The “Reasonableness Divide”: Comparing Community Members’ Assessments of Force Reasonableness to Legal Standards

Abstract

Headlines frequently call attention to the frustrations that many in the community express when members of law enforcement use force. Some believe that the police frequently use excessive force, and yet, more often than not, the officers involved are found not to have violated the law. This “divide” between community member assessments of reasonable force and the law produces great turmoil in our society. We surveyed a national sample of 1,200 US adults to explore the alignment between community members’ views of force reasonableness and the law on reasonable force as well as examine whether and to what extent the “community standard” perspectives for evaluating uses of force contributed to the alignment. Overall, the results indicated that a significant portion of community members’ assessments did not align with the law, and those assessments were driven largely by the “community standard” perspectives they took when evaluating the use of force.

Keywords:

• Police
• use of force
• public perceptions
• force reasonableness

Acknowledgements

We extend our thanks to Seth Stoughton, Bryanna Fox, and Chae Jaynes for their invaluable guidance, support, and expertise, which played a pivotal role in shaping the research and this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The officer’s name, Maxwell Mosley, was selected because research has documented that it is racially neutral (Gaddis, 2017).

2 Subject matter experts (with both legal and policing expertise) were consulted to select the 25-foot distance for the “unreasonable” version. The selected distance reflects a balance between the (controversial) 21-foot rule and recent research suggesting the “danger distance” is even greater (Sandel et al. 2020).

3 There was considerable debate, however, as to whether this change had any substantive impact on California deadly force standards. Law enforcement representatives claimed that the new language reflected the existing case law governing California (O’Linn, 2019).