While recent incidents have lent themselves to the idea that the police frequently respond with unnecessary and excessive force, such occurrences tend to be the exception, not the rule. According to the Bureau of Justice, less than 2% of contact with the police involved the use or threat of force.

You could read that as a little or a lot. What is "contact"? Does that mean that 1 out of every 50 people who ask a police officer for directions are met with unnecessary and excessive force? Probably not, but this stat seems to need more info to be meaningful.

According to the study, "In the Police Public Contact Survey (PPCS), persons who had contact with police during the previous 12 months, whether as a driver in a traffic stop or for some other reason, were asked if the police officer(s) used or threatened to use force against them during the contact. Survey respondents who reported more than one contact during the year were asked about the use or threat of force by police during their most recent contact." The survey was large, as about 50,000 participants contributed information.

Interesting. I guess that leaves us with a question. How many routine traffic or other police stops should result in use of force or threat of force? Looks like current status is about 1 in every 71 stops. I'm not sure what the number should be.

Interesting indeed. It's almost impossible to try to place a normative threshold on an issue such as this, since each incident has a unique set of circumstances and a seemingly immeasurable number of variables.