Graham v. Connor and the Officer's View in a Split Second

Every one of us is a brilliant tactician with a replay button. Give a man a slow-motion clip, a pause key and a cup of coffee, and he will explain in perfect detail what the officer in the frame should have done in the half second he actually had. The sports bar has known this for generations. The second-guessing is cheap. The decision was expensive.

The law has to decide which of those two perspectives counts. In 1989 the Supreme Court answered in a case about a diabetic man, a convenience store and a Charlotte patrol officer. The case is Graham v. Connor, and it governs almost every lawsuit over police force in America today. It deserves to be understood by people who cheer it and by people who curse it, because the cheering and the cursing are usually done by people who have not read it.

The terms, defined

Start with the vocabulary, because most arguments about police force are arguments about words nobody defined.

Excessive force means force beyond what the situation justified. That sounds like a definition, but it is a conclusion. The whole fight is over what justifies force and who decides.

Seizure is the Fourth Amendment's word for the moment government takes your liberty. The text protects "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." An arrest is a seizure. A brief investigative stop is a seizure. Force used to carry either one out is part of the seizure.

Objective reasonableness means the test looks at what a reasonable officer would have done with the facts the officer had. It does not ask what the officer secretly felt, and it does not ask what the video shows to a viewer who knows the ending.

Qualified immunity is a separate shield that protects officials from damages unless they violated clearly established law. It is a different question from the one Graham answers, and we have taken it up in Qualified Immunity Explained, From the 1871 Klan Act to Today's Fights. Graham sets the standard for the constitutional violation. Qualified immunity decides whether the officer pays for it.

What happened in Charlotte

Here are the facts as the Supreme Court recited them. In November 1984, Dethorne Graham, who was a diabetic, felt an insulin reaction coming on. He asked a friend, William Berry, to drive him to a nearby convenience store so he could buy orange juice to counteract it. Graham hurried into the store, saw a long line at the register, hurried out again, and asked Berry to drive him to a friend's house instead.

That hurry is what a patrol officer named M. S. Connor noticed. Connor saw a man dash in and dash out and became suspicious that something had happened. He followed the car and made an investigative stop about half a mile down the road. Berry told him Graham was having a sugar reaction. Connor told them to wait while he went back to the store to see what had happened.

Then the facts turn ugly. Backup officers arrived. Graham got out of the car, ran around it twice and sat down on the curb, and at one point passed out briefly. According to Graham's account, the officers handcuffed him tightly, shoved his face onto the hood of the car, ignored the explanation about his condition, and refused to let a friend who arrived give him sugar. One of the officers said, in effect, that he had seen diabetics and this man was just drunk. Graham was thrown into the back of a patrol car. Only after Connor learned that nothing had happened at the store was Graham driven home and released. He came out of it with a broken foot, cuts on his wrists, a bruised forehead and an injured shoulder.

He sued under 42 U.S.C. 1983. At trial, the district court directed a verdict for the officers after Graham put on his case, applying a four-part test borrowed from a 1973 Second Circuit opinion by Judge Henry Friendly in Johnson v. Glick. That test asked about the need for force, the relationship between the need and the amount used, the extent of the injury, and whether the force was applied in good faith or "maliciously and sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm." The Fourth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court took the case to settle which constitutional provision governs.

I want you to notice something about the sympathies here. The plaintiff was a man having a medical emergency who did nothing wrong. A conservative who thinks the facts of Graham are a defense of the officers has not read the facts of Graham. The Court sent the case back for a new look. It did not bless what happened on that curb.

What the Court held

Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for the Court, and the opinion makes two moves.

First move: pick the right amendment. Lower courts had been analyzing police force under the substantive due process test of Johnson v. Glick, which put the officer's state of mind at the center. The Court said no. All claims that law enforcement used excessive force "in the course of an arrest, investigatory stop, or other 'seizure' of a free citizen" are to be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment and its reasonableness standard. A person who is not yet convicted is not being punished, so the Eighth Amendment is the wrong home, and a vague due process inquiry is a worse one than a specific constitutional text. Where an amendment speaks to the conduct, courts use that amendment.

Second move: define reasonableness the way a working officer would recognize it. The key passage reads:

The "reasonableness" of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.

And the Court explained why:

The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.

The Court also quoted Judge Friendly's line that "Not every push or shove, even if it may later seem unnecessary in the peace of a judge's chambers," violates the Constitution. That phrase captures the whole approach. The judge's chambers are quiet. The curb at night is not.

The third piece of the holding cuts in both directions. The test is objective. Intent does not matter either way. The Court said that "An officer's evil intentions will not make a Fourth Amendment violation out of an objectively reasonable use of force; nor will an officer's good intentions make an objectively unreasonable use of force constitutional." Read that twice. A defender of police should like the first half. A critic of police should like the second half. Both halves are the rule.

The three factors

The Court gave lower courts a short, non-exclusive list of things to weigh. Careful attention is required to the facts and circumstances of each case, "including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight."

Take them one at a time.

1. Severity of the crime. A suspect wanted for a violent felony stands in a different position from a suspect wanted for a minor offense. The more serious the offense, the more force the public interest can justify. This is also why a man stopped on a hunch about a convenience store, as Graham was, presents a weaker case for force than a man fleeing an armed robbery.
2. Immediate threat. This is the heaviest factor in practice. The word that matters is immediate. A threat that could someday arise is not an immediate threat. A man reaching toward a waistband is.
3. Active resistance or flight. Resistance and flight raise the level of force an officer may reasonably use, but they do not erase the other two factors. A person who runs from an officer after a traffic stop has not volunteered to be shot.

Notice what the list is not. It is not a flowchart. It is not a number of seconds or a distance. It does not say "a knife within twenty-one feet" or "a closed fist." It tells a court what categories of fact to look at, and it leaves the weighing to a jury or a judge. That choice frustrates people who want bright lines. It is also the reason the rule has survived for decades. Bright lines break the first time reality produces a case the line-drawers did not imagine.

The strongest case against Graham

A fair argument needs the other side at its best, so here it is as its defenders would put it.

The critics say Graham is too deferential. The "reasonable officer on the scene" standard invites courts to imagine the most favorable version of the officer's perception. Because the question is what the officer reasonably believed, an officer who honestly but mistakenly believed a wallet was a gun can win, and a dead man cannot contradict the officer's account. Critics add that lower courts, applying the "moment of the threat" idea, sometimes looked only at the last second before force was used and ignored the officer's own earlier choices, such as an unnecessarily aggressive approach that created the danger. Finally, they say the three factors read like permission slips. If a crime is serious, if a suspect is moving and if there is any claim of a threat, the factors line up for the officer.

For related ground, see Tennessee v. Garner and the End of the Old Fleeing Felon Rule on deadly force, Myths About Police Use of Force That Survive Every Viral Video on what clips leave out, and Why Cities Cannot Hire Enough Police Officers, and What Would Fix It on the staffing problem behind both. Qualified Immunity Divides Conservatives, and Both Sides Have a Point covers the right's own split.

That is a serious argument, and it is made by serious people, including some conservatives who worry about government power in every form, police power included. A movement that distrusts a bureaucrat with a rulebook should not automatically trust a patrol officer with a firearm. The proper conservative position is trust, but verify, and Graham itself is the verification mechanism. It is a rule that lets a jury decide.

Why the critics are mostly wrong about the rule

Here is the answer, in numbered points.

1. The alternative is hindsight, and hindsight is not a standard. If force is judged by outcome, every injury becomes evidence of unreasonableness. A rule that punishes bad outcomes rather than bad decisions would teach officers to avoid the decisions rather than make them well. Everyone who has ever played a sport knows the difference between a bad call and a bad result.
2. The objective test protects victims of police abuse. Under the old Glick approach a plaintiff had to show malice or a sadistic purpose. That is nearly impossible to prove. Under Graham, an officer's sincere belief is not a defense if no reasonable officer would have shared it. The text points the lens away from the officer's heart, which cannot be examined, and toward the facts, which can.
3. It keeps the question with a jury. Whether a given use of force was reasonable is a question of fact. In many cases, an officer who loses a motion for summary judgment faces a jury of citizens, who are the ultimate "reasonable people" of the law. The Court did not hand the question to the police department. It handed it to the community.
4. It matches what trained officers do. Departments train officers on levels of force tied to the subject's behavior. A rule that tracks training is a rule officers can follow, and a rule officers can follow is a rule that can be enforced against the ones who do not.
5. The critics' remedy is not in the Constitution. If a legislature thinks officers should be held to a stricter standard than the Fourth Amendment's floor, it can say so. States and cities can set use-of-force policy by statute and by rule, and many have. The Constitution sets the minimum. It does not forbid anyone from asking for more.

I do not claim the rule is perfect. I claim it is the right place to start and that the cure for its flaws is better application, not abolition.

How the lower courts use it today

In practice, judges treat Graham as a framework and fill it in case by case.

In Scott v. Harris (2007) the Court considered a high-speed chase that ended when a deputy bumped a fleeing driver's car off the road, leaving the driver paralyzed. The Court watched the dashboard video, which is the rare case where a replay button helped the officer, and held that the deputy's actions were reasonable, and it declined to turn the test into a rigid checklist of preconditions. Reasonableness, the Court said in substance, is the question, and the factors serve it. In Plumhoff v. Rickard (2014) the Court applied the same reasoning to officers who fired at a driver in a chase.

In Kingsley v. Hendrickson (2015) the Court held that a pretrial detainee suing over force in a jail needs to show that the force was objectively unreasonable, with no requirement to prove the officer's state of mind. The case extended the objective idea to a different amendment.

Then came Barnes v. Felix (2025), where a unanimous Court rejected the "moment of the threat" doctrine used by some circuits. The Court held that the inquiry looks at the totality of the circumstances and not just the last second. Critics of police got a real concession in that case. A supporter of Graham should accept it gracefully, because it is consistent with what Graham said: the word "totality" was always in the test. Reasonableness cannot mean "what happened in the last second" if the facts of the preceding minute explain what the officer saw.

The Founding and the rule of law

Our Founders knew what happens when government force is unconstrained. The Fourth Amendment came out of the colonists' hatred of general warrants and writs of assistance, which let officers rummage through any house at their discretion. The word the Framers chose was "unreasonable." They did not write a catalog of forbidden acts. They trusted courts and juries to apply a standard to facts, the way the common law always did. Graham is in that line. It declines to write a formula and insists on a standard.

There is also a point about the moral order of a free society. We ask a small group of people to run toward danger on our behalf and to use force, up to deadly force, to protect the rest of us. In exchange the law owes them a standard they can know in advance, and it owes the rest of us a promise that those who cross the line will answer for it. Graham tries to keep both sides of that bargain. A rule that fails the officer fails the public, because officers who fear the lawyers more than the street hesitate, and hesitation has victims too. A rule that fails the public fails the officer, because public trust is the thing that makes an officer's job survivable.

The case in brief

1. Graham v. Connor (1989) holds that excessive-force claims arising from an arrest or stop are judged under the Fourth Amendment's objective reasonableness standard.
2. Force is judged from "the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene," not with "the 20/20 vision of hindsight," and the officer's intent counts neither for nor against him.
3. The Court's three factors are the severity of the crime, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat, and whether he is resisting or fleeing. They are guides for a jury, not a formula.
4. The critics have a fair point that the standard can be applied too generously, and the Court's 2025 Barnes v. Felix decision confirms that the whole picture matters, not only the last second.
5. The remedy for a flawed application is better judging and better legislation, not hindsight as the legal test.

What you can do: read the use-of-force policy your local police department publishes on its website, then ask your city council whether the department's training matches it.