Читать книгу Evaluating Police Uses of Force - Seth W. Stoughton - Страница 39

In this chapter, we reviewed the constitutional standard that applies in both civil and criminal cases brought in federal court. That standard, laid out most explicitly in Graham v. Connor, requires an officer’s use of force to be “objectively reasonable.” Determining whether a use of force is objectively reasonable requires “a careful balancing of the nature and quality of the intrusion on the individual’s . . . interests against the countervailing governmental interests at stake.” And that balancing, in turn, requires “careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case,” with special attention given to what have become known as the Graham factors: “the severity of the crime at issue, whether the subject poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”

This chapter provided a detailed roadmap for constitutional analysis, demonstrating how the Graham factors and other considerations can be viewed through the appropriate lens to determine the existence of a governmental interest that justifies the use of force, the existence of any threat to that interest, and whether the force used was proportional to the severity of the threat.

As a threshold point, reviewers must carefully determine what the operative facts are by considering what the “reasonable officer on the scene” would have perceived and the conclusions they would have drawn.

With that perspective in mind, the first step in analyzing any use of force is identifying whether there was a governmental interest at stake. This question may be framed as follows: Without considering the force officers actually used in the incident under review, did the governmental interests at stake justify some use of force? The answer to that question depends on whether a legitimate governmental interest would have suffered had officers not used force. The Graham factors and additional considerations discussed in the preceding pages can help guide the analyst to an answer. If the answer to that question is no—either because there is no legitimate governmental interest or because there is no threat to the government’s interest that could be resolved with force—then the analysis should be terminated: the use of force was unjustified. If the answer to that preliminary question is yes, the analysis must continue by reviewing whether the actual force used was appropriate.