6 - The use of force

Summary

I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried out by six.

Conventional police wisdom

Who overcomes

By force hath overcome but half his foe.

John Milton

Most people are familiar with the police beating of Rodney King. Yet what was exceptional about the case was not the beating, but the fact that it was captured on videotape. Nor was the initial acquittal of the officers exceptional; what was exceptional was the fact that despite the videotape the officers were acquitted. Reports of police beatings, especially in circumstances such as Rodney King's, after a car chase, are not uncommon. But it is only rarely that police are held to have acted improperly. When Egon Bittner writes that “the role of police is to address all sorts of human problems when and insofar as the problems' solutions may require the use of force at the point of their occurrence,” he feeds the image that police have of themselves as crimefighters, working in a human jungle whose law is force. That image licences most police force as necessary force. The onus is placed on others to show that it was excessive. Had the Los Angeles police considered themselves primarily as social peacekeepers, for whom recourse to force constituted a last and regrettable option, events would almost certainly have turned out very differently.

Nevertheless, I do not want to underplay the importance of force to the police role.