What Happens When Force Becomes Routine

It rarely starts with a blow.

It starts with a tone. A command delivered too fast. A moment where compliance is assumed before it’s possible. The room tightens. The choices narrow. And then, suddenly, force is framed as necessary.
After that, the details blur.

In St. Francois County, stories circulate quietly. Not the kind that lead the evening news, but the kind passed from person to person—accounts of people taken to the ground when they were already down, of blows delivered after control was established, of pain that arrives not in the chaos of arrest, but in the moments that follow.

The moments no one is supposed to see.

These aren’t stories told with certainty. They’re told with hesitation. With qualifiers. With the awareness that speaking openly comes with risk. People preface their words carefully, as if accuracy alone won’t protect them.

“I don’t know if I can prove it.”
“I don’t know if it matters now.”
“This is just what happened to me.”

What they describe isn’t cinematic violence. It’s not dramatic chases or split-second decisions. It’s something more unsettling: force used after the urgency has passed. Pain applied when control has already been achieved.

They describe being confused, restrained, surrounded. They describe compliance that comes too late to matter. They describe the feeling of realizing that the situation has shifted—from enforcement to punishment—without any clear signal.

And afterward, they’re told it was justified.

Language does a lot of work here. Words like resistance, noncompliance, officer safety. Terms broad enough to stretch around almost any action. Once they appear in a report, they harden quickly.
What follows is familiar. Internal reviews. Statements that emphasize protocol. Conclusions that reassure the public without addressing the experience of the person on the ground.

According to procedure, the force was appropriate.

That sentence carries weight. It ends conversations. It reframes injuries as outcomes rather than events. It suggests inevitability, not choice.

But the people who live with the aftermath remember the choices clearly.

They remember the pause before it escalated. The moment where it could have stopped. The realization that asking questions only made things worse. They remember the sound—flesh on concrete, breath knocked out of lungs, orders still being shouted long after they’d been followed.

These are not claims made lightly. They’re made reluctantly. Often after silence fails to provide relief.

What’s striking is how often these stories resemble each other, even when the people telling them have never met. The same sequence. The same phrases. The same justifications.

It raises an uncomfortable possibility: that what’s being described isn’t a series of isolated incidents, but a pattern normalized by repetition.

In systems like these, escalation becomes habit. Control becomes reflex. And once force is framed as standard operating procedure, questioning it feels like insubordination.

That culture doesn’t require cruelty to exist. It only requires permission.

Permission to treat bodies as obstacles. To interpret fear as threat. To confuse authority with infallibility. Over time, the line between necessary force and excessive force doesn’t disappear—it’s simply redrawn.

Closer to power.

The public rarely sees this part. What they see are summaries. Carefully worded statements. Assurances that everything was handled according to policy. The absence of charges. The closure of investigations.

From the outside, it looks resolved.

From the inside—from the person who was restrained, struck, or injured—it looks unfinished. Their pain doesn’t dissolve because a report says it should. Their memory doesn’t adjust to match official language.

They carry it forward. Into doctor visits. Into court dates. Into conversations they hesitate to have because they know how quickly credibility shifts once an officer’s account enters the room.
There’s an imbalance built into that moment. One version is documented immediately, backed by authority and structure. The other has to survive disbelief, delay, and doubt before it’s even considered.

And many never are.

This is how violence becomes quiet. Not by being rare, but by being absorbed. Processed. Explained away until it no longer sounds like violence at all.

In St. Francois County, the question isn’t whether officers face difficult situations. They do. The question is what happens when difficulty becomes a blanket justification—when harm is excused not because it was unavoidable, but because it was authorized.

Because someone decided it was within bounds.

The stories persist because they have nowhere else to go. They surface in lawsuits, in sworn statements, in late-night conversations where people finally feel safe enough to say what happened to them.
They aren’t asking for spectacle. They’re asking for acknowledgment. For the recognition that force used without necessity is still force, no matter how it’s labeled afterward.

And until that acknowledgment exists—until these accounts are treated as warnings rather than inconveniences—the pattern has no reason to change.

The blows may not be visible to the public.

But the impact doesn’t disappear.

It lingers in bodies, in trust, in the widening distance between authority and the people it claims to protect. And that distance, once it becomes routine, is far harder to repair than any report is willing to admit.