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Although many studies have considered burnout in the human services, little research on burnout has focused on police officers. This study aims to examine the relationship between burnout and police officers' attitudes towards the use of force and attitudes towards the use of social skills to solve problems.

Data were collected from 766 police officers in Norway using anonymously completed questionnaires.

Police officers reporting higher levels of cynicism also held more favorable attitudes towards the use of force; police officers reporting higher levels of professional efficacy also held more favorable attitudes towards the use of social skills to solve problems.

Future research needs to examine these findings in other countries and using longitudinal research designs.

Organizations are advised to monitor burnout levels of front‐line service workers and introduce structures and processes to reduce burnout levels.

This study has value for senior police management and employment counselors.

The current study examines the effect of changing a specific use-of-force policy coupled with de-escalation training implementation on patterns of police use of force.

An interrupted time-series analysis was used to examine changes in police use-of-force incident records gathered from a large, southwestern US metropolitan police department from 2013 to 2017 based on a TASER policy change and de-escalation training implementation mid-2015.

Results demonstrate that changes to use-of-force policy regarding one type of force (i.e. use of TASERs) coinciding with de-escalation training influence the prevalence of use-of-force incidents by increasing the reported police use-of-force incidents after the changes were implemented. This finding is somewhat consistent with prior literature but not always in the desired direction.

When police departments make adjustments to use-of-force policies and/or trainings, unintended consequences may occur. Police administrators should measure policy and training outcomes under an evidence-based policing paradigm prior to making those adjustments.

This study is the first to measure the effects of changing use-of-force policy and implementing de-escalation techniques in training on patterns of police use of force and shows that these changes can have a ripple effect across types of force used by police officers.

The range of tactical force options available to police is increasing, while public debate about police use of force is never far from the headlines. This paper aims to examine what factors shape how people accept police use of force.

The authors use two online experiments to test whether different force options affected judgments about the acceptability of police action and to explore the role of trust and legitimacy in people's judgments.

The authors found across both studies that respondents judged scenarios involving a weapon (baton, CS spray, Taser) as less acceptable compared to scenarios that did not (talking down, handcuffs), but they did not draw much distinction between the specific weapon used. In study 1, exposure to different police tactics had no effect on trust and legitimacy. In study 2, prior perceptions of trust were strong predictors of acceptability judgments.

There is a comparative paucity of British-based empirical research examining public attitudes toward different use of force resolutions by police. In this paper, the authors explore how use of force affects people's views of police at a time in which the nature and scope of force applications, how these are understood and indeed the basic enterprise of policing itself is being reconsidered and renegotiated.

In this study we set out to explain police support for the use of force, police response to a vignette about force, and police self-reported use of force.

The computer-assisted survey was conducted among 419 officers of the Metropolitana police department in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The regression analyses show that a substantial part of how officers view force, and the reported frequency of their own use of force, can be explained through demographic characteristics, organizational features, attitudes toward citizens, and personal experience.

This study was conducted in a region where excessive police use of force is unfortunately a continuing concern. Based on the results we advise police organizations to tackle this issue by investing in improving police attitudes toward both internal and external relations. We also recommend prohibiting officers to carry the regulatory gun while off duty, in order to reduce deaths of both civilians and officers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether community-oriented policing (COP) influences rates of police use of force across communities, and whether the impact of COP varies according to the level of violent crime in communities.

A range of data sources including police use of force reports, online surveys of Officers-in-Charge and recorded crime data was used to examine the association between formal and informal community consultation and the frequency of police use of force, across 64 socially challenged communities in Australia.

Poisson multilevel modelling indicated no overall association between informal or formal community engagement and rates of police use of force. However, significant interaction terms for both informal and formal community consultation with violent crime rates indicated that higher levels of informal and formal community consultation were associated with lower rates of police use of force in communities with higher levels of violent crime. This relationship was not evident in low violent crime areas.

Communities were purposively sampled to have a high propensity for police use of force, on the basis that they had high rates of violent crime, or high levels of socio-economic disadvantage, or both. This research should be replicated with a representative sample of communities.

The findings extend the potential benefits of COP to reducing the use of coercive policing tactics in high violent crime communities.

This study finds that COP can reduce the frequency of violent encounters between police and community members in high violent crime communities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if global and situational support for police use of force vary across first-generation immigrants, second-generation immigrants and native-born Americans.

Drawing on data from the 2012 General Social Survey, multivariate logistic regression models are performed to predict each of the three binary outcome variables (e.g. support for police use of reasonable force or excessive force) depending on immigrant generation status.

Results indicate that, compared with native-born individuals, first-generation immigrants express less global support for police use of force and less support for police use of reasonable force. In contrast, the first-generation group is more supportive of police use of excessive force compared to the second-generation group and native-born group.

Much research on immigrants’ perceptions of the police has yielded conflicting findings. Part of the reason has been attributed to failure to distinguish first-generation immigrants from successive generations of immigrants. The present study fills a gap in this line of research by assessing the extent to which there is a disparity in support for police use of force between different generations of immigrants and native-born individuals.

This research seeks to examine police use of force from a smaller police agency perspective in comparison with what is known from previous research using data from larger‐scale agencies.

Using police use of force reports involving arrests (n=3,264) over a three‐year period (2002‐2004) from a small police agency located in the upper‐Midwest, this study utilizes descriptive and multivariate analyses to examine how and why officers use force.

While officers resorted to physical force (beyond handcuffing) in 18 percent of the arrest encounters, the majority of force is located at the lower end of the force continuum (e.g. soft hand control). However, unlike officer behavior, much of the resistant behavior displayed by suspects is toward the upper end of the spectrum (e.g. defensive/active). The results also indicate that the most powerful predictor of force is the presence and level of suspect resistance presented to officers. These findings are placed within the context of prior work.

Since the current study relies on official data from a single police agency, the findings come with caution in terms of generalizability.

This study contributes to the literature on police use of force by examining everyday force usage in a small police department.

The purpose of this paper is to examine police use of force using individual, contextual, and police training factors, expanding prior research by including multiple police agencies in the sample, thus producing research findings that can be more easily generalized.

The data for the current study were derived from several primary sources: the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Census, Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and 1997 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS).

Among individual level variables, age and arrestee's resistance were significant explanatory factors. Violent crime rate and unemployment rate were significant factors as the neighborhood contextual variables. Finally, in‐service training was a significant organizational‐level explanatory factor for levels of police use of force.

The paper bridges the gap in research between contextual factors and police use of force. It also deepens our understandings of the association between organizational factors and use of force by incorporating police training into the analytical model.

This article explores the nature and extent of police power to use deadly force within the context of the meaning of the rule of law in a liberal democracy. It is argued that the rule of law requires the protection of the most fundamental of all human rights ‐ the right to life ‐ and that when the coercive powers of government are exercised arbitrarily and excessively then not only is there a violation of existing legal rules, but the rule of law itself is in jeopardy. The laws governing the use of deadly force by the Guyana Police Force are discussed and incidences of the use of fatal force are evaluated to determine whether Guyana’s Police Force is acting within the meaning of the rule of law. It is concluded that the evidence suggests the continuing failure to comply with the requirements of legality and public accountability under the rule of law.