What causes excessive use of police force?” Combing the data from the ten cities, a team of researchers from several American universities found a pattern that would have been hard to spot with the naked eye. Police officers who had just come from an emotionally fraught situation—a suicide, or a domestic abuse call in which a child was involved—were more likely to use excessive force. Maybe the problem wasn’t as simple as a bad cop. Maybe it was the emotional state in which the cop had found himself.
