The recent police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in Staten Island sparked an intense national debate and protests on police use of deadly force. Both victims were unarmed and black, and were killed by white police officers. The debate intensified when grand juries in St. Louis County and Staten Island declined to indict the officers in those incidents.
In fact, criminal prosecutions against police officers based on their official conduct are few and far between. By contrast, large numbers of civil claims for damages based on police use of force are filed in the courts on an ongoing basis pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983. These claims typically allege that the officer’s use of force in carrying out an arrest or investigatory stop was unreasonable and thus violative of the Fourth Amendment. A subset of these claims arises from police use of deadly force.
