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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.

This chapter seeks to illuminate the interconnectedness of procedural justice, use of force, and occupational culture in relation to police legitimacy.

The authors review the existing literature and offer an integrated methodological approach that would better assist researchers in their quest to enhance police legitimacy.

Using a systematic design that assesses police legitimacy from a variety of sources has the potential to help answer critical questions with regard to improving police practice.

This is a novel study approach, which has yet to be implemented but which may offer great insight with respect to improving police legitimacy.

Several recent incidents of highly publicized police misconduct in the United States have intensified interest in controlling police behavior. Administrative control of police use of force is difficult because police officers are often the primary and most credible witnesses to police misconduct, effectively giving them enforcement power over rules they are subject to; police cooperation as both rule followers and rule enforcers is necessary for effectively constraining police misconduct. The authors develop a framework for examining how organizational and institutional variables can affect individual decision making. Using this framework, the authors identify three avenues for reducing police misconduct – increasing the information generated by non-police sources, increasing the incentive for officers to cooperate with external enforcement efforts, and changing the expectations of officers regarding the attitudes and behaviors of their peers – and present a case study of Oakland California Police Department to illustrate the implications.

Police technology fundamentally shapes the police role, and the adoption of technology is even linked to the success of police reforms. Police adoption of emerging technological tools changes the way police interact with citizens. The change in police citizen interactions can then have serious implications for the social control that police have over citizens, the civil liberties citizens enjoy, police accountability, and the legitimacy that the police hold in contemporary American society.

While technology impacts these critical issues in policing, not all technology adopted by the police is likely to influence their relationship with the public. As such, this chapter closely examines the ways that several emerging technologies adopted by the police (i.e., body-worn cameras (BWC), aerial surveillance, visual surveillance, social media, mapping and crime prediction, and less lethal force technology) impact issues related to social control, accountability, and legitimacy. The current literature seems to indicate that some innovations such as BWCs enhance police accountability and legitimacy, and also expand social control. Other technologies such as aerial surveillance and conducted energy devices increase social control, and display a complicated or unclear influence over police legitimacy.

Violence as a foundational element of police work is continuously reaffirmed and justified through police labour as ‘violence workers’ (Seigel, 2018). Hiring more female police officers has recently been seen as a way to reduce police violence. However, would employing more female officers change the relationship between policing and violence? Arguments in favour of more female police tend to rely on stereotypical understandings of gender, emphasising that women are naturally less aggressive and more likely to be caring and compassionate, often obscuring the violence enacted by female police officers in doing so. Female officers may be more likely to engage in violence out of necessity due to police culture and occupational norms around the use of force. Examining female police across countries such as the United States, Nigeria and Slovenia, this chapter establishes female police violence as a broader pattern, reflects on how female officers participate in police violence and addresses the extent to which masculinised police culture structures the expression of police violence. This chapter concludes with a discussion of why hiring more female police officers is not an adequate solution for reducing police violence, as police officers enact and are complicit in violence, regardless of gender.

Previous research on community attitudes toward the police focuses on suspect race as an important predictor of attitudes toward law enforcement and police use of force. Generally, missing from these studies, however, is the role of mental illness, both independently and in conjunction with race, and its effect on perceptions of police. This chapter summarizes our recent research addressing two issues: (1) how race and mental illness of suspects affect perceptions of the appropriateness of police use of force, and (2) how race and mental illness of citizens affect perceptions of police.

We examine these issues by summarizing research obtained through The Portland Race and Mental Illness Project (PRMIP), a survey administered to residents of Portland, Oregon. For our first topic, we use an experimental vignette that randomly alters race and mental health status of suspects. For our second topic, we ask respondents to self-report race, mental health status, and perceptions of the police.

Our dual focus provides two key findings: first, citizens’ perceptions of police use of force are affected by suspect race and mental health status. Second, like Black citizens, citizens with mental illness also have a negative impression of law enforcement.

Our research builds on research indicating racial disparity in trust in police by showing that mental illness – both that of the respondent and that of a suspect – affects attitudes toward the police. These results suggest that mental health status affects attitudes toward law enforcement and should be considered in future research and public policy.

Purpose – Police violence involving minority citizens is a significant problem in the United States. Efforts to explain the disparate treatment of minorities have often relied on structural-level racial threat hypotheses. However, research framed by this macro-level approach fails to consider meso-level characteristics of spatially specified places within cities. The place hypothesis maintains that police see disadvantaged minority neighborhoods as especially threatening and, therefore, use more violence in them. Reconceptualizing the racial threat model to include meso-level characteristics of place is essential to better explain police violence.

Design/methodology/approach – The argument is investigated using literature drawn from quantitative analyses of structural predictors of police violence and qualitative/quantitative studies of the police subculture and police behavior within disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Findings – Research on the effects of city-level racial segregation on police violence supports the place hypothesis that the incidence of police violence is higher in segregated minority neighborhoods. City-level segregation is, however, only a proxy for the degree of concentrated minority disadvantage existing at the meso-level. Community-level studies suggest that the police do see disadvantaged places as especially threatening and use more violence in them. Plausibly, meso-level neighborhood characteristics of cities may prove to be better predictors of the incidence of police violence than are structural-level characteristics in cross-city comparisons.

Originality/value – This analysis builds on structural-level racial threat theories by demonstrating that meso-level characteristics of cities are central to explaining disparities in the use of police violence. A multilevel approach to studying police violence using this analytic framework is proposed.

The study explores the use of video to document police interaction with citizens and its role in the renaissance of a contemporary crisis focused on police use-of-force, race relations, and legitimacy in the United States. The saturation of communication technologies and network access have ushered an era of citizens watching the police, consolidating the new visibility of policing and potentially reorganizing to some degree the power dynamics of traditional police/community relations.

The argument is supported through a triangulated analysis that draws on several data sources about video technology use by both citizens and police, media coverage of police shootings, and public opinion on trends in police excessive force.

The institution of policing is experiencing a legitimacy crisis that is fueled by high-profile police shootings of African Americans by white police officers captured by video technology. The public increasingly expects access to video of police/citizen encounters, which redefines the public’s role in police accountability matters as well as the consequences for police legitimacy.

The theory illuminates the ways in which video has become central to public and official discourse in police use-of-force cases and the problems its presence and absence presents in police/community relations. The ability of citizens to record and widely share video of police encounters is a new development in the ability of citizens and police reform advocates to frame the discourse on police/community relations, accountability, and legitimacy.

This study set out to advance knowledge on the reporting of police shootings in print media. Media is the main source of information on criminal justice issues for most citizens. Thus, understanding the presentation of police-involved shooting incidents is important for determining the manner in which media might shape the opinions of readers.

The current study content analyzed relevant newspaper articles gathered from a large database of journalistic documents compiled by Lexis Nexis. Articles pertaining to police shootings published between January 1, 2014 and April 30, 2015, were identified and coded to document various dimensions of how these encounters are portrayed in print media.

Results indicate that explicit racialization of the stories was limited, which is contrary to what was expected. Neither the race of the suspect or officer was mentioned in most stories, making it difficult to assess explicit reporting bias of these incidents. However, results indicate that implicit bias might play a role in shaping the content portrayed in print news accounts of police-involved shootings.

The current study represents one of the first – if not the first – content analysis of news stories centered on police-involved shootings. Given the significant role media plays in delivering information about crime and justice topics to the citizenry, a working knowledge about the media’s portrayal of these events is important for understanding how media consumption may shape citizens’ opinions about police-involved shootings.