Week 15 Response -- The Subjectivity of Force

This post is a response to the question "Do you believe the use of force by private citizens is equal to the use of force by the police or other governmental entities?" posed by @julie.blank14.
I don't think the use of force by private citizens is always equal to the use of force by the police or other governmental entities. More often than not, force by private citizens is used on people that the private citizens know. For example, if a mother forces her child to go to timeout for something the child did, that is a use of force, but the mother knows her child and therefore uses her knowledge of the child to reprimand her child in the way she deems fit. Even with less personal relationships, like a professor and a student; the professor "forces" the student to do homework because the professor knows the student wants to graduate and get a degree, so the professor assigns homework based off of this knowledge to help students attain that goal. When government and police use force, however, they are using it on people they do not know. Granted, it is hard for the government to get to "know" all of its citizens, but nonetheless it makes its use of force different from private citizens. Because the use of force is different, government force is not received as well as force from private citizens. Even though the use of private force and government force is different in many ways, they are similar in the sense of what constitutes a reasonable amount of force for an action. Different parenting styles across the world causes different forms of punishment for the same action because the parents are using the amount of force that they deem reasonable. Similarly with the government, we as citizens are protected by the fourth amendment from unreasonable searches and seizures by the police, but the term "unreasonable" is subjective and leaves a lot of gray area. This gray area has led to many court cases and uprisings about the rational use of force by policemen. Force used by private citizens and force used by government and police entities have some similarities, but ultimately are too different to be equal.

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