In the years since George Floyd’s killing, police departments across the country have rewritten—or pledged to rewrite—their use-of-force rules. But it has been hard to see how those reforms compare, where they fall short, and whether they meaningfully change the standards that govern police encounters.

A three-part initiative from the Stanford Center for Racial Justice offers one of the clearest pictures to date.

At the center of the project is “Police Use of Force Policies Across America,” co-authored by Dan Sutton, the Center’s director of justice and safety, and former research associate Fatima Dahir, who will start her JD studies at Stanford Law in the fall. The report represents what the authors describe as the largest systematic analysis of use-of-force regulations to date, examining 2,200 rules across the nation’s 100 largest cities. The research identifies both areas of convergence since 2020 and deep inconsistencies. For example, some departments now require de-escalation before any force is used, while others still permit officers to draw weapons during routine encounters.

Ralph Richard Banks, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law and the faculty director of the Center for Racial Justice, says he is delighted at how the long-in-development project has come to fruition. “The use-of-force initiative provides communities an unprecedented set of tools to evaluate law enforcement policies in their jurisdictions and to identify needed areas of change.”

“With federal oversight retreating, the real work is happening at the state and local levels,” Sutton says. “We launched this project so communities and policymakers can see, clearly and directly, how force policies differ, and make decisions grounded in evidence rather than assumption.”

A second component of the project is a comprehensive model use-of-force policy structured around 10 essential policy elements and developed from public health research, social science scholarship, and national best practices, with contributions from Stanford Law students, center staff, and pro bono partners at law firm Gibson Dunn. 

Together, the report and the model use-of-force policy form the research backbone for the project’s third and soon-to-launch element: The Policy Explorer is an interactive public database that turns the underlying research—more than 11,000 pages of policy documents evaluated across 22 categories of force regulation—into a searchable tool. Designed to give policymakers, journalists, advocates, and law-enforcement agencies unprecedented access to comparative force rules and key regulatory language, the Explorer will allow users to evaluate policy choices across jurisdictions with a level of clarity that has long been missing from public debate, according to the report authors.

“We wanted to create something that moves the conversation beyond anecdotes,” Dahir says. “When you look at the data side by side, it becomes clear which policies are widespread, which are rare, and where there are opportunities for stronger protections.”

Learn More