Opinion ID: 770823
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Jamming

Text: 64 A police officer's right to make an arrest necessarily includes the right to use some degree of force. See Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396 (1989). In Mendoza v. Block, 27 F.3d 1357 (9th Cir. 1994), we held that novel police practices that have not been tested in the courts may still violate clearly established law if the force involved in the practice violates the arrestee's Fourth Amendment right to be free from an unreasonable seizure. Id. at 1362 (quoting White v. Pierce County, 797 F.2d 812, 816 (9th Cir. 1986)). In these situations, [a]n officer is not entitled to qualified immunity on the grounds that the law is not clearly established every time a novel method is used to inflict injury. Id. 65 In Chew v. Gates, 27 F.3d 1432 (9th Cir. 1994), we further explained the qualified immunity analysis when faced with a novel police practice: 66 [W]e do not mean to suggest that all actions taken pursuant to a longstanding policy are necessarily immunized. An officer who unlawfully implements an official policy or ordinance in an egregious manner or in a manner which clearly exceeds the reason able bounds of the policy is not entitled to qualified immunity, whether or not there is a case on point declaring such actions unconstitutional. In other words, even in the absence of relevant case law, if the manner of implementation of an otherwise con stitutional policy is not only unconstitutional, but patently so, the officer will be deemed to have violated clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. Moreover, the existence of an unofficial or unacknowledged policy or practice is not sufficient to immunize an officer from liability. 67 Id. at 1450 (internal citation omitted). 68 Plaintiffs allege that all officers participated in a course of conduct which included the use of jamming suspects into confined spaces in an effort to provoke the use of force. Whether the defendants are entitled to qualified immunity for their actions in formulating or implementing the jamming policy turns on the objective legal reasonableness of the action . . . assessed in light of legal rules that were clearly established at the time it was taken. Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 639 (1987) (internal cites and quotation marks omitted). For reasons to be discussed, we find that a reasonable law enforcement officer might well have failed to recognize that authorizing or implementing the jamming technique would lead to a violation of the plaintiffs' constitutional rights. 69 According to the undisputed evidence, the use of the jamming technique constituted neither a new nor unique policy when the Cunningham and Soly shootings occurred. Additionally, the uncontroverted evidence indicates that the jamming technique had been used hundreds of times without incident, and the plaintiffs do not present any evidence that the technique was used against them in a different and unreasonable manner relative to the past incidences of jamming the defendants submitted as evidence. 70 Moreover, given the circumstances surrounding its use, the jamming technique was a reasonable use of force for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment. The `reasonableness' of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with 20/20 vision of hindsight. Graham, 490 U.S. at 396; see also Mendoza v. Block, 27 F.3d 1357, 1362 (9th Cir. 1994) (quotation and citation omitted) (holding that the reasonableness of force is analyzed in light of such factors as the requirements for the officer's safety, the motivation for the arrest, and the extent of the injury inflicted). Here, the officers were confronted with armed individuals in the midst of committing a dangerous felony. 23 Accordingly, we hold that it was not clearly established at the time of the shootings that the jamming technique was an unreasonable use of force. 24 71 We also find that the use of the jamming technique was too attenuated from the use of deadly force against Smith to support his action against the officers who participated in that operation. The shooting of Smith did not occur until after several events occurred: 1) officers jammed the suspects' vehicle (a practice which we have already found not prohibited by clearly established law), 2) the armed suspect fled the police, 3) police searched for the armed suspect for an extended period of time, and 4) Smith decided to run from the police while screaming, They're coming for us!  Given these facts, we find that the jamming incident is too attenuated from the alleged use of excessive force against Smith, and, thus, is immaterial to the question of whether he suffered an injury of constitutional proportion.