High Liability, Low Training: UOF

As a patrol cop, narc, SWAT operator and more, I made multiple trips to Internal Affairs for various allegations.  All were unfounded (no discipline administered).  I've been sued in federal court (unfounded and dismissed).

As a supervisor, I was the sole investigator of my shift's Use of Force incidents.  I reviewed BWC, spoke with witnesses, reviewed third party video, took "victim" statements, and more.  I collected facts and made determinations on policy application and if the UOF was appropriate.

Tune in for my lessons learned during all these encounters - protect yourself and your career!

-LEO

Transcript

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Good morning. It's Leo and welcome back. Let's get into use of force. I already covered this pretty deeply in depth regarding the law with Rob from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, I believe they're called. And he's investigated many, many use of deadly force encounters involving law enforcement. I want to get into use of non-lethal force, which is much more common. Many officers, probably most, never have a deadly force encounter. Newer officers feel a lot of apprehension about use of force. They hear that you're going to be buried in paperwork and this department's just going to crucify you no matter what. It's generally not true. If you do your job correctly and follow the rules, you'll be completely fine. You're going to have some scuffles if you're a cop. You're going to have use of force incidents sooner or later. You're not going to know when it's coming, but you are going to have them. And it's okay. Just understand what generally happens, the process that follows. Tell the truth. Man, the biggest thing is knowing the law and knowing your policy, your department policy. Listen to the words that are coming out of my mouth. Read your use of force policy. Understand what it means. Because internal affairs and your department cannot get you in trouble unless you violate policy or law. They can't get you in trouble because they kind of don't like what you did. So if you know the policy and follow it, they can feel disgruntled, they can be having a bad day, but you followed the policy. So it doesn't freaking matter. You don't care. So know your department's policy, know your state law. Rob talked about how in Minnesota, I had never heard this before. You have to say, if at all feasible, you're under arrest. They have to be verbally informed that they're under arrest, or it can undermine that use of force. That's a different law. You should know that. If you're in Minnesota, you need to know that rule. I'm sure they teach that in the academy. If I went up to Minnesota, I wouldn't know that and I might have made that mistake. So you need to know that. The general rule of thumb with all use of force is to be reasonable. If somebody picks up a pillow to hit you with and you hit them in the face with a baton, is that reasonable? There was a shooting recently where an officer got in trouble where a lady said, like, I rebuke you in the name of Jesus, and I think she picked up a pot of water and he shot her and killed her. You just you're gonna be measured by was that reasonable? If it's if it makes you cringe when you think about it, it's probably not. I don't like the latter stuff where it's like, oh, you can always go one level higher. For me, that's confusing. To me, it's just what's reasonable. If they're doing something that can kill me, I'm allowed to kill them with whatever. If you got a hammer and you're trying to whack me in my head, I feel like I'm about to be killed. If my gun's messed up and I got a hammer, I'm gonna use that hammer or I'm gonna use my car or I'm gonna use whatever I have. But it needs to be reasonable. If they there was an incident in New York recently, I can't remember if he was charged. I think he was just convicted, an NYPD officer who was on a narcotics raid and somebody was fleeing on a uh motorized scooter, and he threw a cooler full of drinks and hit the guy and killed him. And I mean, that's unlucky. He probably thought it just wouldn't be a big deal, and he'd get like a cool cooler arrest and knock the guy off the motorbike. Most criminals don't wear helmets, and the dude freaking busted his grape and died. So decide if what you're doing is reasonable. If they're sitting there refusing to leave a bus station, is it reasonable to come up and hit them with a stick, with a baton? I would say no, but it's all very subjective and in the gray. Our agency, my last police agency, you could pepper spray for passive resistance. If somebody's sitting in a bus station refusing to leave, by policy, I could pepper spray that person. I knew that. Did I ever pepper spray people that were just refusing to leave? I dealt with people refusing to leave all the time. Like, hey, get off this hotel's property. They don't want you here. Like, uh, they're drunk. They're like, I'm not getting off the property. I didn't spray that guy. I grabbed that dude and took him off the property. That's just me. But just be reasonable. What was the use of force? Did you were you driving? Were you the passenger in a car and the guy was running on foot and your partner's driving? You sling the door open and bam them with the door and knock him down. Could somebody get really hurt from that? Yeah. So you need to decide is that reasonable? Wrist locks. I mean, what is a use of force? Is a wrist lock to get them into custody? A use of force is any noncompliance, non-compliant handcuffing use of force. If you get on one cuff and they kind of pull that right hand away, the uncuffed hand, and you have to grab it and yank it back behind their back and cuff them. By policy, is that a use of force? I don't know. It's going to depend on your agency. When I left my last police department, my only police department, I'm not like a uh agency jumper, but when I left the one police department I was an officer on, they had gone to that. And a lot of people didn't like it. They had gone to pointing your weapon at somebody was a use of force. You had to do the packet, and any uncooperative handcuffing. So just what I just described, you would have been expected to do a use of force. Know when to report. The old school cops, they'll say stuff like, if nobody got hurt, you don't need to report it. Like, why are you wasting time doing all that paperwork? New school, new age, there's cameras everywhere, man. And all it takes is you flagrantly breaking policy because you got in a little scuffle wrestling match, very minor, so you just didn't report it. And then, you know, you report, you think the guy's cool, and it's no problem. You take him to jail for his little warrant. He's like, ah, it's all in the game, no big deal. But he's pissed. And so he comes in and files a complaint on Monday when he gets out of jail. And he says, Hey, that cop beat me up. He bamed my jaw on the ground. And then they look, your report says uneventful arrest, your body cam says whooped his ass. Whereas it's a completely in policy use of force, but it's a policy violation because you didn't report it. So just think about that. Usually they take a little bit of time. Most of the agencies, it's pretty streamlined and it doesn't take a crazy amount of time. You kind of explain in your report why you did what you did. I've already covered report writing. I'm not going to do that here. But I just err on the side of going ahead and reporting that use of force. If it's if it's close, uh I'll run it by the supervisor at the very least. Hey, man, like I didn't hit him. I didn't even use any control techniques. I didn't even use a wrist lock, but I did like he would not give me his arm and I had to pull it behind his back and handcuff him. And if they say no, don't do a use of force, I would argue you've successfully passed the buck. Like you were on the fence, you asked your boss, they said you're good. Now, if you know you did something, like if you traded some blows and the sergeant's like old school and they're like, Yeah, don't worry about that. We good. I would speak up and go, hey, Sarge, no, I'm I'm doing a use of force. Sorry, sir. And cover yourself on that one. In your report, I'll go into this briefly. Explain the factors. I've already gone through this with Rob. You should know the factors, the suspect history if you know it, the severity of the crime, why you were dealing with them, the severity of the crime they committed, their flight, their fight, were they fighting you and being aggressive? And were they a continuing threat? Was the guy fleeing a drug raid a threat that you needed to knock him off with a cooler? I don't know. Is there a reason that you thought he was going to hurt somebody? If there is, you can justify a lot more force. If he says, I'm going to kill that snitch, that's a whole different thing than he's just fleeing. So articulate that in your report. Don't over-articulate and lie, but just explain why you did what you did very clearly. Uh staying on reporting. Don't succumb to the peer pressure. You get on one of these teams and they get in fights all the time, and it's just how it is. They're going in rough neighborhoods, they're jumping corners, and they're not doing their use of forces. And you get on that team and you get in a scuffle, and maybe you don't have a body cam on, but there's cameras everywhere. Maybe y'all don't wear body cams. I don't know. Or maybe you do, and it just, you know, there's a supervisor that kind of lets stuff go. That can turn into indictments, man. So it's your choice if you report or not. If you do the use of force report. So don't be going, well, everybody else said it was okay, because then you're going to get hit with, well, if they said jump off a cliff, would you do it? Like you're trusted with safety, you're trust with taking freedom, taking life, people's safety. But we need to be able to trust you to like report when you beat somebody up as an agent of the government. You know, that's what you are as a cop. You are the government. So if you're beating people up, you got to report it. Okay. And don't say, well, everybody was doing it. Acceptance at the jail. If you have a use of force, I mean, the last thing you want to do is not call your supervisor and then get turned away at the jail and have them say, no, you got to take this guy to the hospital. Because a lot of time they ask the guy, hey, have you been involved in the use of force? And if the guy goes, Well, he threw me on the ground, does that count? And now you got to call your sergeant who's like, Well, why didn't you call me when you threw him on the ground? Why are you so the jail has to tell me? What the hell? Usually with OC spray, with pepper spray, there's protocols to follow that. That's obviously a use of force every single time. Just know your protocols. You know, you're gonna have to decontaminate them. Uh everywhere I've been, we've had to generally call them an ambulance out to do a official decontamination. It ain't that serious. You get to chill out for a little bit instead of working. I actually had a guy when I was at the Marshalls, I got him and we nabbed him on some stuff, and we didn't do it, but he had a bullet in his head. And when we dropped him at the jail, we had to explain to him, like, no, we didn't do this. Like, yes, he has a bullet in it because the dude was like, I got a bullet in my head. And I was like, hey, I didn't do that. Like, you can see the staples in his head. He's has he has a fresh bullet in his head, but he's had that, he's already been treated at the hospital. And then I became a sergeant, and I remember that jailer became a police officer and was on my shift. And when I saw him, I was like, I know you. And I'd take people to jail regularly. Like, I was my job was fugitive, so I was going to the jail regularly, dropping people off. And I was like, I know you. And he was like, I know you. You brought that guy to jail with that bullet in his head. And I was like, Oh yeah. So there was no use of force there. But, you know, had we shot him in the head, yeah, we would have had to probably take him to the hospital or whatever. Some use of forces are very obvious, like pepper spray, baton strikes, taser, those are obvious. Some are more in the gray. And I've already discussed this. So it comes down to it being your choice. A lot of time, if you get in a fist fight or there's any kind of injuries, the sergeant is going to have to take photographs of you, might take photographs of the scene where the fight was, if, you know, your flashlight's on the ground and there's all these scuffle marks. Most of them aren't out to get you, but they will. I mean, I haven't punched a lot of people at work, but anytime I have, they've taken pictures of my knuckles. I have to hold up my hands, show both sides of my hands. They're taking pictures of faces, obviously, any injuries, stuff like that. They're just documenting it. It doesn't mean you did something wrong. They'll take pictures of your clothes. Sometimes your clothes will have blood on them. You get in a fight, somebody gets scraped, somebody gets a bloody nose, and you might have blood all over your clothes and they photograph you. Don't freak out. It's okay. If you did the right thing, it's it's fine. Punches versus control techniques. I prefer control techniques being joint manipulation, multiple reasons. One, I'm better at them. I'm more comfortable with them. I don't some people have really hard heads. If you punched a few people in the face or like they've moved and you've hit their forehead or like a weird part of their head, it kind of sucks, man. It kind of hurts your hand sometimes. So I don't really like doing that all the time. And I mean, you punch somebody and you break your hand, you get a boxer's fracture, and then they pull a gun. Like, good luck getting that gun out of your holster with a broken hand. And on top of that, just the optics of it, like seeing a cop, I know we shouldn't have to worry about this, but it is it's just something to think about. Like if you're dropping hammers on somebody and just bombing bombs on their head, it looks worse than a wrist lock, even though a good wrist lock with some shoulder joint manipulation as well. So you're hitting like wrist, elbow, and shoulder manipulation fucking sucks. Like you get put in one of those, you're in a lot of pain, but it doesn't look that serious. It just looks like you're kind of right standing next to the guy. So I like doing those. It looks like nothing. People are in a lot of pain and they submit and you get compliance very quickly. I mean, I've done the interviews with Preston Russ about jujitsu. I'm a firm believer, and if you're going to get in fights, you should train for the fights and be ready for it. The worst thing as a supervisor, I've supervised several units, is surprises in any way, shape, or form. It doesn't matter what it is. We don't want to be surprised. We don't want the call from the jail that you dropped off somebody beat up. We don't want the call on Tuesday when you got off on Sunday that somebody's in to complain that you whooped their ass. And we look at the body cam and we're like, this should have been reported. Like you punched them in the face. And then you thought you'd get away with it because you just wouldn't report it and they complained. And now you're probably fired in what would have been a justified use of force, maybe, but you hit it, and it's not going to fly, or you're getting some days or whatever. If you have a pattern of poor decisions that lead to use of forces, if you're out causing fights with how you act, we've all known these guys that just come and escalate stuff. They talk shit, they're kind of bullies with a badge, and they're a whole fucking problem when they show up on the scene. You don't want them there. Man, if you are one of these guys and you have a shooting and it's questionable, it's that file is gonna be pulled by the DA's office. Word is gonna get out, they're gonna get that file when they're considering if you should be indicted for that possibly bad shooting. And then if they start going through and see, okay, he was reprimanded in 2017 for not reporting a use of force. He was reprimanded in 2019 for tasing a passively resistant person when the policy is active resistance. And then he was disciplined in 2022 for saying he used control techniques and video from a nearby ring camera shows him, you know, punching this guy in the stomach twice and then getting him in handcuffs. Yeah, that's gonna come up at your shooting. So just take it very seriously. I'm not trying to spook anybody. Use force if you need to use force. I've used force many, many times. If you're catching the right people, you're gonna have to use force, and that's okay. But it starts with reading the policy, it starts with knowing the law, and you can act faster and more decisively if you know those. I've I remember being a rookie and a guy going crazy, and I mean, he he needed to be tased and pepper sprayed probably. He was going berserk and he was huge and jacked and steroided out. And I didn't really know what I could do. I hadn't read the use of force policy yet, or I'd read it and breezed over it, but I didn't understand it. And once you actually understand it, you can act decisively, you know you're in the right. You can call your sergeant and say, Sergeant, I just had a use of force. Can you come over here to 412 West 38th Street? And when he gets there, you can explain it coherently. You can write a report, you can go through the process, and you can go home and sleep at night because you know you did the right thing, you were in policy and you got no problem. So just educate yourself. Hopefully, this motivates you to read that policy. Maybe read it twice. If there's anything unclear, maybe talk to the policy writers and clarify that and make sure you completely understand what you're looking at. I hope you all be safe and have a great day. Goodbye.