The purpose of this research is to examine the issue of whether and when police use of deadly force is justified. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the issue has emerged, and then to discuss the saliency of these arguments in respect of competing arguments as well as in respect of implications that Reiman's article raises.
It would seem that deadly force is a matter of practical determination, a judgment made by a cop in the field in a life-or-death situation. But as Felkenes points out, among trainers of policemen in particular and in the academic discipline of criminal justice in particular, awareness of the need to impart ethical content to criminal justice students at all levels has grown. The focus on moral aspects of policing means that the concept of abuse of force would be taught hand in hand with that of deadly force use.
Some commentators develop the moral and philosophical arguments surrounding deadly force in a way that emphasizes the method, process, and context in which one set of citizen-agents is empowered to act against or on behalf of other sets of citizens. Reiman discusses the philosophical definitions of the social contract and the phenomenon of deadly force before moving to the more discretionary discussion of criteria for the use by police of deadly force and the factors that enter into the judgment exercised based on those criteria. It is only after he has discussed these theoretical factors that he imposes what could be called a "practical" or real-world factor onto the discussion--that of the social and political realities of inequality.
The discussion of the social contract sets the moral and social context in which the potentiality of deadly police force may be discussed. The give-and-take of prerogatives in power relationships between individuals is the basis for the social contract, which derives from the tendency to abstract from, in greater or lesser degree, the ...