Police commands are the building blocks of police authority. A command to step out of the car, put your hands behind your back, or move back from a scene can create a legal obligation on the spot, and failing to comply can lead to arrest or the use of force. Yet commands receive far less attention from courts, legislatures, and police departments than the force that sometimes follows them.
In this TalksOnLaw interview, recorded in 2023, Joel Cohen speaks with Professor Rachel Harmon of the University of Virginia School of Law, author of the casebook The Law of the Police, about what police commands are, what makes them lawful, and how better regulation of commands could reduce unnecessary force.
Commands Come Before Force
Harmon describes three basic types of commands: to do something, to refrain from doing something, and to stop doing something. Using the 2023 beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, in which officers issued dozens of confusing or impossible commands, she explains why officers usually cannot lawfully use force without first issuing a command, and why commands that create new obligations in real time deserve as much scrutiny as the force used to enforce them.
Three Limits on a Lawful Command
Harmon sets out three tests for whether a command is lawful: it must be constitutional under the Fourth and First Amendments; the officer must give notice and a real opportunity to comply; and the command must be authorized by state law, a requirement courts often overlook by treating any constitutional order as authorized. She discusses whether people must obey unlawful orders, why "comply now, complain later" offers little real recourse, the narrow reach of failure-to-comply statutes, and why issuing an unlawful command, as opposed to enforcing it, rarely carries legal consequences.
Requests, Commands, and the Gray Zone
The conversation explores the difference between a request, which invites voluntary cooperation, and a command, which invokes state authority, and the ambiguity created when officers phrase commands politely or make requests that feel like orders. Harmon also addresses asking an officer whether a statement is a request or a command, orders to unlock a phone by passcode or face, commands to people with disabilities who may not be able to perceive or comply with them, and the absence of departmental policies governing how officers issue commands to the public.
What to Know Now
In Barnes v. Felix (2025), the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the "moment-of-threat" approach some circuits used in excessive force cases and held that courts must consider the totality of the circumstances, including events leading up to the use of force; the Court left open how much weight to give an officer's own role in creating the danger. In the Tyre Nichols case, a Tennessee jury acquitted three former officers of all state charges in May 2025, and a federal judge later ordered a new trial on their federal convictions after finding the original judge may have been biased; the government has appealed that order. In 2024 Tennessee enacted a law overriding Memphis ordinances that limited low-level traffic stops, and in May 2025 the Justice Department retracted its findings that the Memphis Police Department used excessive force and closed several other police investigations. Professor Harmon published the second edition of The Law of the Police in 2024.
