Police experts dig into the new policies for Seattle cops

There are changes coming to the Seattle Police use-of-force policy, and the manual has gone from five to seventy pages.

The police guild thinks some of those changes might put officers at risk, so KIRO Radio asked experts from around the country about the dangers.

Eugene O’Donnell was an NYPD officer before becoming a lawyer and a police trainer. He’s now a police policies professor at John Jay College in New York.

He said officers need to follow the rules, but many of their decisions on the street are based on feel and experience. “The idea that you can write your way to a police department that’s going to be more restrained is a dubious proposition,” he said.

O’Donnell said it’s a good thing that SPD will be spelling out all the do’s and the do not’s in this new use-of-force manual because officers need to be reminded and trained about what’s appropriate.

“If you’re hitting somebody, using force to punish, that’s inappropriate,” O’Donnell said. “That’s a clear line, but it’s hard sometimes to be mindful of it, but that’s the rule. That’s the law. That has to be followed. You use as much force as you need to protect yourself, to affect an arrest or stop somebody from escaping, but you as a police person have no authorization whatsoever to be punishing people. Punishment is for the courts.”

John Caparelli spent 20 of his 27 years in the LAPD working the streets. He was involved in the infamous North Hollywood bank robbery shootout where body-armor-wearing suspects injured 11 officers and 7 civilians in a firefight. He also penned “Uniform Decisions: My Life in the LAPD and the North Hollywood Shootout.”

He’s not too sure about the new Seattle Police policy that considers simply pointing a weapon at someone as a reportable use of force.

“You’re going to have officers trying to second-guess whether they should pull their weapon or not because they’re going to be listed as using force, and that can be dangerous,” he said. “I just don’t get it. I don’t understand that right there.”

Caparelli is also concerned that a lengthy manual could make officers hesitate. “You can’t be thinking ‘OK hold on what can I do here.'”

Caparelli and O’Donnell believe the police do need to behave better than the rest of the public. Society gives them guns and power, and they need to use it wisely and appropriately because, as O’Donnell said, public perception and confidence in the police is essential.

“We want them to think that when the police come that they enforce the law,” he said. “They have restraint. They’re professional. They use a minimum amount of force, and they have pride in the job, that they’re not going to climb in the gutter and go after people that are doing serious crime and get down to their level and break the law like they are.”

The new Seattle Police use-of-force guidelines should go into effect in November.