Objective Reasonableness

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Pages: 7

The rights of American citizens are protected through the Constitution of the United States. These protections allow citizens to gather and protest when they feel that they are being not being treated in the proper manner. In the United States, there has been a recent influx of protests and riots expressing distress over the state of police treatment of American citizens, which has been notoriously violent and connected with racism, bias, and discrimination. To hold the police accountable, citizens need to know when police officers can use deadly force while recognizing there is strong statistical evidence that when deadly force is used, it is used disproportionately on people of color. Citizens like Colin Kaepernick have chosen to voice their …show more content…
Garner 1985 "the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an officer cannot use deadly force against a fleeing suspect unless the suspect is a significant threat to the officer or to others" and in Graham v. Connor 1989 found that "officers who use force must be judged on the totality of circumstances and a standard of 'objective reasonableness'" (Pane 2016). This objective reasonableness "must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight" (Graham 1989). While the law initially takes the side of citizens who don't post a deadly threat to society, the Graham case set a precedent of allowing police officers to justify the use of deadly force of fellow police officers. The FBI's Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) and the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) are voluntary programs that police departments in the United States can report statistics to regarding officer involved shootings. In trying to interpret police use of deadly force statistically, it is difficult to gather accurate information before 2015, this is because while "some departments share data...other departments are unwilling to disclose their data either to the public or to researchers" (Williams, et. Al, p. 12). There are significant disparities between the victimology in these police shootings, non-Hispanic Black men were 2.8 times more likely than white men to be killed by police between 2010 and 2014. Additionally, black men between the aged of 25-34 are significantly more likely to be involved in a legal intervention death (Buehler, p. 295-296). Upon investigation, there were "7,869 officer-involved shooting fatalities in the United States from January 1, 2006 through December 31, 2015" (Williams p. 12). Unfortunately, these numbers are drastically different from what is published by the different programs collecting this data. The FBI's SHR reported only 3,723 deaths between 2006 and 2014 (Williams p. 13). The NVSS