Myths About Police Use of Force That Survive Every Viral Video

Here is how a modern controversy works. Somebody films forty seconds in the middle of an event that lasted four minutes, which itself followed a call that started twenty minutes earlier. The clip goes online with a caption written by someone who has never made an arrest. By dinner it has ten million views, three cable panels and a hashtag. By breakfast the law has been explained to you by a man who has never read it.

Folks, I am not going to tell you that every police shooting is justified. Some are not, and officers have been charged, convicted and sent to prison for it. What I am going to tell you is that a short clip rarely shows the law officers are trained to follow, and a handful of myths do the work of the missing context. Let us take them one at a time, test each against the Supreme Court's decisions and standard training, and give each a verdict. Seven myths, seven verdicts, and no commercial breaks.

Before the myths, the rule

You need two cases in your pocket. We have written about both in detail, so here is the short version.

In Graham v. Connor (1989), the Court held that force is judged by "the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight." Courts weigh the severity of the crime, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat, and whether he is resisting or fleeing. See Graham v. Connor and the Officer's View in a Split Second.

In Tennessee v. Garner (1985), the Court held that deadly force to stop a fleeing suspect is reasonable only when the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm to the officer or others. See Tennessee v. Garner and the End of the Old Fleeing Felon Rule.

That is the legal frame. Every myth below is a claim that the frame says something it does not.

Myth one: officers should shoot to wound, not to kill

This one has the charm of a bumper sticker and the practicality of a bumper sticker. The theory is that a trained officer can aim at a leg or a hand and stop a threat without killing anyone.

The test. Firearms training generally teaches officers to aim at the largest part of the body, the center of mass, for a plain reason: it is the target most likely to be hit. A moving arm or leg is small, and a handgun in a stressful, fast-moving encounter is not a rifle on a range. A missed shot does not vanish. It lands somewhere in the neighborhood behind the suspect. The second reason is the legal one. Deadly force is justified only when the officer faces a threat of death or serious injury. If the threat is that grave, the aim is to stop it, and a shot that does not stop it has accomplished nothing except a second shot. If the threat is not grave enough to justify deadly force, then the officer should not be firing a firearm at all, at the leg or anywhere else. Shooting a leg is not a gentler form of deadly force. It is deadly force that happens to be a worse idea.

Verdict: myth. Movies are not a use-of-force manual. Unless the officer is a character played by an actor who will be fine in the next scene, nobody should expect marksmanship that surgical.

Myth two: warning shots are standard procedure

Fire into the air, the myth says, and the suspect will surrender. It sounds civilized.

The test. Many departments forbid warning shots in their written policies, and the reasons are mechanical. A bullet fired upward comes down. A bullet fired at the ground can ricochet. A shot fired in a city street has no guaranteed backstop. A warning shot also takes a decision that the law treats as grave, the decision to fire a gun, and attaches it to no legitimate target. Where Garner speaks of a warning, it means a verbal warning, "where feasible," that the officer is about to use force. The word is "warning," not "gunfire."

Policies vary by department and by state, and I will not pretend there is one national rule I can cite for you. If you want to know your own department's policy, it is a public document. Ask for it.

Verdict: myth, with a footnote that local policy decides.

Myth three: a man with a knife twenty feet away is no threat

I have heard this one from people who are very sure of themselves, and they are always standing in a living room when they say it.

The test. In 1983 a Salt Lake City police trainer named Dennis Tueller published an article on what became known as the Tueller drill. He timed volunteers charging from a standing start across a distance, and he concluded that an average person could cover about twenty-one feet in roughly a second and a half. The point for officers was that a suspect with an edged weapon who is closer than that distance can reach the officer before the officer can draw, aim and fire a holstered handgun. Trainers have used the exercise ever since to explain why distance alone does not make an armed man harmless.

Two honest qualifications. First, the Tueller drill is a training rule of thumb. It is not a statute and it is not a Supreme Court holding, and no court has said that twenty-one feet is a magic number. A knife at twenty-one feet can be a lawful reason for deadly force in one set of facts and not in another. Second, the drill was designed to illustrate the time problem, not to excuse shooting anyone who holds a blade. If the man is walking away, or has dropped the knife, or is behind a fence, the analysis changes. That is what Graham means by the totality of circumstances.

Verdict: myth as stated. Distance matters, but it does not neutralize a weapon. The officer's decision is judged by what a reasonable officer would have perceived, and what a reasonable officer perceives about a man charging with a knife is not "no threat."

Myth four: officers must wait until a suspect fires first

This myth is the cousin of the previous one, and it is the one I would most like to retire.

The test. No court has ever held that an officer must be shot before he may shoot. Garner says deadly force is permitted when the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, and it gives the example of a suspect who "threatens the officer with a weapon." Threatens. The word does not say "wounds." The Fourth Amendment's standard is reasonableness, and nothing in that standard requires an officer to wait for the gun to go off. Imagine a rule that required the first shot to hit the officer. It would be a rule written by someone who was not going to be the officer.

The better version of the worry, and one worth taking seriously, is the officer who believes he sees a weapon where there is only a phone, a wallet or a tool. That is the real hard case, and it is why Graham asks whether the belief was reasonable and not whether it turned out true. An unreasonable belief, one no competent officer would have shared, is not protected.

Verdict: myth. The law lets an officer act on a reasonable perception of imminent danger. It does not require him to be a casualty first.

Myth five: every shooting of an unarmed person is unlawful

Now we turn the dial the other way, because the same sloppiness works in both directions.

The test. "Unarmed" describes what the person had. The legal question is what the officer reasonably believed. Those can differ. A man who reaches into a car console after being ordered to show his hands, who is later found to have had nothing in it, was "unarmed" in the headline and may have been a reasonable perceived threat in the moment. The Court's standard exists exactly because the facts as they later turn out are not the facts as they appeared.

But do not let the officer's friends off the hook either. Garner itself involved an unarmed boy, and the officer testified he was reasonably sure the boy had no weapon. The shooting violated the Fourth Amendment. Being unarmed is not a defense to a charge of bad judgment, and it is not proof of one. It is one fact among many, and the case turns on the rest.

Verdict: false as a rule, true in some cases. Reasonableness does the work, and neither slogan substitutes for the facts.

Myth six: police rarely face criminal charges for force

This claim comes in two flavors. The mild one says charges are uncommon. The hot one says they never happen.

The test. The hot version is wrong on the public record. In April 2021 a Minnesota jury convicted former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, and he was sentenced to 22.5 years. That was a conviction in state court, brought by a state prosecutor, resulting in a long sentence. Other officers have been charged and convicted in other cases across the country. Conservatives who believe in the rule of law should say so without squirming: an officer who abuses the badge has broken the law, and the law should reach him.

The mild version, that charges are rare compared with the number of incidents, is harder to test because it depends on counting methods that vary, and I will not hand you a figure I cannot source. What can be said is that prosecutors need to prove the force was unreasonable under the same standard that governs civil suits, and juries have often found it hard to second-guess an officer's split-second perception. That is a feature of the standard, and it is also the point where fair people argue.

Verdict: the "never" version is a myth. The "rarely" version is a debate, and it is a debate you should demand data to settle. Before you argue it, find a source that counts every incident the same way, and distrust any figure that comes without a definition.

Myth seven: the video shows everything

Allow me a mild heresy about the thing we all trust most.

The test. A camera is not a person. It has one angle, no sense of what is around the corner, no sense of sound at the edges, and no sense of what the officer knew before he arrived. Body cameras and dashboard cameras have been a real gain for accountability. They have exonerated officers falsely accused and convicted officers who lied, and anyone who is in favor of the truth should be in favor of them. But the clip is a record of what a lens captured, not a record of what an officer perceived. Slow motion distorts timing, so that a quarter second looks like a decision. The frame that matters may be the one outside the frame.

That is why Graham tells courts to take the perspective of the reasonable officer on the scene and not that of the audience. It is also why I would argue the best use of footage is in the courtroom and the training room, where it can be watched twenty times with the other evidence, not in the comment section, where it is watched once with a conclusion.

Verdict: half true. Video is vital evidence and a poor judge.

What the myths have in common

Look at the pattern. In every one of these myths, somebody replaced a standard with a slogan. "Shoot to wound" replaces the question of what the threat is. "Wait for the first shot" replaces the question of what a reasonable officer perceives. "Unarmed means unlawful" replaces the facts. "Charges never happen" replaces the record. The Court's standard is harder than any slogan because it asks us to weigh, and weighing is the work of a jury.

I will make a deal with the critics of the police. I will stop pretending that every shooting is justified if they will stop pretending that the law is a mystery. Those who want to reform use-of-force rules should read the cases and then argue for better statutes, better training and better policies, because the Fourth Amendment sets a floor and does not stop anyone from building higher. See Why Cities Cannot Hire Enough Police Officers, and What Would Fix It for why staffing is part of this problem, and Defund the Police Was a Slogan Cities Tried and Then Quietly Walked Back for what happened when one slogan met a budget.

The founding generation understood that a free people needs a police power it can trust. That means a power that is limited, accountable and not so hobbled that it cannot protect the innocent. Our job is to keep both halves of that sentence in our heads at the same time, which is something no viral clip has ever once managed.

The case in brief

1. Force is judged by what a reasonable officer on the scene would have done, not by hindsight, and deadly force against a fleeing suspect requires probable cause of a threat of serious physical harm.
2. "Shoot to wound," "fire a warning shot" and "wait to be fired upon" are movie rules, not legal rules.
3. A knife at twenty-one feet is not a harmless knife, but the Tueller drill is a training illustration and not a statute, and each case turns on its facts.
4. "Unarmed" does not settle the legal question in either direction, and officers have been charged and convicted when the law was broken.
5. Video is essential evidence, but a clip is not a trial.

What you can do: before sharing the next use-of-force clip, find your department's published policy and the full record, and share those instead.