Sir, if you do not let me handcuff you, I will use force against you.” In the advise step, you let the threat know the consequences of not complying: sometimes it is force, sometimes that they may be considered a suspect, or just that someone he or she cares about may be disappointed. This book is about force, but force isn’t always or even usually the best option.
Sometimes it helps to display or describe the kind of force you are contemplating. One of my colleagues, Steve Pina, actually gives a short class on Taser to the threat, with good success. Without displaying the force option, I have very rarely had the threat comply at this step. Be aware that threatening to use a level of force that you could not justify is, in itself, excessive force. At this stage, you are still being polite and it is harder for the threat to make it personal.
Order: “Sir! I am giving you a direct order! Turn around and put your hands behind your back now!” I don’t know why this works so much more often than the ‘advise’ stage, but it does. Maybe it is the shift from polite to command voice.
Check: “Sir, you are telling me I have to use force. Thank you for being clear. It makes the paperwork much easier.” Then, if practical, you walk away. Frequently, within a few seconds the threat realizes that he has not only given permission but also demanded whatever comes next. If you can afford to give them a little time, most threats rethink things at this stage and decide to comply.
Any verbal commands given to the threat should be simple. Some of the criminals that an officer deals with will not be honor students, and might even be impaired by recreational chemicals. No big words. No complicated sentences. When possible, use positive (do) speech, e.g., “put your hands out” and not negative, e.g., “don’t hide your hands.” Tell the threat what to do as opposed to telling the threat what not to do.
The orders should always be given by ONE officer. I feel sorry for the poor criminal facing two guns when one of the officers is yelling, “Don’t move!” and the other is yelling, “Get on the floor! Get down!” Even if the orders are not contradictory, multiple voices are confusing.
Experts. Whenever there is a media-rich Use of Force, experts will come out of the woodwork to tell anyone who will listen that if the officers only had a “little more training” in dealing with emotionally disturbed people or the mentally ill, or the particular (after the fact) diagnosis of the particular threat, the force could have been avoided.
This will come up more in section three, but let’s get this straight here: These experts are largely speaking from the safety of their desks. Counseling tens of thousands of patients in a clinical setting starts with someone who was stable enough to get to the clinical setting. Calming people who are emotionally distraught and might cry or threaten is not the same as talking someone down from a frothing, enraged, psychotic break.*
Patients listen. Universally, they want something the clinical expert can give: comfort, solace, or (in the criminal world) a slip of paper or report that will absolve the patient from bad acts or another slip of paper for drugs. The experts are experts in dealing with people who are at least stable enough to listen. Take away that condition and much of their expertise becomes irrelevant.
Training is good. Insight is good. As the officer develops more experience, he can do more with knowledge. But whatever is learned and no matter from whom, training will always be a tool, not an answer.
Ideally, verbal commands should be professional: no anger, no threats, and no profanity. You can make a case that profanity is closer to the “native language” of the average threat. You can show that sometimes, especially if you have not used profanity so far, a single example can get the threat to take you seriously.
There is more going on, though. Force situations do not happen in a vacuum. Every action the officer makes is not only accomplishing the goal but is also creating witnesses. A witness who sees an officer grab a suspect by the throat and slam him against the wall will interpret the act very differently if he hears the officer say, “Don’t do it you son of a bitch! I’m warning you! I’ll beat the shit out of you!” than if he hears the same officer say, “Sir, don’t swallow those drugs! You could die!” Same actions, same reasons, entirely different witness perceptions.
The application of force is one of the officer’s professional duties and he must do it like a professional…no anger…no sarcasm. Use calm professionalism because this is a job. Keep the ego out of it.
A force continuum used in training by Multnomah County, Oregon 2007. Note levels of force, force options and levels of resistance.
Example of a Force Decision Framework laid out as available options rather than levels.
There is much more to learn, but the rookie will learn it on the job through trial and error.
Touch on the surface is simple. The hand on the shoulder to establish rapport, the hand on the elbow to steer a drunk in the right direction. It can be reassuring. It can be as comforting as a hug shared with someone who has just been rescued. It can de-escalate situations that are beyond words.
It can also go very, very bad. Will that hand on the shoulder comfort the grieving survivor? Or trigger memories of abuse that the officer has no way of knowing? The danger lies in the fact that the officer is very close—well within reach should the threat decide to attack. If that should happen, the officer has already misjudged the threat’s intent.
Level 4: Pain Compliance and Physical Control
Level 4 includes all of the techniques that have a good chance of getting the threat to go along with a relatively low risk of injury—things such as joint locks, pressure points, take downs, and, in some jurisdictions, OC (Oleoresin Capsicum aka pepper spray), and Taser.
The goal at Level 4 is primarily compliance, getting the threat to go along with the program because to do otherwise hurts, but the officer also attempts to establish control at Level 4 to prevent the threat escalating to a higher level of resistance. Taking a threat to the ground, for instance, removes half of his potential mobility and makes it very difficult for him to strike. Thus, there is a mix of techniques here—pure pain techniques such as pressure points and also techniques that give the officer mechanical advantage to prevent or force movement from the threat.
