A Citizen’s Guide to Violence in Minneapolis

I will spare you a discussion of the hows and whys of my discovery of it, but a little more than a decade ago, I discovered one of the most interesting and informative little books I have ever read. As a student of American politics and public policy and an analyst specializing in the intersection of politics and markets, it’s a book I’d never expected to read, much less to find as fascinating and edifying as I did. As (mostly bad) luck would have it, however, it’s also a tome that explains a great deal about what is going on in our country right now and offers practical advice—to both sides—on how best to de-escalate current tensions.

The book is called Force Decisions: A Citizen’s Guide, and it was written by Rory Miller, who served for many years as “a corrections officer and sergeant working booking, maximum security, and mental health units” and “trained corrections and enforcement officers, primarily in force-related skills… and force policy.” Miller’s purpose in writing Force Decisions was, as the subhead puts it, to help civilians understand how police determine appropriate use of force.

The book is structured around a series of “hard truths,” each of which gives a glimpse into the issues that surround law enforcement use of force and provides a framework for understanding the conditions that necessitate force escalation. The author and his publisher are very careful to note that their work does not constitute formal legal advice (and I reiterate that here), yet it’s clear that the point of all of this is to enable those who have no professional law enforcement experience to appreciate the decision-making process in the use of force, even—or especially—when that process must be completed in a split second.

Interestingly—and tellingly—before introducing these hard truths, Miller is clear that he does NOT want to change the minds of those who are predisposed to think that law enforcement officers are always in the wrong and are mere tools of state oppression. Rather, he writes, he absolutely wants skeptics to maintain their skepticism and to scrutinize each and every force decision made by law enforcement. Skeptics act as a check against the overuse and abuse of force, he notes, and as bizarre as it might sound, they are invaluable to law enforcement agencies. The only thing Miller asks is that the skeptics’ objections “be based on facts and not emotions.”