Moral evaluations of police and civilian use of force

Abstract

At least 80% of law enforcement agencies in the United States rely on some form of a force “continuum”, which is a scale that categorizes forceful actions systematically according to their severity, and enables officers to make expeditious choices about appropriate responsive force in real time. It is unclear, however, how much civilian evaluations align with or diverge from such a severity scale. The studies in this dissertation derive precise severity estimates for a representative set of forceful actions that span the entire range of possibilities. These scale values reveal that lay perceptions of police and civilian force substantively differ from formal models; non-lethal actions cluster together homogeneously, while actions at the extremes are relatively spread out. Moreover, actions that are not role-normative for police are perceived as especially morally severe, while more normative actions are less morally severe. Participant ratings of morality and physical magnitude are also moderated by participant beliefs about police legitimacy and other individual differences (e.g., race, gender, political affiliation, etc.). Additional studies demonstrate that lay evaluators generally expect police to use less force than that with which they are confronted, even when they are confronted with lethal force. This expectation is in direct conflict with the “one level above” heuristic rule commonly used by law enforcement, and also with the supreme court guidelines for evaluating when lethal police force is justified. Taken together, these results imply that the groundwork for disagreement about the legitimacy of police and civilian actions may be partially rooted in the differential way that action severity is perceived by law enforcement relative to civilian observers. They also offer insight into specific ways that educational outreach and policy revision efforts can seek to better align lay and professional moral evaluations force.