By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

Police Chief Lane Roberts believes the Joplin Police Department’s use-of-force numbers for the current year are in line with those of other law-enforcement agencies nationwide and are remaining consistent from quarter to quarter.

The Police Department recently released summaries of its Internal Affairs and use-of-force reports for the first three quarters of 2007. Release of the summaries to the public and the media is a practice initiated this year by Roberts, who became chief in April.

“What I’m seeing is, at this point, an agency with lots of opportunities to use force but shows great restraint,” Roberts said in a recent interview.

Joplin police officers employed some level of force 110 times this year through the end of September, according to the reports. There were 145 officer involvements in those uses of force, meaning that more than one officer had a hand in some of the 110 instances.

Officers made 5,268 arrests over the nine-month reporting period, making the use-of-force rate about 2.75 percent in terms of officer involvements.

Roberts said that rate is slightly lower than rates he saw while he was chief of the Redmond Police Department in Oregon. He said it is significantly lower than the use-of-force rates for the Yakima County Sheriff’s Department in Washington, where he was undersheriff in the late 1990s.

Roberts said he believes the equipping of law-enforcement agencies with Tasers in recent years has lowered use-of-force rates.

“I think they’ve had a deterrent effect, and I’m certain they’ve had a reducing effect on the number of injuries sustained by arrestees,” he said.

Tasers were deployed by Joplin officers 28 times during the first three quarters of the year, or about once in every 188 arrests, according to the reports. That works out to a rate of about 0.5 percent, which Roberts said is an appropriate level of use.

He said there is a general public misunderstanding of police use of Tasers. People tend to think of the Taser as a weapon that police use to punish and to inflict pain on someone they are arresting when it actually is a means of safeguarding a suspect, he said.

“Its purpose is to reduce your ability to resist so we can arrest you without injuring you,” Roberts said.

The Taser allows officers to avoid use of more physical holds or takedowns that pose a higher risk of injury to suspects and officers, he said. While Tasers represent a temporarily unpleasant experience for suspects, they are not “painful” in the sense that a broken bone or torn muscle might be, he said.

Tasers were the second most common type of force employed by Joplin officers over the reporting period, according to the department’s figures. There were 42 instances of officers employing a take-to-ground approach, a control tactic that is more likely to result in injury than use of a Taser, Roberts said.

“But we’re very aware of the public perception of (Tasers), and we try to avoid the perception of misuse or abuse,” he said.

One of the reasons that a take-to-ground approach remains the most common use of force is that not every officer is certified to use a Taser, Roberts said. About half of the Joplin Police Department is certified, he said.

The next most common types of force deployed this year by Joplin police have been physical restraint (12), come-alongs (11), pushes (11) and armbars (10), according to the reports.

The Police Department’s dogs were used just once through the end of September in a use-of-force incident, and that was for a domestic-violence incident in March. The deployment of a dog in the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant robbery in September was not counted among the use-of-force numbers because the dog, Cezar, never actually engaged with the suspect before being fatally shot.

A summary of the department’s Internal Affairs report for the first three quarters shows a total of 52 complaints were received, 31 from the public and 21 from within the Police Department. Of the 52 complaints, 21 were sustained — meaning the allegations were found to be true — after investigations by the Internal Affairs unit, supervisors or the department’s accident/pursuit review board.

Seven of the 31 complaints received from the public and 14 of the 21 generated within the department were sustained.

Roberts said the department tracks and reviews complaints in an effort to detect patterns of conduct among officers. But, he said, the complaints received this year from the public have been most frequently about clashes of personalities between officers and complainants, and not job performance.

“You don’t see many of those ‘big-ticket’ items,” Roberts said. “Mostly it’s about personalities.”

Of 12 complaints received in the third quarter, just four were sustained after investigations. Two of those that were sustained came from the public, two from inside the agency.

Roberts said one of the complaints from the public that was sustained involved an officer’s refusal to provide his badge number when requested by a resident. The officer was required to undergo counseling.

The other sustained public complaint entailed overall rudeness of an officer in making an imprudent remark, he said. The officer received a written reprimand.

One of the two sustained internal complaints concerned an officer who was involved in an accident at an intersection while responding to an emergency call, Roberts said. Counseling was recommended in that case. A written reprimand was issued to an officer in the other internal case, in which “a procedural mistake” led to “an inadvertent rights violation,” according to the Police Department.

The names of officers involved in reported complaints are not released by the department because of the confidentiality of personnel records.





Resistance



The most common form of resistance that has drawn use of force by Joplin police this year is categorized as “uncooperative behavior” (27 percent). Other leading forms of resistance drawing use of force are “pulling away” (23 percent); use of “hands, fists or feet” (19 percent); “passive resistance” (10 percent); and “running” (10 percent).