Police Force Use In Six Jurisdictions.pdf

The study employed systematic samples of adult custody arrests to provide a comparison of circumstances when force is used with the circumstances when force is not used. This approach allowed for a complete set of police behavior, even when no force is involved, thereby avoiding types of errors that occurred in previous studies. The data collection compromised ideal research procedures with the real-life necessities of working within an operational agency. A sample of adult custody arrests representative of each department's annual arrests was obtained, with an estimated 900 to 1,200 arrests needed to obtain reliable estimates of the amount of force. However, a random sample of arrests throughout the year was not drawn due to complicated procedures for starting and stopping data collection by police officers. Instead, arrests were sampled continuously over a 2- to 7-week period, depending on the size of the department and the rate at which officers made arrests. The total sample included 7,512 usable surveys, with a proportion of adult custody arrests for which a completed, usable survey was obtained varying from 85 percent to 93 percent. The large size and representative nature of the sample provide a solid basis for describing the nature of use of force in the six participating departments.