Search results

The present study examines the risk of citizens encountering police use of intermediate and deadly force, as opposed to using physical force, given a set of individual, situational and neighborhood variables.

The study uses data from 2003 to 2016 in the Dallas Open Data Portal. Two-level multinomial logistic regression is used to analyze the data.

The effects of citizen race differ across the types of police force. Overall, citizen race plays no significant role in the officer's decision to shoot firearms at citizens. However, there is evidence of intra-racial disparity in officer-involved shootings (OISs) between Hispanic citizens and officers. African American citizens are disproportionately exposed to display-but-don't shoot incidents, while Hispanic citizens have a lower risk of encountering police use of intermediate weapons.

The study helps to understand how citizen and officer race influence and interact across various types of police force. Implications of the results are offered in relation to relevant literature.

The purpose of this study is to explore the ideological gaps on police use of force.

In a national-level survey distributed via Mechanical Turk (MTurk) (n = 979), the authors explore the role that respondents' political ideology plays in the approval of police use of force across a range of scenarios.

Across all scenarios, self-identified conservative respondents maintain strong approval of police use of force. In comparison, liberal respondents provide more variance in their views on approval of police use of force based on the scenario. The scenarios where there are small gaps in approval between the two ideologies are when reasonable force is used toward a violent threat.

There are specific circumstances where the messaging surrounding use of force can create agreement (reasonable) or disagreement (excessive) among conservatives and liberals.

Conservatives and liberals demonstrate gaps across an even larger set of use of force scenarios.

The paper examines the historical shifts in policing strategies towards individuals with SMI and vulnerable populations, highlighting the development of co-response models, introducing the concept of “untethered” co-response.

This paper conducts a review of literature to trace the evolution of police responses to individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) and vulnerable populations. It categorizes four generations of police approaches—zero-policing, over-policing, crisis intervention and co-response—and introduces a fifth generation, the “untethered” co-response model exemplified by Project SCOPE in Philadelphia.

The review identifies historical patterns of police response to SMI individuals, emphasizing the challenges and consequences associated with over-policing. It outlines the evolution from crisis intervention teams to co-response models and introduces Project SCOPE as an innovative “untethered” co-response approach.

The research acknowledges the challenges in evaluating the effectiveness of crisis intervention teams and co-response models due to variations in implementation and limited standardized models. It emphasizes the need for more rigorous research, including randomized controlled trials, to substantiate claims about the effectiveness of these models.

The paper suggests that the “untethered” co-response model, exemplified by Project SCOPE, has the potential to positively impact criminal justice and social service outcomes for vulnerable populations. It encourages ongoing policy and evaluative research to inform evidence-based practice and mitigate collateral harms associated with policing responses.

Given the rising interactions between police and individuals with mental health issues, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the paper highlights the urgency for innovative, non-policing-driven responses to vulnerable persons.

The paper contributes to the literature by proposing a fifth generation of police response to vulnerable persons, the “untethered” co-response model and presenting Project SCOPE as a practical example.

The focus of the current study is to assess whether officers' broad attitudinal orientations are linked with their situational perceptions of danger in various armed citizen encounters.

The authors draw on survey data from 672 officers employed at a large metropolitan police department. The police culture literature is used to inform measures of occupational stress, danger, citizen distrust, views of upper management, and role orientation in relation to how officers perceive danger across a series of scenarios involving armed citizens that varied in terms of firearm placement and citizen resistance. Along with a host of control variables, a series of multivariate models are used to evaluate the degree to which these aggregated cultural views may shape officers' situational perceptions of danger.

The results indicate that a stronger endorsement of broad attitudinal orientations involving occupational danger and citizen distrust are linked with higher perceptions of danger in armed-citizen encounters, especially as the situations become more discretionary.

Empirical research related to police culture has typically relied upon highly aggregated assessments of how officers view their occupational and organizational work environments. However, yet to be explored is whether these broad views impact officers' assessments of specific encounters, particularly those that are dangerous in nature. The findings from this study also have the potential to inform ambiguous use of force standards that are heavily influenced by officers' situational assessments of danger.

Viral videos of police violence create demands for new police narratives about using force. Public reactions to videos lead spokespeople to provide justifications that support narrative structures of the necessity and inevitability of police violence. Ultimately, video is presented as lacking context and credibility when it is viewed unaccompanied by police explanations.

The authors evaluated the impact of an anti-bias training intervention for improving police behavior during interactions with community members and public perceptions of discrimination.

Fifty patrol officers from a diverse municipal agency were randomly selected to participate in an anti-bias intervention. Before and after the intervention, a random selection of Body Worn Camera (BWC) videos from the intervention group as well as from a control group of officers was coded using a validated tool for coding police “performance” during interactions with the public. Discrimination-based community member complaints were also collected before and after the intervention for treatment and control group officers.

The treatment group had a small but significant increase in performance scores compared to control group officers, F = 4.736, p = 0.009, R2ß < 0.01. They also had a small but significantly reduced number of discrimination-based complaints compared to control group officers, F = 3.042, p = 0.049, p2 = 0.015. These results suggest that anti-bias training could have an impact on officer behaviors during interactions with public and perceptions of discrimination.

Although these results are from a single municipal police department, this is the first study to suggest that anti-bias trainings may have a positive behavioral impact on police officers as well as the first to illustrate the potential for their impact on community members' perceptions of biased treatment by officers.