Law enforcement administrators throughout the country have long recognized that a small percentage of officers are responsible for a disproportionate share of complaints, which can tarnish the reputation of the entire agency. Since the early 1980’s, many large police agencies began to establish tracking systems that systematically identify patterns of behavior of individual officers. This is a problem solving approach which goes beyond taking action on a particular incident which is a concern, but identifying trends and patterns of behavior which require a more strategic response. The premise of an Early Intervention System is essentially to identify an officer who [...]

Another aspect of pepper-spray that leads to litigation is deaths resulting from positional asphyxia. Positional asphyxia involves the improper placement of individuals who have violently resisted causing physical exertion and sometimes exacerbated by the effects of pepper-spray which inhibits breathing. Many of these cases also involve the presence of narcotics that increases a suspect’s heart rate as well as other physiological changes that bear on the ultimate outcome of death. In dealing with positional asphyxia cases, sometimes referred to as “sudden custody death syndrome” one must recognize that most of these cases result more from positioning than from other aspects [...]

In Robinson v. Solano County, the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had an opportunity to review whether a police officer’s pointing of a handgun at a citizen without actually pulling the trigger may violate the Fourth Amendment under some circumstances. The plaintiff in this case was James Robinson, an African-American retired police officer from San Francisco. When the events giving rise to this lawsuit occurred, Robinson was living on a five acre parcel of land in a rural area. Robinson was 64 years old and raised livestock. On the day in question, Robinson observed two dogs on [...]

Immersed as I have been in attempting for the past twenty years to construct creative approaches to managing, reducing, and if possible eliminating police liability, I can only say that it is not the novelty of the approaches, but the soundness and completeness of our commitment to what we should have been doing regularly, all along, that will be productive and attain these objectives. There is a requirement that we have to change our thinking, that since police are trained observers, that by the very nature of their profession they scope out patterns and modus operandi, those very same qualities [...]

Does handcuffing during a “Terry Stop” transform the stop into a full-blown arrest, which requires the officer to have probable cause rather than the lesser requirement of reasonable suspicion? A case from the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut determined that the application of handcuffs does not automatically turn an otherwise valid “Terry Stop” into a full-blown arrest. In Riordan and Bruzy v. Trooper Joyner et. al, 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 5312 (Dist. CT. 2005) a trial court reviewed the stop and temporary detention of Kathleen Bruzy and Mark Riordan by the Connecticut State Police. On June [...]

A major issue in law enforcement today involves the concept of consent searches of motor vehicles. There is little consistency among courts as to when an officer can ask a motorist for consent and the circumstances under which such a search can take place. Some of the confusion has been the result of state court decisions as well as legislation impacting consent searches. Much of the change has been the result over complaints of racial profiling. A recent study produced by the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics indicated that in 2002, whites, Hispanics and black motorists were stopped in [...]