Use of Force Continuum: Levels, Garner Rule, and Section 1983

The use of force continuum is the framework U.S. law enforcement agencies use to match an officer’s physical response to the resistance a person is showing, running from officer presence at the bottom through verbal commands, empty-hand control, and less-lethal weapons, up to deadly force at the top. An officer may only use the level that is objectively reasonable for the threat and resistance in front of them, a standard set by the Supreme Court in Graham v. Connor.¹ The continuum is a model, not a staircase. Officers can enter at whatever level the situation demands and come back down just as fast.

The Five Levels of Force

Officer Presence

The lowest level of intervention is simply being there. A uniformed officer arriving on scene can resolve many situations without saying a word, because the visible authority of the badge and uniform changes the dynamic. Most police encounters never need anything more.

Verbal Commands

When presence alone does not produce compliance, the officer gives clear verbal instructions. Tone, word choice, and the specificity of the direction all matter at this stage. The goal is voluntary cooperation.

Empty-Hand Control

When verbal commands fail, officers use physical techniques to gain control, and these split into two groups. Soft techniques include grabs, holds, and joint locks meant to guide a person into custody without striking them. Hard techniques involve strikes and kicks used when a person is physically fighting the officer.² A person who tenses up and pulls their arm away is getting a joint lock. A person throwing punches is getting struck back.

Less-Lethal Weapons

When physical wrestling is too dangerous or ineffective, officers have intermediate tools. Chemical sprays like pepper spray cause temporary irritation to the eyes and respiratory system. Conducted energy devices discharge a high-voltage, low-amperage jolt that temporarily disrupts voluntary muscle control, letting officers handcuff a combative person. Impact tools like batons are used to strike large muscle groups and stop an assault.² Department policies generally require a verbal warning before deploying these tools when feasible, both to give the person a final chance to comply and to alert nearby officers.

Deadly Force

The highest level is reserved for a direct, immediate threat of death or serious physical injury. That usually means a firearm, but it can include any action or weapon capable of causing death.² Deadly force is the one option an officer cannot take back, and the Supreme Court has set a narrow constitutional window for its use.

Matching Force to Resistance

The continuum works because each force level corresponds to a level of resistance. Federal training models generally recognize five tiers.

Compliant: The person acknowledges the officer’s commands and offers no resistance.³
Passive resistance: The person refuses to follow commands but takes only minimal physical action, such as going limp or locking arms with another person.³
Active resistance: The person’s actions are intended to prevent custody but not to harm the officer. Walking or running away and breaking the officer’s grip fit here.³
Aggressive resistance: The person shows intent to harm the officer, themselves, or someone else. Taking a fighting stance, punching, kicking, or attacking with a weapon all qualify.³
Aggravated aggressive resistance: Actions likely to cause death or serious bodily harm, including firearms, bladed weapons, and extreme physical force.³

Non-compliance does not automatically equal resistance. A person in a mental health crisis, mid-seizure, or with a hearing impairment may be unable to follow commands without any intent to resist. Agencies increasingly train officers to distinguish willful defiance from behavior driven by a medical or psychological condition before selecting a force response.

The Constitutional Ceiling

Every use-of-force analysis in American law begins with Graham v. Connor (1989). The Supreme Court held that excessive force claims arising from an arrest, investigatory stop, or other seizure must be judged under the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable seizures.¹ The question is whether the officer’s actions were objectively reasonable at the moment force was applied, judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene rather than with hindsight.

The Court identified three factors, often called the Graham factors, that guide the reasonableness analysis:

The severity of the crime at issue
Whether the person poses an immediate threat to the safety of officers or others
Whether the person is actively resisting or trying to flee¹

The ruling also recognized that officers frequently make split-second judgments in situations that are tense, uncertain, and evolving quickly, so the standard builds in allowance for that pressure.⁴ What Graham does not do is excuse unreasonable force simply because the situation was stressful. The benchmark is the reasonable officer, not the actual officer’s subjective state of mind. An officer who panics and overreacts can still be found to have used excessive force.

Deadly Force: The Garner Rule

Four years before Graham, the Court set the constitutional limits on deadly force in Tennessee v. Garner (1985). That case involved an officer who fatally shot an unarmed teenager fleeing from a home burglary. The Court struck down a Tennessee statute that had authorized deadly force against any fleeing suspect, holding that deadly force against a fleeing person is unconstitutional unless the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.⁵

The Court gave two examples of when deadly force against a fleeing suspect can be justified: when the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon, or when there is probable cause to believe the suspect committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm. Even then, the officer must give a verbal warning before shooting if feasible.⁵ Where a fleeing suspect poses no immediate threat, the harm of letting them escape does not justify using lethal force to stop them.

Why Officers Can Skip Levels

Real encounters rarely move up the continuum one rung at a time. A person sitting passively on the ground can produce a concealed weapon in a fraction of a second, and the officer’s response has to jump with it. Several factors drive these transitions.

Physical disparity is one of the most common. An officer who is significantly smaller than the person they are trying to restrain faces a different risk equation than one with a size advantage. The number of people involved matters too. A single officer facing two or three actively resisting people may reasonably escalate to an intermediate weapon faster than one with backup already on scene. Courts apply the Graham factors to the totality of what the officer faced, not whether some hypothetical alternative might have worked in theory.¹

Environment plays an equally large role. An officer in a tight hallway cannot create distance. Proximity to potential weapons like knives or heavy objects changes the risk assessment instantly. Exhaustion during a prolonged struggle is another practical reality: an officer whose grip strength is failing after several minutes of wrestling faces increasing danger, and that fatigue can justify moving to a higher force level to end the confrontation safely.

De-Escalation Duty and Prohibited Techniques

Federal policy now explicitly requires officers to attempt de-escalation before resorting to force. The Department of Justice’s use-of-force policy states that officers should use de-escalation tactics designed to gain voluntary compliance before applying force, as long as doing so would not increase the danger to the officer or others. The same policy requires a verbal warning before discharging a firearm when feasible.⁶ These rules apply directly to federal law enforcement. State and local agencies set their own policies, though many have adopted similar standards.

Executive Order 14074, signed in 2022, banned chokeholds and carotid restraints by federal law enforcement agencies, with an exception only when deadly force would be authorized by law. The order also directs the Attorney General and other cabinet secretaries to use federal grant funding and technical assistance to encourage state, tribal, and local agencies to adopt the same restrictions.⁷ The chokehold ban is mandatory only for federal officers, but agencies that want federal grant money face strong pressure to follow suit.

De-escalation training has measurable results. Research on the Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) training program found that agencies using it saw use-of-force incidents drop by more than 25 percent, citizen injuries decline by a comparable amount, and officer injuries fall by 36 percent.⁸ The officer injury reduction challenges the assumption that de-escalation puts officers at greater risk.

When Force Exceeds the Continuum

When an officer’s use of force crosses the line from reasonable to excessive, consequences can flow through three separate channels: civil liability, criminal prosecution, and the doctrine that often blocks both.

Civil Liability Under Section 1983

The primary tool for holding officers accountable in court is 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which allows anyone whose constitutional rights were violated by a government actor to file a federal lawsuit seeking damages.⁹ A successful plaintiff can recover compensation for medical expenses, lost income, pain and suffering, and emotional distress. The suit names the individual officer and can also name the employing municipality if the plaintiff can show the violation resulted from an official policy or custom, under the standard set by Monell v. Department of Social Services.¹⁰

Criminal Prosecution Under Section 242

Federal criminal charges are available through 18 U.S.C. § 242, which makes it a crime for someone acting under color of law to willfully deprive another person of their constitutional rights. The penalties scale with the harm. A violation that does not cause bodily injury carries up to one year in prison. If bodily injury results or the officer used a dangerous weapon, the maximum jumps to ten years. If the victim dies, the officer faces a potential life sentence or the death penalty.¹¹ These prosecutions are relatively rare because the government must prove willful conduct, not merely negligence or recklessness.

Qualified Immunity

Officers sued under § 1983 almost always raise qualified immunity. The doctrine shields government officials from personal liability unless the officer’s conduct violated a constitutional right and that right was clearly established at the time of the incident. The second prong is where most cases die. The Supreme Court has increasingly demanded that the clearly established right be defined with high specificity, so even minor factual differences between the current case and existing precedent can shield the officer. One study found that appellate courts favored police in 57 percent of excessive force qualified immunity cases decided between 2017 and 2019, up from 44 percent a decade earlier.¹² The doctrine remains one of the most debated areas of constitutional law.

1
Supreme Court of the United States. 490 U.S. 386 – Graham v. Connor
2
National Institute of Justice. The Use-of-Force Continuum
3
U.S. Department of Justice COPS Office. Use of Force
4
Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. Part I Graham v. Connor
5
Justia Law. Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985)
6
U.S. Department of Justice. Department of Justice Policy on Use of Force
7
GovInfo. Executive Order 14074 – Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices
8
National Institute of Justice. What Works in De-Escalation Training
9
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 U.S.C. 1983 – Civil Action for Deprivation of Rights
10
Justia Law. Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978)
11
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 U.S.C. 242 – Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law
12
Congressional Research Service. Policing the Police – Qualified Immunity and Considerations for Congress