Quotes from Nick Selby

The fact is, though, that until society understands the process, the law, and the methodology of investigations, it will continue to react to investigations with general distrust. It is a truth that one cannot detect "abnormal" until one understands what "normal" looks like. It is our contention that too much of the public debate has been held on emotional, as opposed to factual and legal grounds.

The goal is to give stakeholders the tools they need to better understand whether law enforcement is fairly and justly treating the public it is sworn to protect. The goal is not to stanch criticism or suppress controversy. It is to produce clean, clear and actionable data that both sides can use to intelligently and meaningfully debate the way forward.

In this book we ask several questions about how we are being policed, including whether police are treating citizens fairly, with respect for their lives and Constitutional rights.

And all three are different from policing in smaller cities and towns across the country.

In the introduction we mentioned that there were around 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. Three-quarters of America's 12,300 local police departments employ 24 or fewer officers; 48% employ fewer than 10 officers, and, in 2015, 5% employed a single officer.

The main thing law enforcement has in common throughout the country are the Constitutional limitations of officers' use of deadly force. The overriding law of the land that is most often looked to in cases in which officers use any force option, including deadly force, is Graham v. Connor (490 U.S. 386 (1989)).

Along with clarification of issues surrounding seizures, the court's ruling stated that, "[t]he 'reasonableness' of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight." What this established was that the crucial element was how the officer measured the situation and its elements at the time, regardless of what may have been discovered later.

It also noted that the test for reasonableness … "is not capable of precise definition or mechanical application," and therefore the test's "proper application requires careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case.

Police-Citizen Interactions At a high level, it is easiest to separate contacts into two broad categories: citizen-initiated and self-initiated. Generally speaking, most self-initiated encounters are traffic stops. Of deadly incidents in 2015, 73% did not begin on a traffic stop, and 27% began on traffic stops.