Policies and Practices to Minimize Police Use of Force Internationally (2022) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 12-31
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From page 12... ...
Owens and colleagues (2018) , on the other hand, highlight the importance of organizational practices -- a modified supervisory strategy to model procedural justice and encourage "slowing down" officers' thought processes -- to minimize police use of force.
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Scholars have found public support for unconstrained use of force by police in some countries in response to high crime rates, including in South Africa (Smith, 2019) , Brazil (Ahnen, 2007)
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It captures background information on laws and standards for police use of force, external oversight bodies, training, internal accountability, technologies, and administrative incentives. This chapter in large part summarizes the findings and examples presented to the committee in the commissioned papers.
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To aid in accumulating a reliable body of knowledge, the committee considers different efforts and research findings from studies of policies and practices aimed at minimizing use of excessive force by police. The different strategies described in the commissioned papers and workshop can be divided into six categories: laws and standards, external oversight bodies, police training, internal accountability and control mechanisms, technologies, and administrative incentives (outlined in Cano, 2021)
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International Standards and Guidelines Several declarations and principles support international human rights standards that can also be used by states to develop use-of-force policies. For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention against Torture all provide guidance and benchmarks for how police and other law enforcement authorities should treat citizens.
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. Relatedly, the UN International Human Rights Standards for Law Enforcement on the use of force include the following: • Everyone has the right to life, security of the person, and freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment and punishment; • Non-violent means are to be attempted first; • Force is to be used only when strictly necessary; • Force is to be used only for lawful law enforcement purposes; • No exceptions or excuses shall be allowed for unlawful use of force; • Use of force is to be always proportional to lawful objectives; • Restraint is to be exercised in the use of force; • Damage and injury are to be minimized; • A range of means for differentiated use of force is to be made available; • All officers are to be trained in the use of the various means for differentiated use of force; and • All officers are to be trained in use of non-violent means.
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pushing practice in a direction to align policing with human rights principles. The UN Human Rights Council also conducts a Universal Periodic Review, which includes a review of human rights records for all member states (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2020)
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the State of Rio de Janeiro had to introduce policies and goals to reduce deaths in police encounters (Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2017)
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The recommendations included the establishment of consistent, updated, transparent, and public registries of informa tion about human rights violations with the participation of the civil society to avoid disparities between official statistics and NGOs' counts of injured persons that undermine the public confidence in the police, the criminal justice system, and in general the government and democracy itself. National Laws Related to Use of Force Several countries have introduced new laws or guidelines that define a cceptable uses of force by police.
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The U.S. ruling is notable because, following this decision, homicides committed by police officers nationwide fell by approximately 16 percent, with evidence suggesting that the reduction is due not only to a reduction in fleeing felons but also to a general reduction in police shootings (Tennenbaum, 1994)
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. International standards and guidelines attempt to put boundaries on police use of force and define when that force may be considered excessive, while national laws codifying a reasonable amount of force and when it can be used vary by country.
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As expected, the count of custodial deaths not remanded to police by the court is larger than the count of custodial deaths remanded to police custody following legal action. Because police violence is more prevalent in cases where individuals are taken into initial police custody than when they are remanded to police by an Indian court, this study uses a count of unremanded police custodial deaths as the main measure of police violence (Hu and Conrad, 2020)
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argue that the creation of the IPID, while more powerful than its predecessor and with obligations to investigate serious allegations of criminal offenses, provided the South African Police Service with an apparent justification for not being internally accountable for its use of force (i.e., for relaxing its own internal controls, given that there would be an external body charged with oversight)
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IPOA is also mandated with monitoring the Internal Affairs Unit investigations and can take them over if it believes the IAU is being delayed or unreasonable. In other words, it has the additional mandate of overseeing internal controls.
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Future research could be beneficial for developing a better understanding of the role of external oversight bodies and whether they can support internal efforts to train police officers and provide reliable accountability mechanisms. POLICE TRAINING AND EVALUATIONS In the second report (NASEM, 2022)
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. Procedural justice training promotes respectful encounters between community members and police officers with the goals of enhancing police legitimacy and perceptions of fairness, and building community trust in the police.
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Training which thoroughly explains to officers the boundaries of their agency's use of force policy, and how far the organization can legally go to defend them, can 5 Forms of de-escalation training have varied across agencies and jurisdictions. One specific definition of police de-escalation exists within the 2017 National Consensus Policy and Discussion Paper on Use of Force (a collaborative effort among 11 law enforcement leadership and labor organizations in the United States)
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Most police training programs are not evaluated in ways that allow for rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of the training in controlling police use of force. This is frequently because of insti tutional restrictions within the police department that prevent researchers from linking police training to recorded police actions in the community.
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From page 30... ...
On the other hand, a training program intended to encourage officers to intervene when they observe out-of-policy behavior by their colleagues might be expected to affect use of force at a higher level of cross-sectional aggregation -- uses of force by individual officers that cannot be linked to an officer's peer group (e.g., the beat assignment) might actually be less informative than use of force data where the cross-sectional link is aggregated to the district level.
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It is important to note that replicating confounded non-experimental studies is not guaranteed to produce unbiased causal effects, unless there is good reason to believe that the confounding issue is, itself, randomly distributed across studies -- and this is rarely the case. BARRIERS TO INTERNAL CONTROL MECHANISMS Many police agencies have internal affairs units or other internal control mechanisms that monitor officer behavior and formally handle accusa tions that arise against officer use of force.
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