RPD Citizen Academy: Power and Consent Through a Law Enforcement Lens

Our series on RPD’s Citizen Academy shares insights from a nine-week program which offers the public selective access to the inner workings of law enforcement. Here’s week 2.

Understanding when and how to use force – including lethal force – is considered a “perishable skill” for officers within California’s police departments. Every two years Redding Police Department (RPD) officers are required to train again on how and when to use force when contacting suspects. 

Sergeant Brian Berg is part of the RPD team that trains incoming cadets on the use of force. On March 27, during the second week of RPD’s Citizen Academy, Berg and two other officers provided an abbreviated version for participants of RPD’s Citizen Academy, basing the information on the biennial dual lecture and scenario certification process that police officers must complete. 

The presentation drew from a curriculum known as the Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST), which is used in police academies. POST materials break down the ways officers interface with the public into three discrete categories: contact, detainment and arrest.

Contact

Berg began his presentation by describing a process that police officers refer to as “consensual contact.”

Berg used this scenario: a police officer approaches you on the street, shakes your hand, and asks how you’re doing. This is a consensual contact, Berg explained, because the person being contacted by police feels that they can end the interaction at any time.  

“It doesn’t matter what our intent is,” Berg explained, speaking to the participants as citizens, “what matters is if you feel that you’re free to leave.” 

RPD’s approach to consensual contact mirrors that found in the state-approved POST training book. It’s a definition that runs counter to a more common understanding of the term consent. Mainstream sex education curricula, for example, defines consensual contact as beginning with a verbal request followed by an affirmative agreement to that particular contact. Asking for consent, instead of assuming it, is how students in school settings are taught to acknowledge a dynamic of power in which one party might feel unable or unwilling to end contact even when they want to. 

Under law enforcement’s use of the term, the reasons that police might “consensually contact” a community member vary. The POST workbook cites examples that include making small talk with people in the community, taking a witness statement at the scene of a car accident, or approaching a man suspected of using drugs. The police often use such initial contact as an attempt to gain evidence which could be used to detain or arrest a suspect.

Police are not allowed to require a civilian to engage in conversation with them, or respond to their questioning, unless there is “reasonable suspicion” to detain them. Individuals consensually contacted by police are free to go at any time, an idea backed by a recent California Supreme Court ruling that individuals cannot be detained for simply avoiding the police. 

Due to RPD’s “proactive policing” approach, officers spend time in the community regularly, frequently making contacts with people who they believe are predisposed to criminality. Underlying the “proactive” mindset used by some departments, including RPD, is the assumption that officers can prevent future crimes through the vigilant rooting out of nonviolent misdemeanors, such as drug possession. 

“Not every thief is a drug user, but every drug user is a thief–they go hand in hand,” Berg told the class confidently, before sharing his belief that getting a drug user off the street is effectively preventing a burglary. 

Proactive policing is often used for contact with so-called “chronic offenders,” a term some use to refer to individuals who have been frequently cited or arrested by law enforcement a situations which renders them increasingly visible to police and thus even more susceptible to future police-initiated surveillance and contact in a “proactive policing” environment. Thus the “chronic offender” designation compounds itself.

Detainment

As defined by the police, contact with a community member moves from consensual to non-consensual when they are detained. POST describes detainment as any action by a law enforcement officer “that would cause a reasonable person to believe they are not free to leave. Such a belief may result from physical restraint, unequivocal verbal commands, or other conduct by an officer.” 

The police can only detain someone if officers have a reasonable suspicion that the individual has engaged in criminal activity, are currently committing a crime in plain sight, or soon will. The reason for the detainment must be justifiable in a court of law, POST says, or the evidence gathered and charges placed can be dismissed later down the line. A subject may be detained only as long as it takes to confirm or discard such suspicion.  

Walking away from a police officer while being detained is a crime and responding to questioning during detainment in an erratic or aggressive way may give officers the green light to perform an arrest. Even so, individuals have the right to remain silent. Refusing to answer questions does not, on its own, constitute delaying, resisting, or obstructing arrest, and does not give officers probable cause to escalate a detainment to the third and most consequential type of police encounter, arrest. 

Arrest

If a detainment escalates to arrest, the person in police custody must be charged with a crime within 48 hours or released. 

As dictated by the Fourth Amendment, police must have probable cause to carry out an arrest. Probable cause has a higher threshold than reasonable suspicion, and is reliant on a set of facts including (but not limited to) direct investigations, second hand statements from sources, and circumstantial evidence. 

Officers may arrest someone if they have probable cause to believe that they have committed a felony, or if someone has committed a criminal offense in their presence. This can be determined by an officer’s broad reliance on their senses including sight, hearing, and even smell.

In addition to probable cause, lawful arrests may also be made pursuant to a court-issued warrant. 

There are certain conditions under which officers can conduct a warrantless search or seizure. For example, law enforcement can ask someone to empty their pockets while being frisked, and can seize drugs from a subject if they are in plain view. In some situations, law enforcement cal also conduct warrantless searches of people on parole and probation.

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Compliance and Use of Force

The contours of one’s rights when encountering the police may seem daunting to the average person. Accordingly, encounters with law enforcement are best-addressed, RPD Officer Berg emphasized, by always complying with police orders. Never resist, he insisted, because “almost every police shooting is preventable if the person being stopped just complied.”

What stops people from just doing as they’re told? Officers responding to the question from Citizen Academy participants surmised that lack of compliance could be caused by a “lack of education,” “a generational attitude,” or negative past experiences that contribute to certain communities’ distrust in police.

If education is the problem, one student suggested, perhaps teaching absolute compliance to officers should be part of high school curriculum.

There are also other reasons why individuals may fail to quickly or completely comply with police orders. For example, those experiencing a mental health crisis might be much less likely to comply, a situation which the class briefly discussed and acted out in a police training scenario following the lesson. 

Those impacted by disabilities such as autism may also have unpredictable responses to an armed officer and the hearing-impaired or those with auditory processing disorders may not understand a command at all. 

The last slides in Berg’s presentation were intended to focus on bias, but time had run out for the class to address to meaningfully discuss the topic. There was no mention of the systemic role that socioeconomic and racial profiling play in police shootings, as firmly evidenced by extensive data collection.

Use of Deadly Force 

As Shasta Scout has reported, by law officers can only legally resort to deadly force when it is “necessary to defend against an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the officer or to another person.” 

While an armed suspect may pose an imminent threat in many situations, the fact that an individual is armed is not enough to use deadly force, as clearly delineated by state law. 

California Penal Code § 835a describes imminent threat as a scenario in which “a reasonable officer in the same situation would believe that a person has the present ability, opportunity, and apparent intent to immediately cause death or serious bodily injury to the peace officer or another person.” 

“An imminent harm is not merely a fear of future harm” PC 835a continues, “no matter how great the fear and no matter how great the likelihood of the harm, but is one that, from appearances, must be instantly confronted and addressed.”

More simply put, legally carrying a firearm or other deadly weapon in and of itself is not enough to establish “imminent threat.” Menacing an officer with said deadly weapon, is.  

Under state law, police officers must always prioritize de-escalation over use of force when possible. Originally passed in 2019, Senate Bill 230 states that local law enforcement are required to “[utilize] deescalation techniques and other alternatives to force when feasible.”

The Bill was endorsed by the California Police Chiefs Association, but critics of the bill, including the League of Women Voters, take issue with the word “feasible,” arguing that it provides too much discretion to law enforcement. Responses to the wording of SB 230 fundamentally come down to whether one believes police officers can be trusted to exercise restraint.

According to RPD’s Officer Berg, they can.

“There are bad apples, absolutely,” Berg admitted during the class, but, he added, “we do not like injuring people.” Ultimately, he said, police are always aware that one highly publicized police killing can damage the reputations of police departments everywhere. 

In the aftermath of the use of lethal force by law enforcement, the County District Attorney is responsible for conducting an independent review to determine if the shooting was justified or not. 

After reviewing 19 use of force incidents that occurred in Shasta County between 2014–2023, the DA concluded that law enforcement had acted appropriately during every one of these violent encounters. Ten of those incidents involved actions by RPD officers. Of those ten, five indicate that the person shot seemed to have been suffering from a mental health crisis, one of whom, Donnell Lang, was unarmed.

Six individuals shot by Shasta County law enforcement since 2014 were armed with weapons. Two were said to have threatened the lives of officers with their cars. One brandished a BB gun that officers mistook for a pistol. 

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