IF EUROPE’S POLICE CAN, WHY CAN’T WE?

A Systems-Thinking Case for Improving Police Use of Deadly Force

[Executive Summary: Constitutional baselines like Graham v. Connor set a legal floor for civil liability, not an operational ceiling for preserving life. Relying on “objective reasonableness” permits predictable, preventable fatal encounters to repeat, destroying community trust and triggering costly settlements. Fatal encounters are systemic process failures, not isolated “bad apple” incidents. Departments must apply continuous quality management through aggregate data tracking, body-camera audits, eliminating aggressive high-volume tactics, and conducting multidisciplinary Sentinel Event Reviews. The “Stanford Model Use of Force Policy” translates the European “absolute necessity” standard into an actionable administrative blueprint requiring force to be “strictly necessary,” proportional, and minimum feasible, with mandatory de-escalation, time, distance, and cover. More restrictive force policies reduce civilian fatalities without increasing officer injuries. Eliminating avoidable crises safeguards officers from severe occupational moral injury, PTSD, and suicide. Standards can be raised via Chief-issued SOPs, mayoral executive directives, or civic electoral pressure in the upcoming elections.]

A Legacy of Seeking Improvement

When high-profile, fatal police encounters shake public confidence, the national response often mirrors two pivotal moments in American law enforcement history: the 1967 Katzenbach Commission (President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice)¹ and the 2015 President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing².

Separated by nearly half a century, both landmark panels reached a remarkably uniform conclusion: statutory standards set a legal floor, not an operational ceiling. True accountability requires local executive leaders to exercise administrative rule-making to strictly govern police discretionary authority and the use of lethal force.

Rather than waiting for legislative mandates or broad judicial baselines to evolve, administrative rule-making empowers city executives and police chiefs to proactively establish internal policies that prioritize de-escalation, restrict lethal force, and codify community partnership.

Nowhere has this legacy been more clearly demonstrated than here in Madison, Wisconsin. Beginning in the early 1970s, municipal leadership turned administrative policy into a tool for systemic change. By pioneering Community-Oriented Policing—replacing rigid, confrontational tactics with guardian-style policing, internal democracy, and high-trust community engagement—Madison established a decades-long precedent proving that raising internal operational standards dramatically reduces police-involved deaths while simultaneously protecting officer safety³.

We write this paper as a coalition to inform our fellow citizens and elected leaders of what organizational improvements are genuinely possible in our own backyard. Many residents are unaware of the structural administrative power our community already possesses:

• An elected Mayor is the statutory head of the police department. Under Wisconsin state law, the police chief must follow the lawful orders of the mayor.
• Police Chiefs do not have unilateral control. While chiefs hold tenure, the citizen Police and Fire Commission (PFC) holds the ultimate authority to discipline or fire a chief or officer.
• Administrative rule-making allows action today. As a city, we possess full authority to establish stricter internal force standards immediately.

This paper poses a direct question to our city: Why can’t we in Madison learn from our national commissions and adopt Europe’s far lower rates of police-involved deaths?

Lessons Beyond the Badge: A Local Precedent

Systemic change can sound theoretical until you see how deeply embedded operational habits can be altered on the ground.

During the early 1970s, Madison was confronted with a police culture heavily reliant on physical force, rigid command hierarchies, and deep mistrust toward a protesting public. Officers were accustomed to responding to friction with escalation. When leadership introduced administrative rule-making, soft-style uniforms, mandatory de-escalation tactics, higher education requirements, and peacemaking as an explicit goal, internal and external pushback was immense. Critics claimed these methods would endanger officers.

Yet, over two decades, as the department moved toward guardian policing and continuous quality improvement, a collaborative and soft approach to protest, something remarkable happened: officer safety improved, community trust skyrocketed, and police-involved deaths plummeted—only one person was killed by police action from 1972 to 1993³.

When a police agency stops treating citizens as adversaries and starts managing community safety as a shared responsibility, the job becomes safer for everyone—including the officer on the beat.

What Is Meant “Quality”?

To an ordinary citizen, “quality” can sound like a squishy corporate buzzword—especially in policing, where it often competes with traditional metrics like response times or arrest counts. In their foundational work on municipal management, Lee Cheaney and Maury Cotter defined quality in a way that remains deeply relevant⁴:

“Quality is a comprehensive approach to the organization and the design of work processes. It is a way to think about stuff. It is a way to treat each other. It is a way to constantly improve everything we lay our hands on.”

Applied directly to policing, quality is measured by community trust, safety, support and satisfaction. A high-quality police organization views the community as a genuine partner to listen to, serve, and protect. Above all, it demands an absolute commitment to continuous, systemic improvement and even “customer satisfaction.”

Even today, the Madison Police Department lists “continuous improvement” as one of its explicit organizational values⁵. Applying continuous improvement to critical incidents and deadly force is simply asking the department to live up to its own stated values⁶.

A City in Crisis: The Death of Corey Ruiz and Others

Throughout the years, police shootings in America have followed a predictable, tragic cycle: outrage, grief, occupation, memorial, confrontation, property damage, and reignition once officials justify the use of force. The recent death of Corey Ruiz at the hands of Madison police appears bent on following that same familiar script.

Currently, multiple entities are investigating the Ruiz killing by Madison police on July 22nd: the state Department of Justice, the district attorney, internal affairs, and the Independent Police Monitor. Regardless of legal outcomes, rebuilding trust with a badly strained community remains the deeper task confronting our city.

Nine city residents have been shot and killed by Madison police since the 1990s, many under questionable circumstances. In those cases, officers were absolved under the low legal bar of the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court’s Graham v. Connorstandard of objective reasonableness⁷. Yet, civil settlements and jury awards have cost taxpayers over $10 million, and widespread protest followed almost every incident.

However, Administrative rules can establish stricter standards beyond what judicial baselines permit. Madison proved this in the 1970s. At the time, Wisconsin statute permitted police to use deadly force against any fleeing felon, legally allowing an officer to shoot a non-violent property suspect. Recognizing that “lawful was awful,” Madison police leadership enacted internal rules restricting lethal force exclusively to immediately dangerous threats. Over a decade later, those internal rules became the law of the land in Tennessee v. Garner (1985)⁸.

A Systems Problem, Not a “Bad Apple” Problem

A “bad apple” approach looks to blame individual employees when mistakes occur. A systems-thinking approach examines how the work design itself contributed to or caused the outcome.

Madison does not have a problem with a few “bad cops” shooting people; it has a system whose processes, training, and culture predictably lead to lethal outcomes. Instead of exhorting police officers to “be careful” while keeping the system intact, effective reform requires data collection, process redesign, continuous training, and measuring success by how few injuries or deaths occur.

To reduce injuries and deaths, four core quality practices must be steadfastly applied:

• Insist on data, not incident-by-incident reaction: Track and aggregate every officer-involved shooting, near-miss, and use of force to identify systemic patterns rather than treating each event as an isolated aberration.
• Treat body-worn cameras as a systems data source: Review camera archives in aggregate—much like airlines review flight-data recorders—to catch tactical near-misses before they turn fatal.
• Eliminate arbitrary targets and aggressive tactics: High-volume stop-and-frisk tactics sacrifice public trust for numerical noise, mathematically increasing the probability of lethal encounters.
• Practice continuous systems improvement through “Sentinel Event” reviews: A sentinel event is an unexpected occurrence involving death or serious injury—demanding an immediate, multidisciplinary root-cause analysis to examine dispatch data, officer fatigue, and tactical options⁹.

The Legal Floor vs. The European Standard

Most American police departments teach deadly force under Graham v. Connor, which asks only whether force was “objectively reasonable” to a fearful officer in the instant before pulling the trigger.

To save lives, police must abandon objective reasonableness as their ceiling and adopt the standard used across Europe: absolute necessity. Derived from Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, absolute necessity permits lethal force only when no other possible option exists. In McCann v. United Kingdom (1995), the European Court ruled that this standard evaluates the entire tactical planning and approach, not just the final split second¹⁰.

The comparative numbers make the point starkly¹¹:

Country	Fatal Police Shootings (per million residents/year)
United States	≈ 3.3
France	≈ 0.4
Germany	≈ 0.15
England and Wales	< 0.03
Norway, Finland, Iceland	Some years: Zero

Critics may argue that America’s saturation of firearms makes European comparisons invalid. But even in an armed nation, absolute necessity forces agencies to prioritize distance, cover, and tactical de-escalation long before a trigger is pulled—and many European countries have strong hunting cultures and household weapons. The primary difference is the standard by which police are trained, led, and judged.

A Ready-Made American Blueprint: The Stanford Model Policy

Moving from the low legal baseline of Graham to a higher standard of absolute necessity is not an abstract theory—it is actionable right now. American legal scholars are already providing the exact administrative blueprints departments need.

In its groundbreaking study—Police Use of Force Policies Across America (2025)—the Stanford Center for Racial Justice at Stanford Law School completed the largest systematic analysis of American force regulations to date¹². Analyzing 2,200 regulations across 100 major U.S. cities, Stanford scholars revealed a critical finding: 48% of surveyed departments have already adopted standards setting a higher bar than Graham v. Connor, demonstrating that local agencies do not need to wait for courts or state legislatures to mandate reform.

To bridge the gap between bare legal floors and operational excellence, the Stanford team published a comprehensive Model Use of Force Policy structured around 10 core modules—from authorization standards to de-escalation and duty to intervene¹². This framework translates international best practices directly into actionable administrative rules for municipal police departments:

• Strict Necessity and Proportionality: It explicitly mandates that lethal force may only be used when absolutely necessary to prevent imminent death or serious bodily injury, and only when all non-lethal alternatives have been exhausted or determined to be ineffective.
• Mandatory De-escalation and Tactical Patience: Rather than judging an encounter solely by the final split second a trigger is pulled, the policy requires officers to actively create time, distance, and cover, making de-escalation a binding operational duty rather than an optional suggestion.
• Proactive Administrative Action: Crucially, the Stanford report reinforces that local cities and police executives do not need to wait for state legislatures or constitutional rulings to change. Local leadership can adopt these exact model rules through administrative policy today.

By pairing the proven lessons of European policing with concrete American frameworks like the Stanford Model Policy, Madison has everything it needs to raise the standard. The language is already written—what remains is the municipal leadership to adopt it.

American Examples of “Raising the Bar” Beyond Graham

Is it realistic to expect a police department or state to hold officers to a standard higher than the U.S. Supreme Court’s “objective reasonableness” standard in Graham?

The answer is a strong yes. Across the country, forward-thinking legislatures, state attorneys general, and progressive police departments have already proven that raising the bar is entirely feasible—and necessary¹³:

• California (Assembly Bill 392): In 2019, California officially redefined its state deadly force statute. The law moved away from allowing force whenever it was merely “reasonable” and raised the standard to strict necessity. Under California law, officers may use deadly force only when necessary to defend against an imminent threat of death or serious injury, requiring courts and departments to evaluate officer de-escalation efforts prior to shooting¹³.
• Washington State (House Bill 1310): Washington enacted a statutory duty of reasonable care requiring peace officers to exhaust all available and appropriate de-escalation tactics before resorting to physical force, restricting force strictly to imminent threats¹³.
• New Jersey: The New Jersey Attorney General issued a statewide Use of Force Policy mandating de-escalation, tactical patience, and proportionality for all law enforcement officers in the state. Similarly, cities like Seattle and Baltimore—operating under federal consent decrees—implemented internal administrative policies that restrict force far beyond the bare Fourth Amendment baseline¹³.

Comparing the Frameworks: Human Rights Law vs. Administrative Reform

While both the Stanford Law School Model Use of Force Policy and the Europe’s replace permissive “reasonableness” with a strict “last resort” framework, they differ fundamentally in legal status, institutional scope, and specific exceptions. 

Europe’s absolute necessity is a binding human rights treaty that imposes strict institutional liability on the state for both the planning and execution of force. In contrast, the Stanford Model is an administrative blueprint designed to elevate current U.S. department standards above the permissive constitutional floor of Graham. The Stanford Model establishes a tighter threshold for deadly force and enforces a narrower operational scope tailored to municipal policy rather than international rights adjudication.

Alignment with the 2015 Presidential Task Force

This shift does not reinvent the wheel—it directly fulfills the blueprint laid out over a decade ago. In the 2015 Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, the report explicitly called on local agencies to update use-of-force policies to emphasize de-escalation, alternatives to force, and restrictive standards centered on the sanctity of human life².

The Task Force made it clear: Graham was intended to establish the lowest constitutional floor to shield officers from federal civil liability. It was never intended to serve as a department’s operational definition of excellence. Local executive leadership was always expected to use administrative policy to raise the standard.

If the recommendations are clear and the precedents exist, why haven’t more municipalities adopted these rules?

• Confusing Legal Floors with Policy Ceilings: City attorneys and police leadership frequently fall into the trap of using Graham as a shield. They treat the Supreme Court’s minimum constitutional liability threshold as if it were a high-quality operational standard.
• Union and Cultural Resistance: Opponents frequently claim that restricting force creates dangerous hesitation on the street. While understandable, this argument ignores real-world data from Europe and reform-minded U.S. departments showing that mandatory de-escalation, distance, and cover reduce officer injuries and reduce lethal encounters.
• The Public Knowledge Gap: Most citizens and local elected officials—including mayors and city council members—simply do not realize that state law and federal court rulings do not restrict them from establishing stricter internal department rules today.

The obstacle is not legal or operational—it is political. The precedent is set, the task force recommendations are clear, and the administrative power already rests in local hands.

Won’t This Make Police Work More Dangerous?

Many citizens and police representatives express this concern: If we restrict when police can use force, won’t that put officers in danger? The data, scientific research, and practical experience show the exact opposite. Raising the bar is a vital protective measure designed to safeguard officers’ lives, mental health, and operational safety.

• Protecting Our Police Officers: Humans are psychologically wired against killing one another; when an officer takes a human life—even in a legally “justified” encounter—it frequently inflicts profound trauma. Beyond traditional PTSD, clinical research extensively documents moral injury, which occurs when an individual engages in an act that violates their deeply held moral baseline¹⁴. Taking a life routinely triggers severe post-shooting distress, including depression, intrusive thoughts, substance abuse, and elevated rates of officer suicide¹⁵. By mandating tactical patience, distance, and cover under an absolute necessity standard, we eliminate the split-second crises that lead to these traumatic encounters, directly protecting officers from severe occupational moral injury.
• Community Cooperation as Body Armor: When police rely on high-trust, guardian-style methods, public legitimacy increases. As empirical research on Procedural Justice demonstrates, public compliance and cooperation depend heavily on whether citizens view police actions as necessary, fair, and respectful of human life¹⁶. When trust collapses, officers operate in hostile environments where every call carries elevated risk. Conversely, when a community trusts its police, citizens actively assist and de-escalate tensions alongside officers.
• European Reality: European officers operating under absolute necessity standards do not suffer higher injury rates; they experience far fewer violent confrontations because their system is designed to prevent escalation¹⁷.

Raising the bar does not ask officers to take unnecessary risks—it provides them with the training, tactical space, administrative support, and psychological protection to resolve conflicts safely.

A Way Forward: Mobilizing for Local Action

To make Madison a city where every family can live without fear—and where officers are protected from occupational moral injury—we do not need to wait for state or federal mandates. The administrative power rests here in city hall.

A Coalition for Justice urges our city leaders, clergy, community partners, and fellow residents to unite around three core administrative policy goals:

1. Place the Sanctity of Human Life at the Center of Police Department Policy: Adopt absolute necessity and proportionality as the binding internal use-of-force standard for the Madison Police Department.
2. Institutionalize De-Escalation, Time, and Distance: Require officers to create distance, utilize physical cover, and disengage when facing non-firearm threats or mental health crises.
3. Practice Procedural Justice: Direct every policy toward building public trust, confronting bias, and ensuring every resident is treated with dignity, neutrality, and respect.

The Strategy: How We Make This Policy Reality

Enacting systemic change in municipal governance requires clear administrative mechanics—backed by an organized, active electorate. Our coalition is pursuing this transformation through three distinct, escalating pathways:

Pathway 1: Administrative Leadership (The Chief of Police)

The fastest and most collaborative path to progress is for the Chief of Police to exercise executive administrative authority. The Chief can issue an updated Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that replaces Graham’s low legal floor with the Stanford Law Policy Lab model standards—leading from within, just as Madison police leadership did in the 1970s.

Pathway 2: Executive Direction (The Mayor)

Under Wisconsin state law, the Mayor is the official head of the police department and holds statutory authority over the police chief. If police leadership hesitates to act independently, the responsibility falls to city executive leadership. The Mayor has the direct legal authority to issue a formal executive directive instructing the department to adopt these higher standards.

Pathway 3: Civic Mobilization and a Mayoral Election

Policy change rarely occurs without organized grassroots pressure. If current executive leadership declines to exercise administrative authority to raise the force standard, the decision returns to the voters of Madison.

We are mobilizing community organizations, faith leaders, policy experts, and neighborhood advocates to make police use-of-force standards a central issue in the upcoming spring mayoral election. We are asking every candidate for Mayor a clear, binding question:

“Will you commit to exercising your statutory authority under Wisconsin law to direct the Madison Police Department to adopt an ‘absolute necessity’ and mandatory de-escalation standard for deadly force?”

By organizing across the city’s aldermanic districts and mobilizing voters around this core demand, our coalition intends to ensure that the next city administration has a clear mandate to adopt the Stanford Model Policy, protect officer mental health, and safeguard human life.

Conclusion: Raising the Bar for American Policing

For far too long, American law enforcement has operated under the permissive, decades-old Graham. But “objective reasonableness” was never meant to be a high mark of excellence; it was designed as a legal shield against constitutional liability. As the European Court of Human Rights has demonstrated through its “absolute necessity” standard democratic societies can—and must—demand that state actors treat the taking of human life strictly as an unyielding last resort. 

While the European framework operates as a binding supra-national treaty, its core human rights principles do not need to remain across the ocean. By adopting the Stanford Law School Model Use of Force Policy, American municipalities can import these exact principles—mandatory de-escalation, pre-force tactical discipline, and strict prohibitions on high-risk tactics—into a practical, operational blueprint tailored for local department manuals.

Upgrading use-of-force standards is not a choice between public safety and officer protection; it is the ultimate alignment of both. The empirical data is unambiguous: clear, restrictive force policies reduce citizen deaths while simultaneously lowering officer injury rates. Furthermore, by mandating tactical patience, time, distance, and cover, the Stanford Model addresses the invisible hazard that shatters far too many careers from within—occupational moral injury. 

By eliminating avoidable, officer-created crises, we build a structural safety net that protects front-line officers from the catastrophic psychological trauma, severe depression, and suicide that so often follow preventable deadly force encounters. High-quality policing demands that those who carry the authority of the state are equipped to return home whole, both physically and mentally.

The path forward requires moral courage from locals. Mayors, city councils, and police chiefs cannot continue to hide behind the low constitutional ceiling of 1989. In communities like Madison—where a legacy of professional, progressive policing has long set a standard for the nation—leadership must lead. 

Formally adopting the Stanford Model Use of Force Policy is the definitive step to close the gap between legal bare minimums and international best practices. It is time for elected officials and police leaders to raise the bar, honor our commitment to human dignity, and build a system of public safety that truly protects both our citizens and the officers who serve them.

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Endnotes and Citations

1. Katzenbach Commission (1967): President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Task Force Report: The Police. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967.
2. 21st Century Policing Task Force (2015): President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Washington, D.C.: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), 2015.
3. Madison Community-Oriented Policing History: Zaleski, Rob. David Couper: Beyond the Badge: Reflections of an Ex-Cop. Madison, WI: Little Creek Press, 2022. See also: Couper, David C. Improving Policing in America: From Top Down to Bottom Up. Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), 2012.
4. Quality and Municipal Management: Cheaney, Lee, and Maury Cotter. Real People, Real Work: Parables on Leadership in the 90s. Madison, WI: SBAK Publications, 1991.
5. MPD Organizational Values: City of Madison Police Department. Code of Conduct, Mission, and Core Values. Statement on Proficiency & Continuous Improvement: “We are accountable to the public and ourselves for the quality of our service. We strive for proficiency in all facets of our work. We seek to continually improve ourselves and those systems in our midst and those in the community where the police can effect meaningful change for better outcomes.”
6. Total Quality Management in Madison: Mosgaller, Tom, et al. Bending Granite: 30+ True Stories of Leading Change. Madison, WI: Master Arts Press, 2022.
7. Constitutional Standards (Objective Reasonableness): Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989).
8. Constitutional Standards (Fleeing Felon Rule): Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985).
9. Sentinel Event Reviews: Doyle, James M. “Learning from Error in Criminal Justice.” National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, 2010. See also: Bureau of Justice Assistance & CNA, Sentinel Event Review in Policing: A Practical Guide for Law Enforcement Agencies, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 2021. Establishing the non-blame, multidisciplinary root-cause analysis framework adapted from medicine and aviation to evaluate critical police incidents as system failures rather than isolated individual errors.
10. European Legal Standard (Absolute Necessity): European Court of Human Rights. McCann and Others v. United Kingdom, 21 EHRR 97 (1995).
11. Comparative Fatal Shooting Rates: Comparative international figures compiled from official national oversight reports and tracking databases covering annual data from 2015 to the present: United States (Washington Post Fatal Force Database, 2015–present); France (IGPN Annual Reports, 2018–present); Germany (DHPol Official Firearm Use Statistics, 1984–present); United Kingdom (IOPC Annual Reports on Deaths Following Police Contact, 2010–present); and Scandinavian national police statistical registries.”
12. Stanford Model Use-of-Force Administrative Framework: Sutton, Dan, and Fatima Dahir. Police Use of Force Policies Across America: Regulations from 100 Cities, Post-Floyd Policy Reforms, and Revisiting Constitutional Standards. Stanford Center for Racial Justice, Stanford Law School (June 2025). See also: Stanford Center for Racial Justice, Model Use of Force Policy: Guidance for Change (10-Module Framework, 2025–2026).
13. Statewide Statutory and Administrative Force Reform Precedents: California Assembly Bill 392 (Cal. Penal Code § 835a, 2019); Washington House Bill 1310 (Wash. Rev. Code § 10.120.020, 2021); New Jersey Attorney General Use of Force Policy (rev. 2020/2021); and U.S. Department of Justice Consent Decrees (Seattle & Baltimore).
14. Moral Injury Clinical Framework: Litz, Brett T. et al. “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy.” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 8 (2009): 695–706.
15. Moral Injury in Law Enforcement: Papazoglou, Konstantinos, and Brian Chopko. “Moral Injury in Police Work.” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin (September 2019).
16. Procedural Justice and Legitimacy: Tyler, Tom R. “Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law.” Crime and Justice 30 (2003): 283–357.
17. Comparative Police Safety and Injury Research: Hirschfield, Paul J. “Exceptionally Lethal: American Police Killings in a Comparative Perspective.” Annual Review of Criminology 6 (2023): 331–354. See also: Zimring, Franklin E. When Police Kill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Demonstrating that European policing models operating under strict necessity standards achieve lower civilian fatality rates without increasing officer injury or fatality rates, primarily through tactical de-escalation and risk-mitigation protocols.