In the course of law enforcement, security personnel often find themselves requiring a lot more information in order to carry out their jobs completely and effectively. Two methods that they employ are interrogation and interviewing. Law enforcement officers can use interrogation in any situation involving a non-cooperative criminal reluctant to divulge information such as the whereabouts of his or her accomplices (Schmalleger, 2017). The police have the mandate to use aggressive, intrusive questioning methods to obtain information. As a tool of law enforcement, interviewing is a much less aggressive mode of questioning, where the police ask questions of an individual in a non-hostile capacity such as when obtaining information from witnesses and getting accounts of victims (Schmalleger, 2017). However, the hardest part of obtaining information in order to carry out the task of law enforcement begins even before questioning; in the arrest phase.
Individuals accused of a crime often resist apprehension, forcing law enforcement to employ a variety of non-lethal methods in order to do their job. This need introduced a standard measure as to how much force they should use, which professionals refer to as the ‘use-of-force continuum’. It is a gradient scale of non-lethal tactics to subdue resisting individuals with tactics and utilities that include empty hand techniques, pepper spray, police batons, and most recently introduced, Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) (Sherman, 2018). The use of ECMs, which are mainly stunners that induce neuro-muscular incapacitation, has been in dispute for a long time. However, they enable the officer to gain a greater control of the situation and reduce chances of injury for both the officer and the suspect. Therefore, their use is preferable since it often removes the need to use deadly force as the suspect becomes unable to retaliate if any other pain compliance techniques failed.
References
Schmalleger, F. (2017). Criminal justice. Pearson.
Sherman, L. W. (2018). Reducing Fatal Police Shootings as System Crashes: Research, Theory, and Practice. Annual Review of Criminology.
