Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Use of Force Doctrine in Missouri


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   keep. Of all the arguments presented here, Carrite's is the strongest. We keep pages based on their coverage in reliable sources, and that has been amply demonstrated here. If there were not much distinction between Use of Force Doctrine in general and Use of Force Doctrine in Missouri, then things may be different, but judging from the comments here that doesn't seem to be the case. Whether the topic is in the news or whether other articles do similar things are secondary concerns. There was also a concern that Missouri isn't mentioned in the main Use of force article - this can be solved through normal editing. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 06:23, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Use of Force Doctrine in Missouri

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This article seems to have been created simply as a result of the Michael Brown shooting. No other state has it's own use of force page and material in it seems largely a rehash of the regular use of force page with a bit of Missouri law thrown in. If there are any significant differences in some U.S. states compared to the national norm, I'm sure they can be added to the main use of force article keeping everything together in one comparative bunch, and avoid making Missouri appear to be some sort of special case. – JBarta (talk) 11:51, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * I sincerely appreciate your contribution to this discussion. If the article does not meet Wikipedia standards then it should certainly be deleted. Let's look carefully at all the facts before making a final decision. You have probably already read the talk page intro. You may not yet have seen my latest acknowledgement and reply to EBY because I just now added it. I am particularly interested in issues surrounding your statement, "If there are any significant differences in some U.S. states compared to the national norm, ..." This illustrates the reason why I asserted that state-by-state articles on use of force are notable (just as state-by-state articles on same-sex marriage are notable), because it is the state laws that primarily govern use of force (although there have been two Supreme Court decisions of limited scope). It is the law in each state that determines whether an officer is justified in killing. Again, I am not particularly qualified to write on this topic - I only created one article for Missouri to plant a seed in hopes that people more qualified than I can properly develop the article, and hopefully develop corresponding articles for other states as well. Unfortunately I do not have any more time at the moment to go into further detail, but I hope this helps. Best, Djbaniel (talk) 16:46, 30 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Comment (leaning towards delete). While I'm tempted to vote for merging the important concepts to a section within Use of force, I believe that WP:NNC might apply here. The article does not become notable because of its scrutiny in the wake of an event. Can someone weigh in on this?  ~Oshwah~  (talk) (contribs)   12:59, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment I'm the editor that wrote most of this article, and would be happy to merge it. It was done as a gesture of goodwill towards the article creator and I do think it came from the shooting & riots. That said, I found some fascinating, educational stuff about use of force (in general going back to common law and about Missouri in particular) which is why, instead of just a stub, I kept going. Call it a Wiki-hole, we've all fallen in them.EBY (talk) 20:05, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Missouri-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 13:57, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 13:58, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
 * This article has no prospect whatsover of being deleted and should not have been nominated. The only issue is whether it should be merged and redirected to a broader article on the use of force or on Missouri law, or whether it should be kept as a standalone page. Since laws and law books tend not to be pan-jurisdictional, there is nothing inherently wrong with having an article on a sufficiently broad area of state law. If a state has its own legislation and case law on a something, then it is a special case. The question is how much there is to say about the topic. James500 (talk) 03:22, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment (neutral). Arguing for deletion would be the fact that this article obviously came about as a result of the events in Ferguson, which makes it topical right now, but I wonder if the highly specialized nature of this article (being about one subsection (#046) of one chapter (#546) of one U.S. state's statutes) will meet standards of WP:NOTE after the furor dies down. I suspect future traffic interested in the current events in Ferguson will start off at Ferguson, Missouri and then they'll click through to Shooting of Michael Brown or 2014 Ferguson unrest which will probably have been merged into one article by that point.  It's kind of hard for me to imagine the scenario of a user interested in learning about the use of force doctrine in Missouri who isn't interested in learning about it in the context of these events.   Arguing against deletion, is that the use of deadly force by law enforcement agencies is a topic that comes up over and over again in the United States, and the U.S. section of the Use of force article could be expanded to include a summary of the variation among U.S. states including Missouri, and referring to the AfD article via a  template if that article became too long and a split was warranted. (Probably Fleeing felon rule should be merged into Use of force, too, but that's another issue.)  Arguing for a merge, would be that Use of force is not that long right now (14kb) and the content could be merged there.  So I'm neutral, with a slight lean toward MERGE if I had to pick. Mathglot (talk) 06:31, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
 * (1) It is not remotely uncommon for an individual section of a statute to be massively notable. Such a section may receive truly extensive coverage because of the fact that judges have a habit of microanalysing legislation word by word (precedents of interpretation), legislatures have a habit of making (and proposing and debating) large numbers of amendments to existing legislation (they never stop tinkering) and all of this is reported, along with extensive critical commentary, by legal writers (including law professors, senior judges and practising lawyers who are considered experts) in absolutely huge numbers of law reports, articles in legal periodicals, annotated statutes (often revised), hansards, encyclopedias, treatises, textbooks and various other legal publications (that never ever shut up). And that is before we consider the output of historians, sociologists, political scientists and even ordinary journalists.
 * (2) I do not think that this article will only be read by people interested in a particular news story that I hadn't even heard of before it reached AfD or similar news stories that some people will not be particularly interested in. I think a far more likely audience consists of (in each case, both local and foreign) politicians, judges, court officials, police officers and other persons involved in law enforcement, prosecutors, other public officials, lawyers, litigants (including defendents and people looking for compensation), law professors and teachers, law students and even ordinary people who just happen to be interested in the law (and the number television programmes and amount of other fiction that use the law as a plot device suggests there are many such people; and of course there will be plenty of people who will be interested in this subject for its own sake because they are not anti-intellectual and their reading interests extend further than what they read in newspapers or see on television and because the subject is obviously important because of its potential to ruin lives). And then there are people who interested (professionally, academically or otherwise) in history, sociology, phillosophy, politics and political science. James500 (talk) 08:08, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, NorthAmerica1000 18:25, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep - Encyclopedic topic passing GNG for significant coverage in multiple published sources. We're doing the sum of human knowledge thang, you know.... Carrite (talk) 14:02, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Currently, Missouri is the only state to have a "Use of Force Doctrine in XXXXX" article here. I would imagine while every state has its own peculiarities, these peculiarities are usually minor, and any notable peculiarities could be mentioned in the general Use of force article. Do you really believe that Missouri is so unique from the other 49 states that it justifies a separate article? – JBarta (talk) 22:22, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Who is to say that this first is the last? This is the seldom seen WP:OTHERSTUFFDOESNTEXIST argument... Carrite (talk) 22:16, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
 * That a particular argument automatically doesn't have merit because it appears on some list of arguments to avoid is simplistic nonsense. In this case it is a rubber-stamp approach that ignores context and better possible alternatives (mentioned elsewhere). – JBarta (talk) 00:57, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Comment: I would also suggest that this article is somewhat of a WP:CONTENTFORK with the suggestion, simply by its lone existence that in the context of the shooting of Michael Brown, Missouri laws are significantly different than the norm and that was a factor in the death of Michael Brown. In addition to forking, this singular article also creates related problems of WP:NPOV and WP:UNDUE. – JBarta (talk) 22:22, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
 * These arguments are completely devoid of merit. "Doctrine X in State Y" is always a valid topic (though it may be mergeable into "Doctrine Z in State Y" if it hasn't received a lot of coverage relevative to its parent topic). The summary style is not a content fork. Law books are not normally pan-jurisdictional, so the coverage isn't likely to be. This sort of coverage has nothing to do with Michael Brown. There are no issues with neutrality here. The argument about the other states is pure WP:OTHERSTUFF. It may well be that every single one of them merits a separate article, and I would suggest you actually check before assuming that they don't. James500 (talk) 01:07, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Other stuff exists actually offers some rationale for deleting this article. A view that X should not exist because there are no other X's is not automatically an incorrect view. And law can most definitely be pan-jurisdictional as far as this encyclopedia is concerned. Murder is against the law in all 50 states. We have an article on murder. But there is no Murder in Ohio or Murder in Colorado. Within the murder article however you'll find a subsection listing murder law in several countries including Murder in the United States and within that article a section identifying notable differences in some states. This to me is a sensible structure that would also work well for Use of Force. Everything is not deserving of an article at any given point in time. If the Use of Force article were to list so many difference between states that a consensus is reached to give each state its own article, then that's another story. But we're nowhere near that point. And again, the OTHERSTUFF argument isn't in a vacuum. It is combined with other issues (NPOV, UNDUE, FORKING) that while you've chosen to dismiss, I believe are important to consider here. – JBarta (talk) 01:56, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * On the other hand, pan-jurisdictional articles may have problems with SYNTH and NOTDICTIONARY (lumping things together because they have the same name) because laws and law books are not necessarily pan-jurisdictional. A view that X should not have an article only because no other X's have one is automatically an incorrect view, since that says nothing about WP:N or WP:SPINOUT. And the only argument that can realistically be made here is for merger not deletion. James500 (talk) 05:16, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Something to consider if the article gets merged, is that Missouri will then be the only state with a section in the Use of Force article. The problems of WP:UNDUE will remain. Considering that the only reason the Missouri section exists is an effort (intentional or otherwise) to imply that Missouri law is significantly different than the norm stemming from the Shooting of Michael Brown, the issue of WP:NPOV is still rearing it's ugly head. The only way to remove all these problems (as opposed to just moving them) is to delete this article outright and create (if anyone is so inclined) a section in the use of force article highlighting various notable differences between the various states... Missouri included if there are in fact notable differences. And while you may argue that every state's law is different from every other state (at some level of detail and hence your view that law is not pan-jurisdictional), in the context of this encyclopedia we're talking about notable differences that a typical reader of this encyclopedia may find useful. Wikipedia is not a law book. – JBarta (talk) 13:49, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * NOTMANUAL has no application to this article, or anything like it, because this article contains no instructions or advice. Law books are not generally manuals, and, in any event, we do use manuals as sources: it is their style of writing that we do not imitate. Wikipedia includes all specialist subject encyclopedias and is therefore, amongst other things, a legal encyclopedia (WP:5). In fact, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of the law of Missouri (most legal encyclopedias relate to a specific jurisdiction: for example, Scotland has the Stair Memorial Encyclopedia) and should therefore include the whole of that law, because that is what a legal encyclopedia does. Your comments about "notable differences" have no basis in policy or guideline (notability applies to topics of articles, not content within articles), and sound likely to result in Wikipedia being dumbed down to the level of a children's encyclopedia. It certainly wouldn't be compatible with being "the sum total of human knowledge" and would result in you injecting your POV about what is and isn't important into the encyclopedia. In any event, all such differences are important and useful. Your arguments about neutrality are nonsense. James500 (talk) 19:28, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, NorthAmerica1000 00:47, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Merge The article WP:FAILN and does not deserve to survive as a stand alone article. Mhhossein (talk) 05:05, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep per Carrite. James500 (talk) 05:26, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * You have argued for "merge" above and for "keep" here. They are two different things. Please clarify yourself. – JBarta (talk) 13:54, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I did not argue for merger. I said that this sort of article has WP:SNOW chance of being deleted on grounds of notability because there is always an obvious target for merger. James500 (talk) 19:49, 11 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep (But possibly rename ariticle?) As evident from the references (see for, example, Keefe, Brendan (November 11, 2014). "Deadly force laws different on each side of Mississippi" http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2014/11/12/deadly-force-laws-different-mississippi-missouri-illinois/18898855/. KSDK. Retrieved December 19, 2014.), the laws governing use of force differ substantially state by state. Thus, a use of force article for each state is notable, just as a same sex marriage article for each state is notable. (This is because it is the state by state laws that primarily govern these topics, and there are sharp differences in the laws in different states. It is primarily the state law that defines when an officer is justified in using deadly force, although there have been some limited Supreme Court decisions as well.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Djbaniel (talk • contribs) 13:08, 20 December 2014‎ (UTC)
 * This is all putting the cart before the horse. If there were a state by state comparison already in the regular use of force article that was getting too big for that article, then fine... maybe each state should have an article. But there is no such thing. Not one scintilla of effort has been spent doing that. Now all of a sudden this one lone state article appears and the only reason for it's existence is that it's an outgrowth of the Michael Brown shooting. Each state deserves it's own use of force article? Fine, then write a bit on each state in the regular use of force article FIRST... then if each state warrants an article we can consider it. But skipping the important part and jumping right to creating an article for just one state to dangle in the wind by itself for all the wrong reasons is just not a neutral, unbiased or sensible way to build an encyclopedia. – JBarta (talk) 13:30, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * As stated in my introduction on the article's talk page, I created the article for Missouri in hopes that there would be sufficient current interest to properly develop the article. Hopefully articles for other states would follow. Djbaniel (talk) 05:21, 21 December 2014 (UTC)


 * And regarding the example of Same-sex marriage in the United States, if you look at the history of that article, it started out with state by state sections listing notable information/differences between some states, then as time went on and those bits grew, various states broke off from time to time with their own article. A sensible way to go about it, unlike the backwards approach championed by a few here. – JBarta (talk) 13:56, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * If it's better to start with "state by state sections listing notable information/differences between some states," until various states break off from time to time with their own article, then that is certainly fine by me. :-)  Djbaniel (talk) 05:21, 21 December 2014 (UTC)
 * @JBarta: It is your approach that is "backwards" (and a recipe for SYNTH), because it does not follow what reliable sources actually do. There are plenty of books specifically about missouri law, or areas of it (try searching for terms such as "missouri practice", "missouri statutes", "missouri criminal law", "missouri criminal code" etc if you don't believe me). It is, like the law of other jurisdictions, an independent topic that needs to be dealt with in its own right. And I don't believe that a system of law can be understood by looking at differences from other systems, because they will be almost random and presented outside of their real context, which is the system of law they are part of. James500 (talk) 11:23, 21 December 2014 (UTC)
 * If you look at the history of Same-sex marriage in the United States and how that article developed you'll see an awful lot of comparison of the sort you seem to be advocating against. No subject is in a vacuum... even if you wish it to be. Any subject where there may be differences between states should certainly be fleshed out to show those differences in a balanced and sensible way. But let's take that one step at a time... as they did in the Same-sex marriage in the United States article. I'm sure that's a topic as full of passionate editors as this one, but to their credit, they didn't let their passion overrun their common sense. Let's develop some meaty state by state material in the general use of force article first, and then talk about possible spitting off into various states. – JBarta (talk) 19:28, 21 December 2014 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.