Salas v. Carpenter

Abstract

The case of Salas v. Carpenter is a crisis negotiation-specific example that has raised a paradoxical question: If the court determines that a particular police operation was handled improperly but within legal parameters, what is the standard for proper management and execution in this field? When taken from the theoretical framework and placed in the realm of operations, how can the management of a law enforcement agency establish standards of performance when neither legislation nor adjudication offers no such guidelines and the court has determined that an incident was handled improperly, but has not violated any form of legal constraint? This column, after identifying the facts leading to the determination, provides suggestions how standards of performance can be defined and who is in the best position to define them.