Abstract
Half a century after Egon Bittner (1970: 46) concluded that the police are best understood as “a mechanism for the distribution of non-negotiably coercive force”, the institution of policing remains the visible and physical “or else” of the state (Bittner, 1990: 10). Just as violence has remained a core feature of the police role, so has its misuse persisted despite decades of enhanced professionalization, expanded training, and technological innovation. Amid a global pandemic, the summer of 2020 saw the police killing of George Floyd spur the largest protest movement in US history, confirming once again just how central violence is to policing that, in turn, shapes governance and the function of democratic life. The use, evaluation, and control of police violence are, undoubtedly, among the most pressing topics of this historical moment.
Drawing on their academic and practical expertise in law, criminology, and policing, Stoughton, Noble, and Alpert’s Evaluating Police Uses of Force is a timely and needed tool with which to engage in critical debates around policing and police violence. The central goal of the text is deceptively simple: analyze how instances of police violence are evaluated based on various standards currently employed in the United States. As the authors show, however, these standards—be they legal, administrative, or community-based—are complex, inconsistent, and often misaligned.
The first three chapters lay out a labyrinth of constitutional, state, and administrative standards in outstanding detail, laying bare just how convoluted the evaluation of police violence is. For example, the authors describe the seeming contradiction whereby a constitutional use of force may be illegal according to state law, just as a use of force that is legal under state law may be unconstitutional. This is to say nothing of the marked state-level variation in laws governing police violence under a range of circumstances, much less the administrative standards which individual departments use to practically guide officers’ understanding of the exceedingly murky concept of “reasonableness”. Indeed, as the authors point out, these agency-level policies are themselves often based on an imperfect amalgamation of state and constitutional law, further complicating what might be assumed by an outside observer to be a straightforward calculation of legality.
The latter half of the text begins with what the authors term the “community expectations” standard, highlighting that public perception is of paramount importance to understanding public reactions to police violence. As the authors make clear, this is true regardless of whether an incident falls within the bounds of law or policy, underscoring that the consequences of police violence extend well beyond the blood or broken bones of a single “lawful but awful” incident. The final two chapters provide invaluable insight into how police violence is discussed within policing and then deployed by officers on the street. Of particular note are the authors’ excellent discussions of common “tactics” in which police are trained and the ever-expanding range of weapons that officers have at their disposal.
The value of this analysis for our understanding of police violence is difficult to overstate. Generally, social scientists who tend toward description or explanation of the inequitable distribution of police violence are prone to ignore the broader constellation of laws which empowers it. By the same token, research that focuses on the targets or effects of police violence often does so to the exclusion of the departmental policies and occupational understandings of force that shape officers’ street-level violence. With dispassionate rigor, Stoughton et al. give a thorough description of the legal and practical apparatus of police violence, both of which are necessary considerations for those who endeavor to understand how law “on the books” manifests in violent police practice.
But while this book provides a strong descriptive account of police violence and its evaluation, it is also a decidedly normative one. Throughout the text, the authors make clarifications that recognize the imperfections inherent to existing laws and policies governing police violence, highlighting what the ideal or correct application of existing law and policy should be. In their discussion of what constitutes an “immediate threat” under the constitutional standard, for example, they warn that “formulaic or boilerplate language” describing a generalized or hypothetical threat is “patently insufficient” to establish a suspect’s intent (p. 34). This warning notwithstanding, simplistic claims of “eye contact” and “body language” are readily deployed by police when justifying their violence; the authors themselves provide numerous examples. A similar tension is present in their discussion of the rarity of criminal charges brought against police for on-duty violence. Though the paucity of police prosecutions stems partly from the legal protections afforded to police in their use of violence, they also note that prosecutors’ “conscious or unconscious reluctance to charge officers” and concerns over “the political fallout that can accompany the prosecution of a police officer” play a role (p. 61).
As a result, the authors find themselves in the unenviable position of describing the proper utilization of laws and policies that, per their careful analysis, does not consistently function in this idealized way. Instead of concerted consideration of the shortcomings and solutions to police violence that is improper, illegal, unnecessary, unreasonable, and so on, the authors expound on what evaluators of police violence “should” consider or what departmental force policies “should” include to correctly employ existing standards. To be clear, evaluators and departments can and should follow the authors’ prescriptions. But these recommendations are not solutions to an imperfect system so much as enumeration of the many points where that system fails in predictable ways. By beginning and ending with the status quo, the authors reify and inexorably tether themselves (and readers) to a system which they have shown to be, at best, inadequate for the consistent evaluation and control of police violence.
In fairness, the authors did not set out to design a more perfect system nor to solve the defects of existing laws, policies, or police practice. This is not so much a weakness of their analysis—indeed, the authors meet their stated analytic goals to great effect—but a recognition of the limits of this important text. Further, this limitation does not preclude this book from being of great use to those who are very much invested in reimagining the system which undergirds unequal and unjust policing. Indeed, though Evaluating Police Uses of Force is not a treatise on how to improve or reform existing standards, it provides a current and complete blueprint of the laws and policies that contribute to persistent inequalities in police violence. This blueprint will be of tremendous value—perhaps especially so—to those who seek to understand the existing system and where they may best intervene in order to reduce these damaging inequalities.