

It stops some fights before they start because people believe they will get hit if they don't comply, and a baton is affordable and its use easy to train. First, it's the link between empty hands and deadly force in other words, officers don't have to put it away to deploy another piece of equipment to escalate or de-escalate force, and no other piece of equipment on your duty belt offers this multiuse capacity. Regardless, I am a proponent of the police baton for numerous reasons. Certainly, the criminal element is not growing lax in their approach to resisting and fighting with the police. Many of the above factors underlie decreasing baton usage. Media exploitation of officers who justifiably use the baton.Confusion concerning the lethal capacity of baton strikes and.Confusion concerning the effects of baton strikes.Decreased space on the police duty belt.Improper placement and positioning of the baton on the duty belt.


Now, there were some small departments represented in that group, but most were midsize and large agencies, and these instructors struggled to remember the last time a baton was used to strike and subdue a suspect. The instructor then asked these instructors, who should have their fingers on the pulse of use-of-force incidents in their respective departments, to comment on the frequency of baton use in general. But of those who were street warriors, the answer was, astoundingly, zero. To be fair, many of those instructors were currently on assignment at their respective academies and not on the streets, and thus would not have had the opportunity to use force. The instructor asked the audience if any of them, as instructors, had used a baton against an aggressor or assailant within the past year. Click here to subscribe to Law Officer MagazineĪt a recent national conference of law enforcement instructors, the topic of baton use surfaced at one of the presentations.
