Deadly Force

Abstract

Deadly force refers to any use of force by a police officer that could result in the imposition of serious bodily injury or death. It includes homicides by police. Most homicides by police in the United States are found to be legally justified. A sworn law enforcement officer with general powers of arrest is legally justified in using deadly force if the officer has a reasonable apprehension of an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death being imposed against the officer or someone else. The fleeing felon rule has been abrogated and police officers are no longer legally justified in using deadly force to stop a fleeing felon absent other exigencies that would constitute an imminent threat. Deadly force research has long been hampered by the lack of meaningful data on the incidence and prevalence of police use of deadly force. Government counts of fatal officer-involved shootings have grossly underestimated annual counts of deadly force incidents. Recent open-source databases, largely created and curated by media organizations, have found that between 900 and 1,000 persons are shot and killed by on-duty police officers each year in the United States. This bibliography mostly focuses on deadly force in the United States. There has been a renewed interest in deadly force research in the aftermath of numerous officer-involved shooting in recent years, with calls for police accountability, transparency, and legitimacy, particularly as various stakeholders have called attention to racial disparities in terms of who is victimized by police deadly force and claims of police bias manifested through police violence against minority citizens.