Book review: Seth W Stoughton, Jeffrey J Noble and Geoffrey P Alpert, Evaluating Police Uses of Force
| Author | Michael Sierra-Arévalo |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620965174 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620965174
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(1) 1 –3
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620965174
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Book review
Seth W Stoughton, Jeffrey J Noble and Geoffrey P Alpert, Evaluating Police Uses of Force, New
York University Press: New York, 2020; 352 pp.: 9781479814657, $60.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Michael Sierra-Arévalo, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Half a century after Egon Bittner (1970: 46) concluded that the police are best under-
stood as “a mechanism for the distribution of non-negotiably coercive force”, the institu-
tion of policing remains the visible and physical “or else” of the state (Bittner, 1990: 10).
Just as violence has remained a core feature of the police role, so has its misuse persisted
despite decades of enhanced professionalization, expanded training, and technological
innovation. Amid a global pandemic, the summer of 2020 saw the police killing of
George Floyd spur the largest protest movement in US history, confirming once again
just how central violence is to policing that, in turn, shapes governance and the function
of democratic life. The use, evaluation, and control of police violence are, undoubtedly,
among the most pressing topics of this historical moment.
Drawing on their academic and practical expertise in law, criminology, and policing,
Stoughton, Noble, and Alpert’s Evaluating Police Uses of Force is a timely and needed
tool with which to engage in critical debates around policing and police violence. The
central goal of the text is deceptively simple: analyze how instances of police violence
are evaluated based on various standards currently employed in the United States. As the
authors show, however, these standards—be they legal, administrative, or community-
based—are complex, inconsistent, and often misaligned.
The first three chapters lay out a labyrinth of constitutional, state, and administrative
standards in outstanding detail, laying bare just how convoluted the evaluation of police
violence is. For example, the authors describe the seeming contradiction whereby a con-
stitutional use of force may be illegal according to state law, just as a use of force that is
legal under state law may be unconstitutional. This is to say nothing of the marked state-
level variation in laws governing police violence under a range of circumstances, much
less the administrative standards which individual departments use to practically guide
officers’ understanding of the exceedingly murky concept of “reasonableness”. Indeed,
as the authors point out, these agency-level policies are themselves often based on an
imperfect amalgamation of state and constitutional law, further complicating what might
be assumed by an outside observer to be a straightforward calculation of legality.
965174TCR0010.1177/1362480620965174Theoretical CriminologyBook review
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