Robert E. Worden's Unfair

Police officers are vital in our everyday lives because they’re known and serve as reliable forces that aid in protecting our rights and ultimately, our lives. Law enforcement, and police officers in particular, have secured a lot of media coverage recently because there have been multiple cases where through excessive force, police have fatally shot and killed civilians. While it may be known for police to do this if it is necessary and for their own safety, some specific stories have been globally exerted because of the unlawful reason behind the killing and verdict of the police officers at fault. In a book assessing criminal justice, Robert E. Worden believes that on a theoretical standpoint, there are situational factors that are the cues
on which police officers form judgements about how incidents should be handled” (150). I agree, and because the police continue to exhibit the use of deadly force on civilians based on uncertain variables, policy solutions-such as monitoring how the police use force and holding police accountable for excessive usage of it-should be administered in order to ensure police are serving and protecting all communities.
For the past couple of months, the televised news have continuously covered stories pertaining to the use of force by police officers. Although it may seem alarming yet frequent, the event of an unarmed citizen getting shot and/or killed is a very gruesome situation. Which leaves us with the question what is a dangerous civilian? Is it simply somebody of a certain demographic or is it somebody that actually has a life threatening weapon? One can use examples such as Sandra Bland, Michael Garner and other civilians trying to do as police officers demanded them but ending up dead in the civil process. The use of deadly force in these situations are unjust and law enforcements are clearly at fault. In an article by John P. Gross, he describes a famous case titled "Tennessee vs. Garner" (157). In this case, a police officer used deadly force despite being aware that the teenager was unarmed and of slight build. These type of cases in the news are becoming very consistent and of the same storyline. An unarmed citizen that has been killed by police officers under the circumstances of assumptions based on the neighborhood where it happened, race, and age or sex of the victim. Instead of charging the officers as guilty in Garner’s situation, the Court defended them using claims of self defense and referring to the Fourth Amendment. Being that police officers are law employees, it seems as if the Court places a lot of confidence and defensiveness into their actions. “Their reluctance to regulate the use of force by police officers is based on inaccurate assumptions regarding the nature of policing” (Gross, 161). In Court, police officers continuously claim that their jobs are really dangerous and that they put their lives on the line every time they step outside with their uniform on. The truth is that the life of a police officer is not in danger. In fact, according to The Washington Post, a job as a police officer is continuously being called safer than many jobs and even situations that people can experience (Balko). The Court is supporting officers’ claims that are greatly exaggerated. Because of the superiority and relation to law enforcement, the Court may have trouble creating policy solutions. But they do not understand that administrative reign on the use of force will have a great effect on the frequency of police abusing their use of firearms.
According to Worden, it is implicitly presumed that the outlooks or personalities of these officers are at the root of their seemingly distinctive behavioral patterns (152). Regardless of how they were trained, what seems to matter most is how they cooperate based on the situational factors surrounding them. When there is an incident happening, police officers form judgements such as the neighborhood they are in, the number of other police officers in the area, or the location (indoor or outdoor). All of these factors affect their behavioral patterns. If police received better training and preparations for any type of case, they will not resort to excessive use of force because they will understand and be prepared for things at hand. We must begin to bridge the gap between neighborhood contextual factors and police use of force (Lee, 682). This means that force resonates more with how the officer assesses the situation in their head than the training they were given. They act through actions, which is something that is does not always end in good favor. Police training and policies should be improved in order to bridge this gap. Although some may argue that a psychological hypothesis about police behavior is based on subjective reactions presented unsystematically, it is imperative that we start somewhere in order to enact change. “Broader training and psychological testing of officers and uniform reporting standards for accusations of brutality” are recommended to be best in solving this dilemma (Sullivan).
Seeing unarmed people getting killed through excessive use of force and noticing that majority are from the same backgrounds and demographics, makes you wonder the labels that these victims are given.
In the book Unfair by Adam Benforado he states that “the labels we give victims can make a big difference in how their cases are handled.” When it comes down to it, labels are used as a factor when determining most cases and even when police decide how they want to go about the situation. Like the title of the book, it is unfair that life and death situations are handled in this way. It is unjust to chose how to deal with something based on irrelevant things like race, wealth, age, or sex. In America, the amount of the population of minorities are continuously growing and because of that, the majority race may begin to feel threatened. It seems as if caucasians, and in this case caucasians police officers, discern an increasing threat to to their economical and political footing. This may insinuate the thought that they are fighting a war on crime against specific demographical citizens. In his book, Benforado describes the story of a man named David who died because of the neglect of the ambulance (10). David died because of assumptions from the ambulance. The case was quickly judged as a man who had excessive alcohol in his system when he actually was suffering of brain damage due to being robbed and attacked in his neighborhood. His neighbor Jerry, uninformed of the
situation beforehand, called the dispatcher saying he found the man lying on the street. Through negligence and people judging based on the wealthy neighborhood and age/physical appearance of David, everyone from the dispatcher to the E.R. nurses assumed he had alcohol poisoning. Labeling him ignorantly resulted in his negligence and eventually his death because the wrongful accusations caused his procedural tests to be delayed. It is not fair but it is just the way the system works out. This story resonates with police officers because the use of deadly force is exerted due to the fact that they label victims and tend to act out through those assumptions. Because of this, there should be an early intervention system for police officers. After police experience use of force complaints or are involved in situations of such, reports and immediate monitoring from supervisors should be done.
Since there is excessive use of force on citizens from police officers, there are growing amounts of communities and sometimes whole cities that are aware of the mistreating of unarmed people.
Seeing this happening begins a collective fear of our law enforcement which can lead to mistrust and separation of hope. According to an L.A. Times article, in Inglewood, a city located inside of Los Angeles County, California, residents were beginning to get tired of treatment by police and began to call and complain to the U.S. Department of Justice in order to demand reform. A Times investigation found that Inglewood officers repeatedly resorted to physical or deadly force against unarmed suspects (Kim et al.). When further investigation was demanded and started, they noticed that “The agency's rules on using deadly force are vague and inconsistent with U.S. Supreme Court guidelines” (Kim et al.). This demonstrates that there is a clear correlation between outdated reforms and the excessive use of force. Police who perform these acts can be deemed protected because the policies and procedures are not available and reasonable to the currents things that are happening in today's society. The policy is vividly failing our citizens and it is resulting in people being killed for reasons farther than they can control. It all comes down to rules and regulations. If those are wrong and not updated, then that will be on the hands of the people who follow them, which is in this case the
police officers. And if police officers are following wrong rules, it is no reason why they wouldn't begin to do wrong things. Officers of the Los Angeles Police Department are actually rewarded for hard-nosed enforcement that is likely to produce arrests and often bring police into conflict with citizens (Worden, 158). This reveals that that the administration fails to discourage the use of force and the incentives may cause the police officers to be more aggressive than they should. We need to decrease hard nosed enforcement rewards and increase sanctions for improper use of force (158). The only way to diminish this wrongdoing is to start from the top of the law, which is the U.S. Supreme Court, and began proactive reform to better our communities and lift the dread and fear between citizens and the people who are hired in order to protect them.
Because of the inability of the U.S. Supreme Court to regulate the use of force among police officers and civilians, they have exerted an excessive amount of force and have been creating controversy within many communities throughout the United States.There are many different factors that lead into why police officers are allowed to get away with killing unarmed citizens. The main one is that there are currently no policy reforms in place in order to regulate and aim to change the outcomes of these situations. Instead of creating policy solutions to deal with fatal use of force, officers are continuing to be let off the hook in regards to killing unarmed citizens. Situational factors and uncertain variables when police officers are out on the field continuously and directly affect how officers choose to use force on civilians. When police continue to act out in this way, they began to instill fear within an increasing amount of communities. It is unethical to act out on civilians based on emotions or prejudice thoughts because that takes away the threshold of trust and security between the two groups. We then question whether the police are here to protect us or are against us. The only way they will be able to surpass these things and know how to go about them is through immediate reformation of the current policies and better training beforehand. We should revise and strengthen the policies dealing with the police and their use of force in order to reduce the administration of unjust killings.