Читать книгу Evaluating Police Uses of Force - Seth W. Stoughton - Страница 40

Of the roughly 18,000 government entities in the United States that employ sworn officers, less than one hundred are federal agencies. The vast majority—over 15,000—are city police departments and county sheriffs’ offices. The remainder are a mix of state police agencies and special jurisdiction agencies that provide either general policing services to specific geographic entities (e.g., hospital, university, or transit police) or state-wide policing services related to a specific activity or narrow set of activities (e.g., fish and wildlife, alcohol control, or gaming police). Of the roughly 900,000 sworn officers in the United States, more than 750,000 work for state and local police agencies.1

As those numbers demonstrate, the overwhelming majority of police agencies and the vast majority of officers derive their authority from state law. State law sets the criteria for who can be an officer, establishing, inter alia, age restrictions, minimum education prerequisites, citizenship requirements, criminal history limitations, and physical and mental health standards. State law creates a regulatory framework through which minimum training standards are set, professional licenses are issued, and, at least in forty-four states, police certifications can be revoked. State law determines how police agencies are funded, how they are permitted to procure equipment and services, and how they are to keep and disclose various records. State law also authorizes officers to use force and insulates them from civil or criminal liability for doing so.

In short, state law is an important and relevant standard under which the use of force can be analyzed. We provide in this chapter an overview of when state law applies, what it applies to, and how it applies. The Appendix of State Laws, set out at the end of this book, provides the relevant statutory provisions and, when statutes are lacking, judicial opinions regarding the regulation of police uses of force in all fifty states.