Holding Law Enforcement Accountable for Police Brutality and Excessive Force

As a general statement, police do a good job, and try their best in what is a dangerous and uncertain profession. But like any profession, sometimes things go wrong, and police overstep their boundaries, ignore policies, or they use excessive force. What can you do, if a police officer uses excessive force on you, while the officer is trying to do his or her job?

Training and Department Policies

In many situations where an officer oversteps his or her boundaries, or where too much force is used on someone, the lawsuit centers around what kind of training the officer has, and around the police department’s policies and procedures. That’s because often, when things go wrong, it’s not an officer who is “going rogue,” but rather, a department that doesn’t do a sufficient job in training its officers.

Proving Policies and Procedures Were Insufficient

Often, a victim of police misconduct will need to hire their own attorney, who is skilled in police procedure, and proper law enforcement behavior in the field.

Victims can look at a police department’s history of training. What kind of situations does a department train its officers in? What kind of mandatory training is required? Are there programs or resources that teach police officers how to deal with, for example, mentally handicapped persons, or especially belligerent people, or homeless people, or any other community that could be the subject of police brutality?

Who is actually giving trainings? Often police departments have individuals training officers, who actually aren’t familiar with the areas that they are training the officers in.

This may be hard to believe, but sometimes, a police department may be training its officers the completely wrong way—in other words, in ways that are instructing the officers to violate the law. Many police policies and procedures or training manuals, have not been updated to accord with recent developments in the law.

How Excessive is Too Excessive?

Victims seeking to sue for police brutality or excessive force face a delicate legal balance.

On the one hand, in order to show a police department liable for the behavior of a police officer, the victim usually must show something more than just simple negligence. Often, training must be wholly inadequate, or the department or the officer must be acting with disregard or complete indifference to public safety, or in dereliction of its duties to the public.

But if the officer’s behavior goes too far astray—that is, if a police officer totally acts on his or her own, with such recklessness that it’s clear the officer is outside the scope of his or her duties—the victim risks that the department may disavow liability for what the officer did.

Immunity Problems

Victims also must overcome qualified immunity—the concept that offices are immune from what they do in the field, if there is no clear law that tells the officer what he or she was supposed to do in a particular situation.

Injured because of what you believe may have been excessive force by law enforcement? Call us to schedule a consultation with the Tampa personal injury lawyers at Barbas, Nunez, Sanders, Butler & Hovsepian today.

Sources:

crcgroup.com/Tools-Intel/post/an-arresting-fact-municipalities-bear-growing-risk-for-police-actions

hrw.org/legacy/reports98/police/uspo30.htm