Summary
Improved community bonds and gun control that limits the amount of firepower that people can access would increase both police and citizen safety, a Stanford scholar said.
Stanford News Service recently interviewed John J. Donohue III, a law professor who has been conducting empirical research on gun violence and gun control for more than 25 years. Donohue is the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law at Stanford.
When and how can the police legally shoot and kill a person? Are there federal and state differences?
Police use of deadly force is typically constrained by both applicable state law and by the United States Constitution. While there are some state law differences, they tend to be less important than the attitudinal differences that exist in various regions of the country that may lead prosecutors and juries to reach different conclusions based on their differing worldviews. In general, the more dangerous the crime that the officer believes someone to have committed and the greater the threat to safety the individual poses, the greater the ability of the police officer to use force, including deadly force.
As the Supreme Court stated in Graham v. Connor [1989], “All claims that law enforcement officers have used excessive force – deadly or not – in the course of an arrest, investigatory stop, or other ‘seizure’ of a free citizen should be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment and its ‘reasonableness’ standard.” The Supreme Court went on to stress that “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.”
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