Читать книгу Evaluating Police Uses of Force - Seth W. Stoughton - Страница 49

Imagine a random person—we’ll call him John—who walks up to someone else in a shopping mall, tackles them, ties their hands together, carries them out to the parking lot, places them into a waiting vehicle, drives them across town, and locks them in a small room. In most contexts, John would be committing a series of serious crimes and opening himself to substantial civil liability. If John was actually Officer John, though, he may engage in functionally identical actions without running afoul of state law. Analysts must consider whether an officer’s use of force is the type of action—or, more pertinently, caused the type of social harm—that state law regulates; that is, does state law apply to what the officer did? That is only the first half of the analysis, though. The second and equally important half of the analysis is determining whether state law authorized an officer to take the action or cause the harm under the circumstances. In other words, did the officer violate the applicable state law?

State statutes and common law doctrines can explicitly authorize police officers to engage in what would otherwise be criminal or tortious behavior.2 They can also exempt police officers from otherwise applicable restrictions or provide officers with defenses to civil liability or criminal sanctions. For our purposes, there is no relevant distinction between authorizations, exceptions, and defenses; all three effectively allow officers to engage in what could otherwise be unlawful actions. Such authorizations, exceptions, and defenses can be police-specific—for example, authorizing officers, but not others, to act in particular ways—or more generally applicable, including officers within the scope of a broader legal rule.

In the remainder of this chapter, we first address the relationship between the constitutional standard and the state law standard. We then discuss police-specific state laws before broadening our perspective by briefly discussing more generally applicable state laws. Readers are advised that the statutory analysis offered in the following pages is accurate as of the date of writing, but, as always, state law is subject to amendment.19