WASHINGTON—Police across the United States are rethinking how they use force amid national outrage over questionable shootings and violent arrests.
The changes include efforts in Dallas to train officers to de-escalate situations by moving backward during target practice and arming some with sponge projectiles rather than guns. In Camden County, New Jersey, officers are taught about the sanctity of life and encouraged to take time to defuse a situation, even if a suspect is wildly waving a knife at them.
After months of work, nearly 200 law enforcement leaders gathered in Washington on Friday to review and discuss new guiding principles that, if enacted by the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, would significantly remake how policing has been done for decades. The 30 principles include an unprecedented acknowledgment from leading law enforcement professionals that officers should go beyond the Supreme Court-adopted basic legal standard that asks what a “reasonable officer” would do in such a situation, and that officers should focus on preserving all human lives in any encounter.
“There’s an expression, ‘Lawful but awful,’” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, who led the effort to develop the principles. “I think (these principles) would impact on some level these really tragic shootings of the mentally ill, the homeless person, the unarmed person. It could have an enormous impact.”
