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Excessive Force and James Fyfe’s Long Shadow

by CLieberman



Dr. Fyfe tes­ti­fy­ing at Amadou
Diallo’s trial in Feb­ru­ary, 2000.
(court tv)

Thurs­day, Octo­ber 5th, marked the incep­tion of the con­fer­ence, titled Research and Pol­icy on Police Account­abil­ity, com­mem­o­rat­ing the legacy of James Fyfe. Some of the most influ­en­tial researchers in the field of polic­ing, as well as a few lead­ers of major police agen­cies, pre­sented papers. The con­fer­ence, held at CUNY’s John Jay Col­lege of Crim­i­nal Jus­tice, included research on use of force by police, the pol­icy impact of research, and com­menced with the announce­ment of the first Fyfe Fel­low­ship recip­i­ent, which was awarded to a doc­toral stu­dent in the Crim­i­nal Jus­tice Pro­gram who had served as a police offi­cer. The fel­low­ship is designed to fund future or cur­rent research in the field of polic­ing. Speak­ing at the Fyfe Fel­low­ship Din­ner was Pro­fes­sor Jerome Skol­nick, co-author with Dr. Fyfe on one of the more widely used pub­li­ca­tions on polic­ing, “Above the Law: Police and the Exces­sive Use of Force.” Dr. Fyfe, a native of New York City, for­mer New York City police offi­cer, the first Deputy Com­mis­sioner for Train­ing at the NYPD, and dis­tin­guished pro­fes­sor at CUNY, was one of the great schol­ars and researchers in the fields of police use of force and police training.

Although James Fyfe passed away last Novem­ber, his work remains an impor­tant part of aca­d­e­mic research in the field of crim­i­nal jus­tice and polic­ing. It is nearly impos­si­ble to research police use of force or police train­ing with­out encoun­ter­ing a James Fyfe cita­tion. Jeremy Travis, Pres­i­dent of John Jay Col­lege of Crim­i­nal Jus­tice, was quoted as say­ing that Dr. Fyfe’s “research on the use of force changed the direc­tion of police prac­tice and legal doc­trine.” His expert tes­ti­mony led to major changes in both police train­ing and pro­ce­dures regard­ing police use of force. He was also involved in Sec­tion 1983[1] lit­i­ga­tion and con­sent decrees[2] for police depart­ments, which affected major cities in the United States, such as Philadel­phia, a city that Fyfe con­cluded was “one of the worst in the nation for lax dis­ci­pline, exces­sive union power and an arbi­tra­tion process that favors the police and cuts off most city appeals to the courts.“[3] Con­sent decrees led to mon­i­tor­ing of police agen­cies by Fed­eral author­i­ties until the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with the decree could be cor­rected. Dr Fyfe con­ducted research and pub­lished exten­sively on police use of force.

Police use of force remains an issue that greatly con­cerns the pub­lic. Account­abil­ity for these offi­cers of the law that employ force against mem­bers of the pub­lic has been a hotly debated topic. Events of recent years in New York City, includ­ing the assault and sodomy of Abner Louima and the shoot­ings of Amadou Diallo and Ous­mane Zongo, both West African immi­grants that died from police inflicted gun­shot wounds, have fueled the pub­lic dis­cus­sion on police use of force and police train­ing. Dr. Fyfe tes­ti­fied at the trial of the four offi­cers involved with the shoot­ing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immi­grant killed by police that mis­tak­enly thought he had a weapon. Over the course of his career, Dr. Fyfe worked on hun­dreds of crim­i­nal and civil cases, tes­ti­fy­ing both for and against police offi­cers and agen­cies, always objec­tively and empir­i­cally exam­in­ing the issues sur­round­ing the spe­cific legal ques­tions involved. Although his tes­ti­mony some­times met with crit­i­cism from par­ties involved in the actions, Dr. Fyfe’s integrity was rarely called into ques­tion. He also con­ducted research in the area of police pro­ce­dures regard­ing domes­tic vio­lence, which led many law enforce­ment agen­cies to change their poli­cies toward arrest­ing the offender, rather than attempt­ing to medi­ate between involved parties.

One of Dr. Fyfe’s most sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the crim­i­nal jus­tice field may have been in rela­tion to the use of force against flee­ing felons. Prior to the Supreme Court rul­ing on Ten­nessee v. Gar­ner (1985), it was law­ful in many juris­dic­tions, includ­ing Ten­nessee, for a police offi­cer to shoot a flee­ing felony sus­pect. While work­ing for the Police Foun­da­tion, Dr. Fyfe was the pri­mary author on the Ami­cus Brief pre­sented to the Court. Due in part to his expert tes­ti­mony, the Court ruled that “[t]he Ten­nessee statute is uncon­sti­tu­tional inso­far as it autho­rizes the use of deadly force against, as in this case, an appar­ently unarmed, non­dan­ger­ous flee­ing sus­pect; such force may not be used unless nec­es­sary to pre­vent the escape and the offi­cer has prob­a­ble cause to believe that the sus­pect poses a sig­nif­i­cant threat of death or seri­ous phys­i­cal injury to the offi­cer or oth­ers.” This case set a Fed­eral prece­dent for all law enforce­ment agen­cies, in which many agen­cies sub­se­quently amended their poli­cies regard­ing the use of deadly force. This land­mark deci­sion led many law enforce­ment agen­cies to reex­am­ine their exist­ing pro­ce­dures to com­ply with the Court’s appli­ca­tion of the Fourth Amend­ment to the use of force.

Valid empir­i­cal research on police prac­tices has been shown to have an impact on the pro­fes­sional appli­ca­tion of polic­ing. For exam­ple, research, sub­se­quent to the court deci­sion in Gar­ner, showed how the pro­por­tion of minori­ties, specif­i­cally African-Americans, sub­jected to the use of deadly force by police decreased sig­nif­i­cantly, due pri­mar­ily to the increased restric­tions on the use of deadly force imposed by law enforce­ment agen­cies. James Fyfe was a leader in the research of polic­ing and his impact in the field of crim­i­nal jus­tice, both on an aca­d­e­mic and pro­fes­sional level, will con­tinue to res­onate for years to come.

Foot­notes:

[1] 42 U.S.C. 1983 is a civil action in which a per­son states a claim if he alleges that the defen­dant deprived him of a con­sti­tu­tional right while act­ing ‘under color’ of state law.

[2] 14141 of Title 42 of the Vio­lent Crime Con­trol and Law Enforce­ment Act of 1994 “It shall be unlaw­ful for any gov­ern­men­tal author­ity, or any agent thereof, or any per­son act­ing on behalf of a gov­ern­men­tal author­ity, to engage in a pat­tern or prac­tice of con­duct by law enforce­ment offi­cers or by offi­cials or employ­ees of any gov­ern­men­tal agency with respon­si­bil­ity for the admin­is­tra­tion of juve­nile jus­tice or the incar­cer­a­tion of juve­niles that deprives per­sons of rights, priv­i­leges, or immu­ni­ties secured or pro­tected by the Con­sti­tu­tion or laws of the United States.”

[3] Philadel­phia Mon­i­tor Takes Police to Task (Fran­cis X. Clines), NY Times, April 4th, 2001

Posted by CLieberman on Oct 15th, 2006 and filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site

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