Police authority to use force

Guðmundur Ásgeirsson, Superintendent.

What I will go over with you now are the tools and tools that the police use in their daily work. This is what the police look like.

I wear a protective vest that is puncture-proof and fire-resistant. If necessary, the vest can be supplemented with secondary protection. We use radios, the Tetra system, to communicate information between police officers.

We are equipped with cameras. Cameras are not always activated, but the police officers control when they are activated and we use them to gather evidence on the scene. Very important, both for the security of the police and then the police officers are involved in.

If we roll here with the equipment. We have a multifunctional tool, we use it for various things. These are tweezers and knives and screwdrivers. We can open doors and save ourselves on the scene with this kind of device. We have medical equipment, here I show you a sharp-wand. A sharp-wand is used to control bleeding, arterial bleeding, then it is put around the thigh or arm and tightened and then we can stop the arterial bleeding.

We have general medical equipment to stop such minor bleeding, we have disposable gloves and disinfectant products that we can use to help people before paramedics arrive.

We have flashlights, we often need to use them for our work.

I will now turn to the use of force - the tools we use when we need to use force. There are different situations that the police encounter and it depends on the situation what tools and tools we use.

The most important tool we use is just our voice, a conversation with people. We need to have and be able to communicate with people and we try to lower the tension on the ground and talk to people.

The device we use most behind the voice is the handcuffs. The handcuffs look like this. They are used to control movement of the handcuffs to ensure the safety of police officers and ensure the safety of those we are interfering with. They are also used to secure evidence; a number of people are often arrested because of an ongoing case and they cannot be searched and then we can, say, handcuff the person and then we ensure that the evidence will not be compromised.

Police officers also carry plastic bands or gaskets. This we use if we have used our handcuffs or if we are arresting more than one person then we can grab this, these bands to control movements of the hand or foot. This can be used on hands and feet.

The protective spray we wear in our daily work looks like this, there are other sizes and types of this, but this is pepper spray and for the times we need to use this we spray people's faces. What happens is that people can't keep their eyes open, they swipe their faces and close their eyes and then they can get a grip on people and put handcuffs on them.

A tool we use very little, very rarely, is the bat. Extractionable bat. This tool is a defensive tool primarily for us to defend against an attack, but we may need to use it in other cases.

The latest device in our equipment is the electrical weapon. This device is a transitional device between the gas, the spray and the baton and then firearms. This can be crucial if we need to deal with a person armed with a knife or something, to be able to use this device to ensure both the safety of police officers and then the person concerned.

It may surprise people that the tool we use most, most of these tools of force are the handcuffs, as I mentioned earlier.

Police officers often find themselves in difficult situations and must make decisions very shortly beforehand and they must use proportionality, they must choose the least harmful measure that they can possibly use to overpower the person. So the work can often be difficult and complicated but we are always trying to do our best.