To cuff or not to cuff: Should that even be a question?

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Topics & Tactics for Law Enforcement with Scott Buhrmaster

Last week, a Dallas area woman was arrested and jailed for failing to pay a traffic ticket. The woman, 97-year-old Harriette Kelton, was stopped after officers noticed that her vehicle registration and inspection sticker had expired. During the contact, the officers were notified that a warrant had been issued for Kelton's arrest, so they handcuffed her and took her to jail.

In response to the incident, one of Kelton's sons, a surgeon with Baylor University Medical Center, spoke out in protest saying, "Our real beef with this is that no real judgment was displayed or actually carried out in this incident."

Her other son, a state district judge, chose not to comment on the incident.

Although protest of the incident may center on whether officers should have acted on the arrest warrant, headlines like one recently issued by the Associated Press reading, "97-Year-Old Handcuffed, Jailed For Unpaid Traffic Ticket" will surely raise the question of whether the elderly woman should have been handcuffed en route to jail. With that in mind, it's important to remember four key reasons why the answer to that question should be "Yes":

1. Officer Safety

It IS in fact possible for an elderly person to pose a serious threat to an officer. It may not be probable in most cases, but it IS possible. Officers have been attacked, injured and even killed by unlikely subjects.

You're treading on dangerous ground when you begin making judgment calls on who should and shouldn't be cuffed based on a split-second and abitrary evaluation of their ability to hurt you. If you're placing someone under arrest, you should cuff them…period.

2. Conditioning

Cuffing at the point of arrest should be a habit, not something you have to put time into thinking about. If at arrest you've conditioned yourself to reflexively begin the cuffing process, you're allowing yourself to focus more clearly on other elements of officer safety, subject behavior and the arrest.

3. Consistency in Court

If you don't make cuffing a non-negotiable policy, you're opening yourself up to complaints of discrimination from those who feel that cuffing them was excessive, abusive, or discriminatory. If in the face of a complaint you can prove that by policy you cuff everyone regardless of race, creed, sex, size or age you can better disprove accusations of discrimination or maltreatment.

4. Avoiding Negotiation

Making the decision to forego cuffing a person out of "respect" or because you're concerned that it "might not look good" can be a first step in opening yourself up to dangerous negotiations. There are a number of things that should be non-negotiable when it comes to arrests and transports: things like handcuffing itself, cuffing in the back, and transporting subjects in the back seat of your patrol unit, not in the front seat.

What Do You Think?

We would be interested in hearing your opinions and practices related to situations like this. Would you handcuff a 97-year-old woman? Why or why not? Have you found yourself in a situation like this? How did you justify your actions…and were you successful in your justification?

There are many gray areas in law enforcement. Should cuffing ever be one of them? We'd like to hear your thoughts:

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