Use of Force
Use of Force
The main charge of the Independent Commission was to investigate the root causes within the LAPD of violence when making arrests and carrying out other police functions within the community. To understand the extent to which the beating of Rodney King signaled a tendency toward the use of excessive force, the commission examined a range of documents, including LAPD training manuals that communicated guidelines about how to use defensive weapons, such as side handle batons, and conveyed to officers the department’s official use of force policy (1 below): “While the use of reasonable physical force may be necessary in situations which cannot be otherwise controlled, force may not be resorted to unless other reasonable alternatives have been exhausted or would clearly be ineffective under the particular circumstances. Officers are permitted to use whatever force that is reasonable and necessary to protect others or themselves from bodily harm."One of the commission’s teams of attorneys, a group from the law firm Freeman & Mills, probed LAPD databases containing arrest and use-of-force statistics gathered from May 30 to July 3, 1991, and compiled graphs and charts derived from the data they found (2-5 below). Tellingly, these visualizations convey a story of disproportionate arrest rates and extensive use of force, particularly toward Latino and Black populations, as reported in misconduct complaints.
