photo by: AdobeStock

A police firearm is shown.

When it comes to being a law enforcement officer in Kansas, you better have done some reading before you ever pull your weapon.

The Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center — the University of Kansas-run center near Hutchinson that trains the vast majority of police officers in the state — has extensive classes full of legal definitions and standards related to when police officers can use force as part of their job.

The center recently shared classroom materials on the subject with the Journal-World. Here’s a look at some of the key laws governing when Kansas law enforcement officers can legally use force.

• If a law enforcement officer uses force of any kind — deadly or not — it must be for at least one of four reasons. Those are: to make an arrest; to prevent an escape; to defend themselves; or to protect a citizen.

• When it comes to using deadly force, the rules are more specific. The situation must involve a “violent fleeing felon,” or a “dangerous suspect,” or be a situation where the officer is protecting him or herself or another citizen. As is stated in a widely used U.S. Supreme Court Case — Tenn. v Garner — “a police officer may not seize and unarmed, non-dangerous suspect by shooting him dead.”

• The public most often thinks of deadly force as officers using their firearms, but the center notes that there are several other types of actions that can be considered deadly force by an officer. Those include: Use of a police vehicle as a weapon; use of police dogs; use of batons or flashlights to strike a person. In general the center advises that an action could be considered deadly force anytime “an instrument or tool is used to arrest a suspect in such a way that it is highly unlikely that the fleeing suspect will escape without serious injury.”

• The public generally thinks of a suspect as being dangerous if they are armed. KLETC legal staff, however, note that the definition of a “dangerous suspect” goes beyond someone who is merely armed. A dangerous suspect is someone who has threatened the officer with a weapon or the officer “has probable cause to believe the suspected committed an offense in which they inflicted or threatened to inflict serious physical injury.” Courts generally have ruled that suspects “armed with guns, knives, flashlights or those who use a vehicle as a weapon,” are dangerous.

• What an officer reasonably believes at the time force is used is critical to determining whether the use of force was legal. “One of the principals of use of force is that force an officer reasonably believes is necessary is the only lawful force. This simply means at the time force was employed, the officer reasonably believed it was necessary at the moment it was used. This decision cannot be made on ‘what might happen,’ instead it must be made on ‘what is happening.'”

• Ending the use of force at the appropriate time also is critical to determining whether the use of force was legal. “The application of force must end when the situation creating the need for the application of force has been resolved. In other words, once the danger is is past, there is no further need to use force. For example, if an officer has successfully deployed a TASER on an attacking subject, the officer may not be justified in additional deployments simply because the subject does not comply with verbal commands to put their hands behind their back.”