Police Excessive Force

Police Excessive Force



Police Excessive Force

Introduction

At the core of the traditional role of the police in our society is the ability and need to exercise coercion in performing some of their functions. With some unknown frequency and severity, law enforcement officers use various forms of verbal and physical coercion in performing their everyday functions of enforcing the law and maintaining order. How and when the police use and do not use physical force influence the immediate accomplishment of police functions. The use of force also affects public attitude that sustain or undermine the legitimacy of the police and the entire system of justice.

There is a long tradition of research about the police use of deadly force, and reviews of this research have identified the characteristics of who was killed, by whom, and under what circumstances, as well as plausible suggestions to explain why. The studies on use-of-force policies and training have generally been prescriptive and have rarely reported the frequency with which officers use particular levels of force. The narrative accounts by independent researchers have tended to emphasize the researchers' personal interpretation of the police work and to highlight alleged and sometimes confirmed incidences of unusual, dramatic, illegal, or inappropriate behavior by officers or civilians (Garner, 715). These descriptions and insights provide a valuable basis for generating hypotheses about the nature of force and the situations in which force is used.

Discussion

Official police records provide more structured data on more use-of-force incidents over a broader spectrum of police behavior in an entire jurisdiction for longer periods than is typically captured in personal narrative accounts. This approach suffers from the presumption of biases introduced by using officers' self-reports to their own use of force. Given the diversity of behaviors that are considered use of force in different departments and which types of force must be reported, this approach may be more suitable for comparisons within jurisdictions over time.(Dantzker,2003)

Surveys of police officers and interviews of recently arrested suspects provide a more direct source of information and are not likely to suffer from as great a selection of bias as records of official complaints. However, these designs may be suspect because both are self-reports from interested parties, are limited to samples of arrested persons, and the interviews are typically conducted while the respondents are under criminal justice supervision. Field observations of the police provide independent measures of the behavior of the police and the public that are not available in official records or public surveys. The design of these studies, however, has purposely focused on a small number of high crime precincts and shifts and, as a result, may have exaggerated the amount and nature of force in a particular jurisdiction. Ironically, the use-of-force incidents observed have been few. In addition, these studies have tended to rely on case-by-case qualitative judgments about what constitutes force, either by observers or by individuals reviewing the observers' summaries of police behavior.

Most recently, Terrill and Mastrofski (2002) used data on 5,700 hours of observation of 222 patrol ...