Every police encounter has a moment that decides everything.
It is not the shouting. It is not the chase. It is not even the instant a weapon is discovered. It is the quieter moment that comes after all of that, when the movement slows, when the tension drops, when the person in front of the officer is no longer a threat.
When the hands are still.
When the body is contained.
When control has been established.
That is the moment the law steps in fully and without compromise.
Before that point, the law allows for urgency. It understands the pressure of a split second decision, the confusion, the fear of what could go wrong. It leaves room for reaction. But the second control is established, it stops bending.
Completely. It withdraws any permission for violence and replaces it with something else entirely.
Procedure.
Restraint.
Accountability.
That line is not theoretical. It is not something to be debated after the fact. It is one of the clearest boundaries the state draws for those it arms. It is the point where power is supposed to check itself.
And it is the line that was crossed.
Force Order 237 has been repeated so often in recent years that it has begun to lose its shape. It is now spoken about as though it were a general allowance, something an officer can reach for whenever a situation feels tense or uncertain. That is not what it is. It was never written that way.
It is a narrow, unforgiving rule designed for extreme circumstances. It exists for moments where there is a real and immediate threat to life, where there is no other way to prevent serious harm, where every other option has already failed or does not exist. It is built on one simple idea: that lethal force is the last resort, not the easiest one.
The courts have not been silent about this. Over the years, they have drawn the boundaries again and again, in language that leaves very little room for misunderstanding. Where there is no real danger to life, the justification fails. Where the person involved is unarmed or not posing a threat, the defence becomes almost impossible to sustain. Where the force used goes beyond what the situation demands, the law does not bend to accommodate it. It rejects it.
There is nothing vague about this.
Everything comes back to one word. Control.
Once a person is restrained, once they are no longer fighting or fleeing, once the situation has moved from chaos to containment, the legal question changes completely. It is no longer about what might happen. It becomes about what must happen.
You do not fire.
You do not escalate.
You do not improvise.
You take the person into custody.
That is the standard. It is not optional. It is not flexible. It is the line between lawful force and something else.
This is why the case of Ogidi Mena is so difficult to ignore. Not because it is complicated, but because it is painfully clear.m
A twenty-eight year old man goes to pick up a package on behalf of someone else. A firearm is found inside. Suspicion rises, as it naturally would. In any functioning system, that moment triggers a process. Questions are asked. Investigations begin. Responsibility is traced.
But suspicion is not a verdict. It is certainly not a sentence.
What matters is what happened after that discovery.
By every available account, he was already under control. He was restrained. He was not resisting. He was not attempting to escape. He was not advancing on anyone. The situation, whatever tension it may have carried before, had settled. It was no longer volatile. It was no longer unpredictable.
It was contained.
And then a shot was fired.
At that point, the conversation cannot hide behind legal language. It becomes immediate. Direct.
What exactly was left to defend?
There was no advancing threat. No immediate danger to life. No split second necessity that demanded a fatal response. The very conditions that could make Force Order 237 relevant had already disappeared. They did not weaken. They did not become uncertain. They were gone.
So it cannot be used to explain what happened next.
This is where we must be careful with the words we allow into the conversation. Terms like engagement and protocol can make things sound distant, almost technical, as though we are discussing a system rather than a human life. But this is not technical.
A restrained man was shot.
That is the fact everything else is trying to circle around.
The law is not designed to be picked up after the fact and used as a shield. It is meant to guide action in the moment.
It is a boundary, not a backup plan. If that boundary is ignored when it matters most, it cannot be called upon later to justify the outcome.
If we begin to accept that it can, then the rule itself starts to lose meaning. Because if it can be stretched to cover a situation where there is no threat, no resistance, no urgency, then there is no situation it cannot be stretched to cover.
And a rule that applies to everything, in truth, applies to nothing.
That is where the real danger lies. Not just in one incident, but in what that incident begins to represent. It signals a shift in how power understands itself. It suggests that the limits are no longer fixed, that they can be adjusted after the fact, that they exist only as long as they are convenient.
Once that happens, something begins to erode.
Trust does not disappear overnight. It thins out slowly. People begin to watch more carefully. They begin to second guess. They begin to see authority not as protection, but as something unpredictable, something that can change without warning.
A uniform should not carry that kind of uncertainty.
No society can function for long when the line between control and danger becomes unclear. Because once people stop believing that there is a point where power must stop, they begin to live differently. More cautiously. More defensively. Sometimes more desperately
That is not stability. That is quiet fear.
Force Order 237 was never meant to follow the sound of a gunshot. It was meant to prevent it. It exists to make one thing clear above all else: that the use of lethal force is tightly bound to necessity, and once that necessity disappears, so does the permission.
In this case, that moment had already passed.
Once control is established, the law has already made its decision. What happens after that is no longer confusion. It is no longer pressure. It is not the fog of a difficult situation.
It is a choice.
And that choice does not disappear.
Shaakaa can be reached on: shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com
