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Excessive Force

The constitutional limit on how much force police may use in a stop, an arrest or a search - judged by what a reasonable officer would have done in the moment, and the reason body-camera footage decides more of these cases than testimony does.

Informational only - this is not legal advice. These definitions explain general legal vocabulary in plain English. They are not advice about your situation, reading them creates no attorney-client relationship, and the law differs from state to state and changes over time. For advice you can rely on, speak to a lawyer licensed in your state.

What it means

A claim that a police officer used excessive force is, for a person being stopped, arrested or searched, a Fourth Amendment claim: the Constitution forbids unreasonable seizures, and force beyond what the situation called for makes the seizure unreasonable. The standard is objective reasonableness, judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene rather than with hindsight, weighing the severity of the suspected offence, whether the person posed an immediate threat to the officer or others, and whether they were actively resisting or trying to flee. The officer's intentions - good or bad - are not the question; the question is whether the force was proportionate to what a reasonable officer would have perceived.

Deadly force has its own rule: an officer may not shoot a fleeing suspect merely to prevent escape, and may use deadly force only where there is probable cause to believe the person poses a significant threat of death or serious injury to the officer or others. A person already in custody after conviction is protected instead by the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, where the question is whether force was applied in a good-faith effort to maintain order or maliciously to cause harm; a pretrial detainee is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment under an objective standard similar to the Fourth. Which amendment applies depends on where in the process the person was, and it changes what has to be proved.

The claim is brought under the federal civil-rights statute against the officer personally and, where an official policy, custom or failure to train caused the violation, against the city or county; the state itself cannot be sued for damages in federal court. Qualified immunity is the defence that decides most of these cases: the officer is protected unless the right violated was clearly established in the specific circumstances, which usually means a prior decision with closely similar facts. State-law assault and battery claims against the officer and the employer proceed alongside, subject to the state's tort claims act and its notice rules.

Where this comes from

The objective-reasonableness standard for force during an arrest is Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989); the deadly-force rule is Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985); the pretrial-detainee standard is Kingsley v. Hendrickson, 576 U.S. 389 (2015); and the convicted-prisoner standard is Hudson v. McMillian, 503 U.S. 1 (1992). The cause of action is 42 U.S.C. § 1983, with municipal liability under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978), and qualified immunity under Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223 (2009). Claims against federal officers proceed, if at all, on a far narrower footing after Egbert v. Boule, 596 U.S. 482 (2022).

When people hire a lawyer for this

The evidence is on a retention clock - body-worn and dash-camera footage, dispatch audio, cell-phone video from bystanders, and the medical record of the injuries - and a lawyer's preservation letter to the agency within days is often the difference between a case and an allegation. A person who was also charged should not give a statement about the incident, to the police or to an internal-affairs investigator, before the criminal case is resolved or a lawyer has advised on it; the civil claim can wait, the Fifth Amendment problem cannot be undone.

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Part of the LawyerLand plain-English legal glossary. Definitions are written from primary sources - statutes and court rules - and each entry states the authority it rests on, or says plainly when the doctrine is state law with no national rule.

If you cannot afford a lawyer, civil legal aid programmes provide free help with many of these problems: civil legal aid programmes by state.

Related free reference tools: statute of limitations for a personal-injury claim, by state, quoted from each state's official text - part of LawyerLand's legal reference tools.