At the baseline, the reasonable person standard is a structure of legal fiction used as a hypothetical so as to determine how an individual should act or would act, in relation to the law, within a given set of circumstances. Tangibly speaking, the reasonable person is meant to represent the consensus of the community being governed by the law as to how an individual would react to a given situation based on the totality of the circumstances associated with it. As applied to law enforcement officers involved in the use of force, this is meant to create a hypothetical law enforcement officer who has reasonably taken into account the situation at hand, their training, community expectations and any other facts serving to define the use of force situation. Officers are expected to behave within the bounds of what such a hypothetical reasonable person would have done in the very same type of situation.
In examining the reasonable person standard from a deontological perspective, it is a form of ethical analysis which is premised on duties, and which suggests that universal ethical duties flow from core ethical principles. From this perspective, the universality of ethical imperatives is a direct corollary of the duty held by the individual. In this respect, a police officer will hold clear duties, both in terms of intervention and in terms of non-intervention, on the basis of the fact that they hold this role. Given the combination of their training and their duty, deontology would expect law enforcement officers to operate with relative consistency across different types of use of force incidents.
With one of the core duties of the police officer being to protect the safety of the public, the reasonable person standard becomes problematic because of the manner by which the police officer must prioritize the public’s safety, in very short time horizons, where they might not be able to measure the totality of circumstances associated with the situation at hand. Rather, they may have to make a split-second judgment to protect the public and its interests. In this respect, the reasonable person standard is somewhat at odds with the deontological approach to ethics. If a police officer has the correct intentions in relation to using force but misperceives a given element of the circumstances associated with the use of force, they will not have violated his ethical duties as per deontology. This said, they may have violated the reasonable person standard. This disjuncture is a primary demonstrator of why this standard is thus problematic for police use of force incidents.
