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Please Tase Me Bro
Using seemingly excessive force makes everyone involved in a police encounter safer
Society is generally ignorant about how the police function with regard to the use of force. The media is partially to blame for that — they continuously highlight instances in which officers use force to apprehend suspects and subsequently portray the officers involved in a negative light.
What the media often fails to highlight is just as important; the events leading up to the officers’ use of force. Thus, people watching these videos are not only unable to see the situation in its full context but also prevented from understanding that quick, overwhelming force is safer both for the police officer and for the suspect.
In most cases, the officer is not tasing, tackling, or unnecessarily maligning the suspect for his own amusement — the officer does it to restrain the suspect and de-escalate the situation before it merits the use of greater, more deadly force. Police brutality does of course happen, but people need to take a longer look at the situation before they cast judgment upon an officer’s action.
Police officers have an escalating scale used to determine the appropriate level of force to be employed against a suspect. That scale, called the force continuum, starts with the officer’s physical presence and verbal commands. This escalates to “soft hands” (pressure points and other non-striking actions) mace or pepper spray, then to “hard hands” (striking blows, like punches and kicks), tasers, and police batons. The force continuum is topped with the threat of deadly force and followed by the use of deadly force to resolve a dangerous situation.
Officers use the least force necessary to overwhelm but avoid injuring a suspect. However, there is some degree of variation. As soon as a suspect puts an officer in danger, the officer is at liberty to use a degree of force immediately greater than the one the suspect is employing.
For example, if a suspect is attacking an officer with their fists, the officer should use either superior unarmed fighting or a non-lethal weapon of some sort. As soon as the suspect comes at an officer with a weapon, the officer is justified in using deadly force. Essentially, if someone comes at an officer with a knife, the appropriate trained response is for the officer to use a gun.
The force continuum is of particular use in light of the personal risk inherent in the police officer’s profession. The force continuum training maximizes an officer’s safety in the face of great personal risk and gives him the ability to assess what actions should be taken when confronted with potentially life-threatening situations. In order to ensure his own personal right to safety, an officer must be able to use force to subdue a suspect — the force continuum not only reflects this difficult reality, but also creates a means by which officers can responsibly react to that reality.
Police officers have an equal, if not greater, right to safety than those they are arresting. They can’t allow the suspect to struggle, because if the suspect struggles and hurts the police officer, there is also a huge risk the suspect is going to be hurt as well in the ensuing takedown. This is the primary reason police officers prefer incapacitating force (things such as tasers, or blows to pressure points that temporarily deprive the suspect of mobility). Ironically, the force police officers use actually makes violent arrests safer.
Many supposed instances of police brutality are just standard procedure in the face of a potentially dangerous criminal. It’s annoying when people cry brutality every time force is used in an arrest, because it detracts from the seriousness of real police brutality.
Instances like the Rodney King beating should clearly evoke outrage, but the police forcing a belligerent drunk to the ground in a quick, somewhat brutal manner does not warrant the same moral outrage.
As long as the takedown is performed in the proper manner, officers are possibly preventing harm to both parties, as any escalation in force by the drunk requires a like escalation on their part. So please, before you make any generalizations about police behavior, check out standard procedures for the situation the officers were confronted with so you know the full story — rather than the story spun by the mainstream media. 
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