Use of Force in Transition — The New Rules of Police Use of Force
Detailed Topics and Class Schedule
The Advanced Law Enforcement Symposium
Use of Force in Transition
The New Rules of Police Use of Force
Curriculum
13 Modules. Three Days. Every Level of Your Organization.
This session walks participants through the full lifecycle of an officer-involved shooting — from the moment of the shooting to the moment the civil verdict comes in — with emphasis on the investigative and command decisions that determine litigation outcomes.
Topics Covered
- Immediate post-shooting command decisions: scene preservation, witness separation, and the Garrity minefield
- Parallel investigation management: criminal, administrative, and civil timelines running simultaneously
- The compelled statement problem — when IA needs answers and the DA isn't done yet
- Body-camera footage management: who sees it, when, and what the law requires vs. what policy allows
- Use-of-force review boards and shooting teams: structure, independence, and litigation exposure
- How plaintiffs' attorneys use investigative failures to build Monell claims
- The DA's declination letter and why it doesn't end the civil case
- Barnes v. Felix and the post-control force doctrine
Post-Breonna Taylor, no-knock entries and tactical callout decisions have become command-level legal landmines. This session provides the legal framework every SWAT/SRT commander and agency counsel needs — delivered by three instructors whose combined experience spans SWAT command, constitutional law practice, and law enforcement policy at the highest levels.
Topics Covered
- Legal standards governing SWAT activation — when does Graham analysis attach to the decision to deploy?
- No-knock and quick-knock entry doctrine after the national policy backlash
- The negligent tactical deployment theory — liability for decision-makers, not just the entry team
- Tennessee v. Garner and deadly force during tactical operations, including unintended-target scenarios
- Flash-bang and breaching device liability
- Hostage and barricade situations: decision frameworks and failure-point analysis
- Training and policy documentation as a Monell shield
Every force incident sets a chain of institutional processes in motion — review boards, early warning flags, supervisor accountability reviews, and data collection obligations. Chief Gonzalez brings the perspective of a sitting chief and court-recognized use-of-force expert who has built and operated these systems from the inside.
Topics Covered
- Early warning systems: what they must capture, how courts evaluate them, and what failure looks like in discovery
- Use-of-force review boards: structure, independence, documentation, and Monell implications
- Supervisor accountability in force incidents — when the sergeant becomes a defendant
- The chief's ratification problem: how post-incident statements become evidence of municipal policy
- Force reporting systems: what data must be collected, how it must be stored, and what happens when it's incomplete
- Internal affairs and use-of-force investigations: independence, timelines, and the parallel proceeding minefield
- Building an audit-ready agency: practical steps before litigation arrives
Less-lethal force options are among the most frequently deployed and most frequently litigated tools in law enforcement. This session examines the full spectrum of less-lethal technology from multiple perspectives — constitutional framework, medical and liability risks, and the policy and training documentation required to defend their use.
Topics Covered
- Bryan v. MacPherson and Deorle v. Rutherford
- Proportionality analysis
- Post-deployment medical care
- Policy drafting and training requirements
De-escalation is no longer optional — courts are scrutinizing pre-force conduct more aggressively than at any point in the history of use-of-force litigation. Dr. John Peters reframes de-escalation not as a cultural mandate but as a constitutional and legal obligation with concrete consequences.
Topics Covered
- Graham v. Connor and Kingsley v. Hendrickson
- Duty-to-de-escalate trends
- Tactical repositioning, time, and distance
- Failure-to-de-escalate liability
- Case studies involving mentally ill subjects
The standard for justifiable force is set by the courts. The verdict is set by twelve people who have never worn a badge. This session examines how force cases are actually decided at trial, what factors drive jury outcomes independent of legal doctrine, and what command staff, trainers, and line officers can do to ensure the agency's position is as defensible in the courtroom as it was on the street.
Topics Covered
- The reasonable officer standard as written in case law vs. as understood by a jury
- How courts instruct juries on force decisions and what those instructions actually convey
- The role of BWC footage in jury deliberations: when video helps the defense and when it becomes the most damaging evidence
- How plaintiff's counsel constructs the narrative — language, framing, and emotional architecture
- Implicit bias evidence in use-of-force trials: how it gets admitted and how to counter it
- High-dollar verdict analysis: the cases that should have been defensible and the factors that determined the outcome
- Practical takeaways for training, documentation, and incident management in light of jury behavior research
The legal and investigative landscape surrounding officer-associated deaths has shifted fundamentally in the post-George Floyd era. This session equips officers, trainers, and command staff with a clear understanding of the medical realities, investigative obligations, and legal exposure that arise when someone dies during or following a law enforcement encounter.
Topics Covered
- The collapse of excited delirium as a medical and legal defense — what the AMA, AHA, and ACEP rejections mean for litigation
- Positional asphyxia: the physiology, the warning signs officers must recognize, and the legal duty to act
- Prone restraint and hobble restraints: where the law is moving post-George Floyd and post-Elijah McClain
- The restraint asphyxia theory in civil and criminal proceedings — how plaintiffs are now arguing causation
- Barnes v. Felix and the causation implications for post-control force in prone restraint cases
- Officer-associated death investigation: the first 60 minutes and the decisions that determine the legal outcome
- Policy and training updates agencies must make now in light of the shifting medical consensus
- Documentation: what to write, what not to write, and how autopsy findings interact with officer reports
K9 deployments are among the most actively litigated use-of-force scenarios in American law enforcement — and among the most undertrained at the command level. Sam Hall brings his litigation experience to bear on the constitutional framework governing every phase of a K9 deployment.
Topics Covered
- Constitutional threshold for K9 deployment under Graham v. Connor
- When courts treat K9 as deadly force — circuit splits and training implications
- "Find and bite" vs. "find and bark" policy debate and its litigation consequences
- Failure-to-call-off liability after compliance or surrender
- Appellate trends: extended bites, inadvertent deployment, bystander injuries
- Policy drafting: training documentation, use-of-force reporting, and after-action requirements
The officer report written in the first hour after a force incident is the single most important document in any subsequent civil or criminal proceeding. This session examines how force documentation is used, dissected, and weaponized in litigation.
Topics Covered
- The force report as litigation document: how plaintiff's counsel reads it, what they look for, and how they use it
- Inconsistency between the report and BWC footage: the single most damaging evidentiary problem in force litigation
- The supervisor's approval signature: what it means legally and why rubber-stamping creates independent liability
- Parallel use of the same report in criminal, administrative, and civil proceedings — and why language choices matter
- Common documentation failures that turn defensible force into indefensible litigation
- What legally defensible documentation looks like: specificity, objectivity, and the language courts trust
- Report writing in the BWC era: how to write for the camera you know was running
Managing force in a crowd is one of the most constitutionally complex situations in law enforcement. Chief Gonzalez and Jeb Brown draw on real case outcomes to give participants a practical framework they can apply immediately.
Topics Covered
- The constitutional framework for force in crowd situations — how Graham applies when the threat is diffuse
- Less-lethal munitions in crowd control: the specific liability standards courts apply to mass deployment scenarios
- Mutual aid and unified command: who is legally responsible when officers from multiple agencies use force at the same event
- The command accountability chain in civil unrest: how orders given at incident command level become Monell evidence
- Dispersal orders, unlawful assembly declarations, and First Amendment boundaries on force authorization
- Documentation in the chaos: after-action reporting requirements when individual force incidents cannot be individually attributed
- The Minnesota, Portland, and Seattle litigation: what the verdicts and settlements tell agencies
- Building a civil unrest use-of-force policy before the next event
Every officer who has used force has experienced the moment when the video becomes the story and their account of what they perceived becomes secondary. This session examines the science of why that happens, and what agencies and officers must do to ensure their position is as defensible in the courtroom as it was on the street.
Topics Covered
- What the BWC actually captures and what it structurally cannot — fixed angle, two-dimensional recording vs. the officer's full sensory experience
- The God's Eye Fallacy in force litigation: how juries treat BWC footage as a neutral, omniscient record and why that assumption is scientifically false
- The science of stress physiology and perception: tachypsychia, tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, and memory distortion
- The hindsight problem: how BWC footage structurally reintroduces the hindsight bias that Graham v. Connor was designed to exclude
- How plaintiff's counsel presents video evidence at trial: slow motion, freeze-frame, zoom, and narrative strategies
- Writing reports that capture perception, not just events: why the difference matters enormously in litigation
- Training implications: how agencies can build curricula that prepare officers to articulate the gap between perception and video
One of the most consequential and chronically undertrained legal obligations in American policing. Every federal circuit has recognized it. States are codifying it with criminal penalties. Officers are being federally prosecuted for it. Yet most agencies treat it as a paragraph in a policy manual rather than a skill that requires genuine training.
Topics Covered
- The constitutional foundation: the three-element test every circuit applies — constitutional violation, officer awareness, and realistic opportunity to prevent it
- The rank irrelevance rule — why "it wasn't my call" is not a defense regardless of seniority, binding in Wisconsin under Byrd v. Brishke (7th Cir.)
- The scope question: does the duty extend beyond excessive force to false arrest, deprivation of medical care, and other constitutional violations
- The criminal dimension: federal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 242, the Kueng and Thao convictions
- State statutory liability: the Colorado model, criminal misdemeanor exposure, and the legislative trend
- The supervisor who directs the force: when command authority eliminates the duty-to-intervene defense
- Policy drafting: what a legally defensible duty-to-intervene policy must say
- Barnes v. Felix and the duty to intervene: how the post-control force doctrine defines the intervention window
- Scenario workshop: the sudden kick, the prolonged restraint, the supervisor-directed force
The law never stops moving. This closing session looks around the corner — at issues percolating in the lower courts, legislative trends building in state capitals, and operational developments that will generate the next generation of use-of-force litigation. Each issue is opened to the room: Are you already seeing this in your agency?
Issues on the Table
- The Qualified Immunity Abolition Act — what happens to force litigation if federal QI disappears
- Artificial intelligence and the automation of force decisions — the liability vacuum no one has filled
- The expanding duty to render aid — where courts are pushing post-force medical care obligations
- Body-worn camera AI analytics — when the algorithm flags your officer before you do
- The next generation of less-lethal technology and the constitutional framework courts will build around it
- State legislative trends — the jurisdictions most likely to pass significant use-of-force reform in the next two years
Faculty
Practitioners. Litigators. Experts.
Sheriff Delain began his law enforcement career as a U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Special Agent, serving in the Persian Gulf War and Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti. He joined the Brown County Sheriff's Office in 1996, serving in the Jail and Patrol Divisions, the Drug Task Force, and specialty units including SWAT and the Mobile Field Force. Elected Sheriff in 2018, he is a graduate of the FBI National Academy and a past President of the FBI National Academy Associates — Wisconsin Chapter.
Samuel C. Hall, Jr. is the Managing Partner of Crivello, Nichols & Hall, S.C. and widely regarded as one of Wisconsin's leading attorneys in law enforcement civil rights litigation. He has successfully defended hundreds of law enforcement officers, agencies, and government officials in high-profile cases in Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, and beyond, with appearances before the U.S. Supreme Court and multiple federal circuits. Hall holds the top AV-Preeminent rating by Martindale-Hubbell and has been recognized by Best Lawyers in America and Wisconsin Super Lawyers.
Chief Gonzalez is the 22nd Chief of Police of the Riverside Police Department, where he has served for more than 30 years. His command experience includes SWAT, K9, and Force Training Unit assignments. He has been an instructor at the Riverside County Sheriff's Academy for over 20 years, teaching use of force, defensive tactics, and civil liability. He is recognized as a Subject Matter Expert in police use of force in both state and federal court and is a graduate of the FBI National Academy.
Dr. John Peters is one of the nation's foremost experts on the behavioral science of use of force, de-escalation, and officer-associated death. A nationally recognized trainer, researcher, and expert witness, Dr. Peters has consulted with law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and defense counsel across the country. His work bridges the gap between the science of human performance under stress and the legal standards by which force decisions are evaluated.
Dave Berman is the Principal of Berman L.E. Group, LLC, a national law enforcement training and consulting organization specializing in less-lethal weapons systems, use-of-force policy, and tactical training. He has trained law enforcement personnel domestically and internationally, including specialized units in corrections, SWAT, and patrol operations, and has extensive experience in use-of-force incident analysis and training program development.
Jeb Brown is a retired Chief Assistant County Counsel for the County of Riverside, California, where he served as lead counsel on law enforcement matters from 2014 to 2021. Prior to that appointment, he spent 20 years as a Supervising Deputy City Attorney for the City of Riverside, serving as Police Legal Advisor and primary legal counsel to the Riverside Police Department. He is the founder and president of Shield Public Safety Training, a national law enforcement education organization delivering advanced constitutional law training to chiefs, sheriffs, command staff, and agency counsel.
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Attendees will receive a certificate of completion reflecting all contact hours. Wisconsin agencies may apply those hours toward LESB annual in-service training requirements at the agency's discretion. No pre-approval from the LESB is required for discretionary in-service hours.
Shield PST is seeking CLE credit approval in Wisconsin (up to approx. 16 credit hours) and California (up to approx. 20 MCLE participatory hours). Approval pending in both jurisdictions. Confirmed hours will be posted at shieldpst.org as approvals are received.