Use of force

What percent of contacts result in use of force?

Littleton Police Chief Doug StephensChief Douglas Stephens: Great question, Sam, and I’m sure a lot of people are wondering about use of force. We’ll probably hear that a lot tonight. So as I said, our officers actually physically respond on approximately 55,000 calls for service every year. That’s a lot of calls, right? A lot of contacts. Of course, not all of those results in some sort of arrest or criminal investigation. A lot of those are service type calls as well. But of those 55,000 calls, we make custodial arrests on average, where we actually put people in handcuffs and take them to jail for a criminal violation. Approximately 1,400, 1,500 times per year. Of those, we average less than 1% or about 1% of those custodial arrests end up in a documented use of force situation. So about 1% of those calls. So for example, in 2019, we had 14 total use of force incidents in those 55,000 contacts.