Police chief deems use-of-force frequency about right w/ JPD use-of-force summary and Internal Affairs report

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.