by Stephen Soukup
Rory Miller’s Force Decisions shows why emotional snap judgments about police use of force ignore reality—and how facts, training, and restraint are the only path to de-escalation.
I will spare you a discussion of the hows and whys of my discovery of it, but a little more than a decade ago, I discovered one of the most interesting and informative little books I have ever read. As a student of American politics and public policy and an analyst specializing in the intersection of politics and markets, it’s a book I’d never expected to read, much less to find as fascinating and edifying as I did. As (mostly bad) luck would have it, however, it’s also a tome that explains a great deal about what is going on in our country right now and offers practical advice—to both sides—on how best to de-escalate current tensions.
The book is called Force Decisions: A Citizen’s Guide, and it was written by Rory Miller, who served for many years as “a corrections officer and sergeant working booking, maximum security, and mental health units” and “trained corrections and enforcement officers, primarily in force-related skills… and force policy.” Miller’s purpose in writing Force Decisions was, as the subhead puts it, to help civilians understand how police determine appropriate use of force.
The book is structured around a series of “hard truths,” each of which gives a glimpse into the issues that surround law enforcement use of force and provides a framework for understanding the conditions that necessitate force escalation. The author and his publisher are very careful to note that their work does not constitute formal legal advice (and I reiterate that here), yet it’s clear that the point of all of this is to enable those who have no professional law enforcement experience to appreciate the decision-making process in the use of force, even—or especially—when that process must be completed in a split second.
Interestingly—and tellingly—before introducing these hard truths, Miller is clear that he does NOT want to change the minds of those who are predisposed to think that law enforcement officers are always in the wrong and are mere tools of state oppression. Rather, he writes, he absolutely wants skeptics to maintain their skepticism and to scrutinize each and every force decision made by law enforcement. Skeptics act as a check against the overuse and abuse of force, he notes, and as bizarre as it might sound, they are invaluable to law enforcement agencies. The only thing Miller asks is that the skeptics’ objections “be based on facts and not emotions.”
Unfortunately, that request has mostly fallen on deaf ears. No matter the incident or circumstances leading to the use of force, objections inevitably start—and often conclude—with emotional responses, sometimes hysterical, often based on preexisting moral judgments that don’t even remotely fit the situation and conditions. This is especially true today, when the two “sides” in every confrontation are ideologically predetermined, when both sides have made presumptions about the motives and culpability of all parties involved, and when every action is dissected, re-dissected, and re-re-dissected in environments that are totally removed from that in which the original force escalation took place. As Miller puts it:
- Any use of force appears shocking to the uninitiated.
- People who make judgments about use-of-force situations they were not involved in usually have access to information the officer did not have… and almost always have far more time to analyze information.
- They also lack the information the officer had. They did not see, hear, feel, smell, or sense what the officer did.
- Stopping violence or potential violence is a separate issue from ‘justice’—motive and mental competency are keys to determining the level of criminal culpability, but are irrelevant to whether someone must be stopped before they hurt somebody.
When you read—usually on social media—or hear—usually from a politician trying to exploit a situation for his or her own partisan gain—immediate reactions that cast use-of-force decisions in black-and-white, Manichaean terms, you can rest assured that those reactions are wholly based on emotion, with very few (if any) facts sprinkled in. Yes, it looks like the ICE agent shot an innocent man in the back simply for exercising his Second Amendment rights, but is that really what happened? Do the facts—which include not just the loaded weapon but also resisting arrest—support that perception entirely? How does the fact that he’d already been shown to be armed affect the factual case for the use of force?
Conversely, when someone in a position of authority says publicly that “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived to inflict maximum damage and kill law enforcement,” that too is based on something other than fact. Whether this latter reaction is based on emotion or something else, however, is open to debate.
One of the two most interesting and relevant sections of the book is that which addresses the training of law enforcement officers and the lessons they must retain from it. In this section, Miller goes heavy on the details, describing at length the education given to recruits about the use of force, about the rules governing its use and escalation, and about the proper techniques to avoid having to use force in most circumstances, to know when force is needed, and to use it effectively and as minimally as necessary to address the situation. He writes that force training is, always and everywhere, guided by the “Golden Rules”: 1. “You and your partner go home safely at the end of each and every shift.” 2. “The criminal goes to jail.” 3. “Liability free.”
In the current context—ICE’s travails in Minnesota—this training and these rules raise serious issues for everyone involved. For starters, it is clear that ICE agents are not trained sufficiently to handle intrusive, law-breaking, and occasionally violent protestors. They just aren’t. The Trump administration’s critics are right here. If the agents were trained more effectively, they would likely be better equipped to follow rule #3 more diligently. But they aren’t.
All of that said, there is a reason ICE agents are not trained for those circumstances. Those circumstances are—or at least should be—entirely outside of their purview. Their job is to arrest people who are breaking immigration laws, not to manage crowds. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the people who are trained to manage crowds and who should be handling protestors—state and local police—have been ordered not to do so by state and municipal authorities. We can get into a chicken-and-egg argument here, but the bottom line is that people who are not equipped to handle crowd control are being forced to do so for partisan political reasons. And only a change in political calculations will de-escalate that aspect of the current situation.
The second of the two most relevant sections of Miller’s book is the fourth and final section, “About You,” in which the author explains a citizen’s rights and responsibilities in dealing with law enforcement. Miller begins by reiterating the largely inarguable notion that “governmentally and societal sanctioned force is an immense power. You can’t wish it away, and you can’t evaluate it from a utopian ideal.” He continues, explaining that the check on that power is the set of rules by which law enforcement officers are required to conduct themselves, especially with respect to the use of force. This being the real world, however, and not a training exercise, sometimes those rules don’t work. They may be antiquated or insufficient for specific conditions or… whatever. The catch, of course, is that the only effective way to change ineffectual rules is by being rational and employing factual arguments. Emotional responses rarely produce positive outcomes.
And along these same lines, Miller closes with some advice that may be hard for some to hear, especially those who are convinced of the righteousness of their cause:
“If you have to be defiant, don’t be stupid about it. Argue, if you absolutely have to, but show the officer your hands. If the officer says, “Show me your hands!” and you say, “No,” you have given the officer no choice but to assume that you have a weapon ready to deploy. This is so stupid—right up there with checking for gas leaks with matches—it shouldn’t even need to be said, but it happens. Being defiant about something stupid can escalate a verbal situation to deadly force for childish, immature ego.”
“If the officer ever uses the magic phrase, ‘For your safety and mine, I need you to…’ do it. That is a solid signal that the officer perceives this as an issue of safety, and the officer will absolutely use force if you do not comply.”
To be clear, failure to comply doesn’t mean that anyone deserves to be beaten, thrown to the ground, or shot. But it does mean that these things are more likely to happen. Protestors, politicians, and law enforcement officers alike would do well to remember all of this and—if they are at all civically minded—adjust their behavior and rhetoric accordingly.
Stephen Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/01/26/a-citizens-guide-to-violence-in-minneapolis/
No comments:
Post a Comment