Understanding Police Use of Force via Hospital Administrative Data

Assessing the impact of administrative policy on use of deadly force by on- and off-duty police.

Deadly force research typically does not distinguish between shootings by on-duty and off-duty police. This article uses Philadelphia police shooting data from two time periods (1970-1978 and 1987-1992) and a unique quasi-experimental design to examine the comparative effects upon on- and off-duty police shootings of an administrative policy that limited police shooting discretion but that did ...

Progress toward national estimates of police use of force

This research builds on three decades of effort to produce national estimates of the amount and rate of force used by law enforcement officers in the United States. Prior efforts to produce national estimates have suffered from poor and inconsistent measurements of force, small and unrepresentative samples, low survey and/or item response rates, and disparate reporting of rates of force. The pr...

Suspect Mental Disorder and Police Use of Force

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 38 No. 2, February 2011 127-145 DOI: 10.1177/0093854810388160 © 2011 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The author would also like to thank Erica Olschansky for her proofreading assistance with t...

Correlates with Use of Force by Police Officers in America

Does Suspect Race Influence Use of Force by Police?

Is the media to blame for predominantly focusing on situations with minority suspects being on the receiving end of police brutality? Or, do the police more frequently target certain races with force? This paper investigates if the race of the suspect has an impact on whether the police implement force. Using a variety of empirical studies, it will be argued that force is more commonly used on ...