The difference between an imminent and immediate threat can determine whether an officer’s use of deadly force is objectively reasonable. An immediate threat is active now, while an imminent threat is impending, concrete, and likely to cause death or serious injury without intervention. Trainers, supervisors, investigators, and officers must evaluate the full sequence of events rather than isolate the final second before force is used.
One of the persistent challenges in use of force training is that we often use words that sound similar but mean very different things when officers are forced to make decisions under rapidly evolving circumstances. Two of those words are immediate and imminent.
As a trainer, I have long seen students struggle to understand the difference when applied to real-world events. An immediate threat is present and active right now. A suspect is pointing a gun, driving a vehicle at an officer, swinging a weapon, or taking some other action that is already capable of causing death or serious physical injury. An imminent threat is broader. It may not be causing harm at the exact second, but it is impending, near, and reasonably likely to materialize if the officer does not act. Lexipol defines imminent in their policy guidance as “Ready to take place; impending. Note that imminent does not mean immediate or instantaneous.”
That difference can seem academic in a classroom, but it is critical in the field.
Barnes v. Felix and the “Moment of Threat” Rule
The Supreme Court’s decision in Barnes v. Felix should cause every law enforcement trainer, supervisor, investigator, and officer to revisit how we teach the concepts of imminent and immediate as they apply to use of force incidents. The case did not create a new use of force standard. Instead, the Court reaffirmed a familiar one: The reasonableness of force must be judged under the totality of the circumstances, not by isolating only the last instant before the officer fired. The Court rejected the “moment-of-threat” rule used by the lower courts because it improperly narrowed the Fourth Amendment analysis and prevented courts from considering the events leading up to the shooting.
Officers do not experience force events as still photographs. They experience them as a sequence. Information comes in quickly. Threats change. Distance closes. Hands move. Vehicles accelerate. Subjects ignore commands. Terrain, weapons, prior knowledge, and the officer’s available options all matter. A later legal review should not pretend those facts disappeared simply because the final moment can be clipped into a few seconds of video.
At the same time, Barnes should not be misunderstood. Totality of the circumstances does not mean every fact in the background automatically justifies force. It simply means relevant facts must be considered. The question remains whether the officer’s use of force was objectively reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, as Graham v. Connor requires. Graham directs courts to judge force from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, not with 20/20 hindsight, and to account for the fact that police officers often must make split-second judgments in tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving situations.
Tennessee v. Garner remains equally important. Garner rejected the old “fleeing-felon” rule, stating instead that police may not use deadly force simply because a suspect is fleeing. Deadly force to prevent escape is permissible only when necessary and when the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.
“Officers do not experience force events as still photographs. They experience them as a sequence.”
Imminent vs. Immediate and the Fleeing Felon
The fleeing felon example provides a good illustration of the distinction between immediate and imminent.
A person running away may not be an immediate threat to the pursuing officer, but even so, they may pose an imminent threat to others if not stopped. Whether an imminent threat is posed is not based on generalized dangerousness or the seriousness of the subject’s past conduct alone. If “imminent” means only that the person is bad and might hurt someone someday, we have simply recreated the fleeing-felon rule that Garner rejected. But if the facts show the threat is real, near, and likely to occur if the officer does not act, the analysis changes.
Two older incidents help illustrate the point. For many years I have used these incidents in training classes to attempt to explain the difference between immediate and imminent. After Barnes they have renewed relevance.
The first is the 2015 escape from Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped from the maximum-security facility and remained at large for more than three weeks, leading to a massive manhunt across northern New York. Matt was eventually shot and killed by law enforcement. Sweat was later spotted by New York State Police Sgt. Jay Cook near Constable, New York, close to the Canadian border. According to reporting on the Franklin County district attorney’s review, Cook ordered Sweat to stop; Sweat ran, dropped his backpack, and continued toward a tree line. Cook fired, striking Sweat and ending the manhunt. The acting district attorney later concluded the shootings of both Matt and Sweat were justified.
Sweat’s shooting generated the more difficult training question because he was reportedly unarmed when captured and was running away when shot. A shallow analysis might stop there: unarmed man running away. But Barnes teaches that the final image cannot be the entire analysis.
The totality included far more. Sweat was not merely a property-crime suspect fleeing from a scene. He was an escaped maximum-security prisoner serving life without parole for killing a sheriff’s deputy. He had been at large for 23 days. Authorities had reason to believe the escapees had broken into camps during the manhunt, and reporting on the DA’s findings noted concern that a shotgun was missing and the escapees could be armed. Sweat was near the Canadian border and running toward terrain where he could disappear again.
Still, the case is hardly simple. In fact, its value as a training example lies in its complexity. In a conference call following the incident, members of the New York State Police and Division Counsel told me they agreed the sergeant acted appropriately, but they were having difficulty with the immediate versus imminent distinction under the law.
Sweat was likely not an immediate threat to Sgt. Cook in the narrow sense; there was no visible weapon pointed at the officer. But he did pose imminent threat to the public if he escaped again. The risk was not merely that Sweat was fleeing. It was that a convicted murderer who had already successfully escaped a maximum-security facility, who had evaded capture for weeks, and who was about to regain the concealment of the woods near an international border would continue to present a serious and near-term danger if not stopped.
Remember: Immediate asks whether he was about to injure the officer at that very second. Imminent asks whether the threat of death or serious physical injury was sufficiently close, concrete, and likely if he escaped. In Sweat’s case, the DA’s conclusion appears to have rested on the latter and the fact that he had committed a major felony, Escape in the First Degree.
The second incident is the 2009 Lakewood, Washington, police officer ambush. Maurice Clemmons walked into a coffee shop in Parkland, Washington, and murdered four Lakewood police officers: Sgt. Mark Renninger, Officer Tina Griswold, Officer Ronald Owens, and Officer Greg Richards. A two-day manhunt followed. Clemmons was later encountered in Seattle by Officer Benjamin Kelly, who was checking on a stolen Acura with its hood up. Kelly recognized Clemmons, ordered him to show his hands, and fired when Clemmons reportedly turned and moved his hands toward his waist. An inquest jury later found that Kelly believed Clemmons presented an imminent threat when he fired.
Again, the final moment matters, but it is not the only moment that matters. Clemmons apparently had not yet displayed a gun before Kelly fired. That fact is important, because it means the threat was not immediate. But the analysis doesn’t end there. Clemmons had just murdered four uniformed officers. He was believed to be armed, and Officer Richards’ stolen duty weapon was later recovered from Clemmons. Kelly was alone, in darkness, within a few feet of a known cop-killer who had moved his hands toward his waist. The inquest jury unanimously found that Kelly saw Clemmons move his hands toward his waist before the shooting and that Kelly believed he was in imminent danger.
Clemmons presents a different imminent-threat problem than Sweat. Sweat was running away. Clemmons was approaching or near the officer, within feet, after an ambush murder of police officers, and moving toward an area where weapons are commonly concealed. In Sweat, the imminent threat was largely the danger to the community posed by continued escape. In Clemmons, the imminent threat was much closer to an immediate attack. The weapon may not have been visible yet, but the window for safe reaction was closing rapidly.
Imminent vs. Immediate: Training Implications
These examples show why trainers should be careful with language. If we teach officers that deadly force always requires an immediate threat, some may interpret that to mean the gun must already be pointed, the knife must already be in motion, or the vehicle must already be striking someone. That is not the law. The law requires objective reasonableness under the totality of the circumstances. In deadly force cases, the central question is whether the officer reasonably perceived a threat of death or serious physical injury that justified the force used.
But the opposite error is just as dangerous. If we teach imminent threat too loosely, officers may believe that a person’s history, charges, or general dangerousness can justify deadly force even when the threat is speculative or too remote. That is not the law either. Garner is the guardrail: Deadly force cannot be used solely to prevent escape. The threat must be significant, not imagined. It must be connected to death or serious physical injury, not just the inconvenience or difficulty of later capture. And the facts supporting that belief must be articulable.
Barnes strengthens this balanced approach. It helps law enforcement by rejecting artificial hindsight that begins only when the officer fires. Officers should not be judged by a cropped final frame that excludes the conduct, information, movement, and decision points that created the danger. But Barnes also means that officers’ own pre-force decisions may be taken into account. If an officer unreasonably creates or escalates the danger, those facts may also be part of the totality. Totality cuts both ways.
That is an important training point. Officers should be taught not only how to explain why they fired, but how they got there. What did they know? What did they see? What commands were given? What did the subject do in response? What was the distance? What was the terrain? Were there known weapons? Was the subject reaching, advancing, fleeing, or attempting to access cover? Were other people at risk? What alternatives were reasonably available at the time? What facts made the threat immediate, imminent, or neither?
In many incidents, the immediate threat and imminent threat will overlap. A subject pointing a firearm is both. A subject charging with a knife at close distance is both. A driver accelerating toward an officer may be both. But the hard cases often involve a gap between what is visible in the instant and what is reasonably understood from context.
That is where law enforcement needs disciplined language. “I feared for my life” is not enough. “He was dangerous” is not enough. “He was running away” is not enough either. The analysis must connect the facts to the threat.
In the case of Sweat, the question is not whether every fleeing escapee may be shot; we know the law doesn’t permit that. The question is whether, under these facts, this escapee posed an imminent threat of serious harm if he disappeared again. In the case of Clemmons, the question is not whether officers may shoot every wanted murder suspect on sight. They may not. The question is whether this known armed cop-killer, within feet of a lone officer, reaching toward his waist, presented an imminent threat before the gun became visible.
Those are very different questions from the ones often asked in public commentary. Public debate frequently begins after the shot is fired and works backward from the outcome. Legal analysis, done properly, begins earlier. It asks what a reasonable officer knew, perceived, and faced as the situation unfolded.
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A Wider Lens
Barnes v. Felix is a reminder that the Constitution requires a fuller view when it comes to use of force analysis. The ruling is not a license to justify every shooting by adding background facts. Nor is it a license to condemn every shooting by freezing the video at the final second. It requires the harder work of looking at the whole event.
That is exactly what good use of force training should do. It should teach officers that “immediate” and “imminent” are related but not identical. That time, distance, movement, weapons, terrain, prior knowledge, subject behavior, and available alternatives matter. And that the seriousness of a suspect’s past conduct does not eliminate the need for a present or near-term threat.
Officers operate in real time. Courts, investigators, trainers, and the public review their actions later. Barnes tells those reviewers not to wear chronological blinders. Garner tells officers and reviewers that flight alone is not enough. Graham tells everyone to judge reasonableness from the perspective of an officer on the scene, under the facts as they reasonably appeared at the time.
Taken together, those cases provide a practical training message: The final moment matters, but it is rarely the whole story. The law does not ask whether force looked perfect in hindsight. It asks whether the officer’s decision was objectively reasonable under the totality of the circumstances. Understanding the difference between immediate and imminent is one way to make that analysis more honest, more disciplined, and more useful for the officers who must make these decisions before anyone else has the luxury of slowing them down.
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