The geographic concentration of use of force incidents at subway stations mimics the law of crime concentration bandwidths: A research note

Abstract

The Law of Crime Concentration states that a small percent of microplaces will account for large portions of crime. In this research, we demonstrate that police use of force incidents likewise occur at a small percentage of subway stations in Philadelphia, a category of ‘risky facilities’, where crime concentration is also expected. Those percentages mimic the bandwidths of the Law of Crime Concentration. We sketch pertinent data collection needs and future research questions that should be explored if a crime and place perspective is to play a role in understanding and informing policies geared toward reducing the extent to which police use force against the public.

Keywords

Use of force law of crime concentration hot spots police crime and place

The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes, proportionately, to the necessity for the use of physical force and compulsion in achieving police objectives.—Peelian Principal number four

Introduction

Law enforcement agencies are increasingly ‘under fire’ (Weitzer, 2015: 475) for the sometimes controversial application of lethal and nonlethal force in American communities—particularly in communities of color. It is nevertheless challenging to argue that we have seen increases in the application of force by police in recent years, excessive or otherwise, despite the examples of controversial video aired on our nightly news and spread on our social media feeds. We do a poor job of recording, compiling, and releasing data on coercive police actions in the United States (Kane, 2007; Klinger, 2008)—this is a problem that has been on the radar of American criminologists for decades (Fyfe, 1988).

This is not to say that there is a scarcity of academic research examining the correlates of police use of force. A steady stream of research was charted into the 1970s (Goldkamp, 1976; Harring et al., 1977), 1980s (Fyfe, 1980, 1988), 1990s (Alpert and Smith, 1994; Alpert et al., 1997), and 2000s (Terrill, 2003; Terrill and Reisig, 2003), and this attention has certainly not waned in recent years (Morrow et al., 2017; Terrill and Paoline III, 2017). A great deal of this research models individual officer and suspect characteristics as explanatory variables predicting both lethal and nonlethal force applications. As we discuss in the following, the results of such studies are oftentimes mixed (Klahm and Tillyer, 2010). Other lines of research consider organizational, situational, and neighborhood-level variables and their impact on the application of force. Whereas research examining individual officer characteristics oftentimes applies psychological frameworks to guide examination—‘is there something about particular officers that help explain why they use force’ (Terrill and Reisig, 2003: 293)—these lines of research posit that police use of force is influenced by the broader context in which these encounters occur. In other words, they examine whether sociological, organizational, and ecological constructs influence an officer’s application of force. The most robust research in this area treats these factors as nested and appropriately applies multilevel analyses to parse out the importance of individual and macrolevel factors (and their cross-level interactions) in influencing police decisions to take coercive actions.

In this research note, we explore whether a crime and place perspective can play a role in further understanding police use of force. To do so, we examine police use of force through the lens of the ‘Law of Crime Concentration’ (Weisburd, 2015: 133) to discern whether the use of force incidents exhibit similar patterns of spatial concentration as crime incidents. When viewed from a crime and place perspective, one might argue that the literature examining police use of force has relied too heavily on a ‘macro’ vantage point.¹ In the context of crime, for example, though some neighborhoods might be labeled as being high crime, decades of research have demonstrated that even in neighborhoods bestowed such a label, very few places account for large portions of crime and that many places within such neighborhoods are crime-free. Is the same true for the concentration of police use of force incidents? If so, (1) why might this be and (2) can steps be taken to reduce the use of force incidents at these places with this knowledge in hand? The first step to answering these two questions is to move down ‘the cone of resolution’ (Brantingham et al., 1976: 261) and to examine the geographic distribution of police use of force incidents at a finer geographic scale. We take a first step here and explore whether we uncover concentrations of police use of force within Philadelphia’s subway system using the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority Police Department (SEPTAPD) response to resistance (their term for use of force) records from 2012 to 2016. After establishing that we do, in fact, observe a spatial concentration, we propose several research questions that future scholars might explore and discuss how answering these questions may lead to actionable policy implications for police.

Crime and place and the law of crime concentration

The criminology of place concerns itself with the study of crime problems at microgeographies, which refer to units of analysis as small as addresses, street segments, intersections, or clusters of these units (Weisburd, 2008). It was not until the 1970s that a small group of geographers and criminologists turned their attention from the focus of traditional criminology, most often persons, to how these microgeographies contribute to crime problems. Although an interest in the geographic variation of crime patterns was not novel (Shaw and McKay, 1942), criminology saw a new interest in the microgeographic as opposed to a neighborhood-level distribution of crime during this time. The seminal work of Sherman et al. (1989) is arguably one of the most influential studies in the area, as it involved one of the first analyses that concretely demonstrated that crime is not random but rather that it is highly concentrated. In their work, they found that only about 3% of addresses in Minneapolis accounted for about 50% of calls for police service. Their findings would spur replication and further probes into the concentration of crime at place and result in development of a scientific ‘law of crime concentration’ (Weisburd, 2015: 133).

In his 2014, Sutherland addresses to the American Society of Criminology; Weisburd (2015) presented an analysis of the microgeographic distribution of crime similar to that of Sherman et al. (1989) work. Weisburd (2015: 143) provided evidence from eight different cities and demonstrated that there appear to be a ‘tight bandwidth of crime concentration at places suggesting a law of crime concentration across cities’. More specifically, he found that 50% of crime incidents occurred at only between 2.1% and 6% of street segments across the cities and that 25% of crime incidents occurred at between 0.4% and 1.6% of street segments. Regardless of what city was analyzed and notwithstanding minor variations between what he classified as larger and smaller cities, this concentration of crime at few places was consistent. Later work would demonstrate that this concentration holds regardless of the temporal scale (i.e. season) (Haberman et al., 2017), whether crime types are disaggregated rather than combined (Andresen et al., 2017) or whether a suburban versus urban jurisdiction is examined (Gill et al., 2017).

The law of crime concentration and hot spots policing

The concentration of crime at place that Weisburd (2015) articulated in his law of crime concentration has been used for decades to justify a hot spots policing approach (Sherman and Weisburd, 1995). Simply put, if the bulk of crime occurs at few places, then police should focus their attention, be it patrol time or problem-solving techniques, at these hot spots—police should not spend their uncommitted time conducting unfocused patrols in large geographies such as sectors (Weisburd, 2008). Since police have begun to take this more spatially nuanced approach toward crime prevention, a great deal of empirical evidence has suggested that crime reductions have resulted. For example, in the latest systematic review of hot spots policing, Braga et al. (2019) found that in 62 of 78 high-quality evaluations of hot spots policing intervention, 20 were found to be successful in preventing or reducing crime.

Despite the reported success in reducing crime via a hot spots approach, skeptics of the deployment scheme yet remain. Related to our work here, for example, Rosenbaum (2006) suggested that the definition of a hot spot is too narrow and that:

Generally, the police have decided that a hot spot is a place where there are too many violent crimes, drug deals or gangs. But why is this definition of “the problem” so narrowly construed? Undoubtedly, urban neighborhoods have hot spots of public fear of crime, hot spots of hostility toward the police, of slum lords, of racial profiling, disorder, weak informal social control, institutional disinvestments, and weak interagency partnerships, to name just a few. Yet these problems are not treated as hot spots because they are not police priorities, because they are not well measured or understood, and because they do not fit within the traditional definition of the police function.

We believe that Rosenbaum’s (2006) concerns are well placed, especially as we write on the topic of police use of force in 2020. We would add to his discussion of potential types of hot spots the fact that use of force hot spots may exist, and we, therefore, test whether we find a similar level of use of force concentration that has been found across multiple jurisdictions inside and outside of the United States when crime has been the variable under study.² If so, we argue that greater attempts to measure and understand police use of force and its spatial distribution at a microgeographic level could prove useful in developing policies that attempted to reduce the extent to which police use force against the public.

The correlates of use of force

Reviews of the state of the evidence of police use of force are available elsewhere (Klahm and Tillyer, 2010) and so it is not our intention to review all of the research findings regarding the causes and correlates of police use of force. Our review here is intended to demonstrate that, although sizeable, the use of force literature provides only moderate guidance for police leaders interested in taking steps to curtail the use of force. Research findings are oftentimes mixed and dependent upon model specification (Terrill et al., 2008) and variable operationalization (Engel et al., 2010). Below we provide a brief overview of the state of knowledge based on Klahm and Tillyer’s (2010) review. Before doing so, it is important to point out that the vast majority of the research discussed examines the use of force generally, which is distinct from excessive force. Although there will inevitably be instances where police are compelled to use force and although in many of these instances force is completely justified, the literature in our review largely consists of studies examining the use of force generally. In approaching our literature review (and research), we highlight that in our view, it is worthwhile to attempt to understand and develop evidence-based policy aimed at reducing even justifiable force when possible, though we recognize that the use of force will oftentimes be an inevitable and necessary part of police work.

Suspect characteristics

Numerous studies have made the characteristics of suspects against whom force was used as their foci. Suspect race is one of the more common demographic variables included in these analyses. Despite the attention that suspect race in the use of force incidents garners, there are in fact few studies that find a relationship between the race of the suspect and the likelihood of force being applied. Indeed, of the 17 studies included in Klahm and Tillyer’s (2010) review, only two found a positive relationship between the race of the suspect and the use of force, whereas seven report mixed findings and eight found no relationship between suspect race and use of force. It should be noted that model specification may play a role in determining the predictive value of race. For example, Terrill and Reisig (2003) noted that despite the fact that early models predicted a higher likelihood of force being applied to minority versus white suspects, this effect disappeared after neighborhood context was controlled for.

The gender and age of a suspect appear to be a more reliable predictor of whether a suspect will have coercive actions applied, though as with other variables mixed findings arise. Most often, males appear more likely to have force used against them, and the weight of the evidence suggests that as suspects age the likelihood of force being applied diminishes (in 7 of 15 studies including an age variable).

Research on suspect demeanor and level of intoxication is likewise inconsistent regarding those variables as predictors of police use of force. Of the 13 studies that considered a suspect’s demeanor during an encounter, only 4 studies found that demeanor was linked to the use of force. A contribution to this ambiguity may be due to the way in which the variable has been operationalized (Engel et al., 2010). Although the level of intoxication more consistently predicts several operationalizations of use of force variables (7 of 15 studies find a positive relationship where being intoxicated predicts the use of force), eight reported either mixed findings or no statistically significant relationships.

Encounter characteristics

Several variables associated with the police encounter that led to the application of force have been studied. Again, we see mixed evidence regarding their importance in predicting the use of force for many of these variables. Suspects who are in possession of a weapon, for example, are found to be more likely to have force used against them in several, but not all studies included in Klahm and Tillyer’s (2010) review. For example, Paoline and Terrill (2005) found that female officers were no more likely to use physical force when a suspect was in possession of a weapon, yet male officers were. Further, one study conducted by McCluskey and Terrill (2005) found that a suspect in possession of a weapon was no more likely to be subjected to force. Whether the encounter was proactively engaged by police is also found to increase the likelihood of force application in some but not all of the available studies. Another relationship of interest that remains unclear involves probing whether the presence of other officers correlates with variation in the level of force applied, as studies have found both a mediating and a moderating effect of additional officers on scene. Finally, two encounter-related variables—whether an arrest is being effected and whether officers are met with resistance—do seem to be reliable predictors of whether subjects will be the recipients of police force.

Officer characteristics

The characteristics of officers themselves have often been independent variables included in models predicting the use of force-related outcomes, yet few relationships have been uncovered. The weight of the evidence suggests that these variables have little predictive value. The race of officers engaged in the application of force appears unimportant (see Garner et al. (2002) for an exception). As with race, gender does not appear to be a consistent predictor of whether an officer will use force, though there are studies, which find a gender-use of force relationship (see Kop and Euwema, 2001).

Officer age and level of experience are highly correlated, which has led many scholars to examine the effects of time on the job more often than age of the officer. Of the three studies available at the time of their review, Khlam and Tillyer (2010) reported that two found a negative relationship between age and the use of force, while one found no relationship. Conversely, level of experience has received considerable attention, and results are somewhat mixed. Of the 13 studies included in their review that examined the level of experience an officer had, five report no relationship, while four report a negative relationship. Finally, there is no clear indication that level of education plays a role in predicting whether officers will use force. Of the five studies that examined this variable in relation to the use of force, two had findings that were mixed and two found a negative relationship.

The current research

The use of force literature is vast, and a great deal of knowledge has been generated as a result. As we noted, the oftentimes mixed evidence makes it difficult to tease out explicit policy implications from this literature. Also, a gap in the literature documented above is an understanding of the microgeographic distribution of use of force incidents. Accordingly, we detail a preliminary inquiry into whether a concentration of police use of force incidents can be found when one examines the geographic distribution of use of force through the lens of the law of crime concentration. From the outset, we should note that we consider our work preliminary because of the uniqueness of a transit police agency like the SEPTAPD. Although not representative of municipal police agencies, which are the bulk of forces in the United States, we believe that our analysis can serve as a model for others where data availability allows for exploring whether our findings hold for a more ‘typical’ police agency.

We also consider our work preliminary because street segments and street intersections have traditionally been utilized as the unit of analysis during the examination of the law of crime concentration, yet our analysis of use of force incidents uses subway stations as the unit of analysis. However, as Eck et al. (2017) discussed, ‘risky facilities’, such as train stations, bars, or schools, represent a ‘related form of crime concentration’. Eck et al. (2017) also provide evidence that within a category of risky facilities, crime will concentrate at a small proportion of those facilities. They demonstrate, for example, that 60% of 911 calls at bars in Shawnee, Kansas, USA, over a 2-year period stemmed from only 20% of the city’s bars (n = 3). So although our analysis is not directly comparable to the majority of studies that have examined the Law of Crime Concentration to date, our understanding of the spatial crime dynamics of risky facilities, combined with our understanding that many social and natural phenomena exhibit spatial concentration (Eck et al., 2017), provides ample justification to probe our research question. Uncovering a spatial concentration of use of force incidents within cities at the street block or intersection level would represent a logical next step to confirm the existence of a spatial concentration of use of force incidents.

Subway system background and research questions

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) is a public transportation system that serves five Pennsylvania counties and three states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware). It spans 2200 square miles and has an average ridership of 805,000 trips per day (SEPTA Service Planning Department, 2015). SEPTA police (SEPTAPD) are responsible for policing SEPTA’s subways, buses, trolleys, and trains. Despite its massive size, SEPTAPD report that the system is patrolled by only 250 officers. Although a geographically small portion of SEPTA, Philadelphia’s subway, the focus of the current study, accounts for the largest portion of ridership and recorded crime. It consists of 2 lines, 53 stations, and 25 miles of track. The Broad Street Line traverses the city north and south, and the Market–Frankford Line traverses the city east and west. These lines serve Philadelphia’s 1,559,062 residents and have an average daily ridership of 307,983 (SEPTA Service Planning Department, 2015). Of all response to resistance incidents occurring within the entire transportation system (n = 746), 44.8% (n = 333) of these events involving SEPTA police officers occurred at a subway station from 2012 to 2016. For the purposes of our analysis, we evaluated the concentration of use of force incidents on Philadelphia’s subway system exclusively given that they are fixed locations, which allowed us to examine our research questions and have a consistent denominator. The subway system is also treated as its own entity by SEPTAPD, so it also makes practical sense to do so.

Our interest here is to determine whether the use of force incidents followed similar patterns of clustering as those found for crime incidents under the law of crime concentration. Weisburd (2015) found that there is a tight ‘bandwidth’ of crime concentration at places. Namely, in all cities examined, only between 0.4% and 1.6% of street segments in each jurisdiction experienced 25% of all crime incidents. When examining 50% concentration, Weisburd (2015) found that this bandwidth was only between 2.1% and 6% of street segments. Do these bandwidths hold for use of force incidents?

Data and methods

Data on all use of force incidents were provided by the SEPTA police for years 2012–2016 in paper format. We digitized these and created a database suitable for our analysis here. All use of force incidents are reported and maintained on response to resistance forms. Officers are required to complete the forms for any police encounter with a civilian(s) that results in force being applied. SEPTAPD’s procedural directive mandates that the application of force by a police officer should be in direct relationship to the amount of resistance encountered or the threat to the officer or another and should be progressive in nature. As such, SEPTAPD employs a use force continuum: (1) officer presence, (2) verbal direction, (3) oleoresin capsicum spray or Taser, (4) empty hand control, (5) baton, and (6) lethal force. Although officer presence and verbal direction are considered a show of force by the SEPTAPD, they are not recorded and, thus, not in our database of use of force incidents. We created a count of force for the remaining categories for each subway station included in our analysis.

For purposes of our study, we excluded transportation centers from our analysis, as they are not comparable to the other subway stations in our sample. Transportation centers are hub locations where multiple forms of transport (busses, trolleys, subway, and regional rail) come together. So, although Philadelphia’s two subway lines may have stations within these transportation hubs, they also house several other forms of transportation and are not directly comparable to the average subway station in Philadelphia. After excluding these transportation hubs, 26 subway stations on the Market–Frankfort Line, and 19 stations on the Broad Street Line were included in our sample (n = 45). Over the 4-year study period, there was a total of 151 incidents where officers used force at Philadelphia subway stations ( $\bar{x}$ = 4.87; SD = 7.47).

We calculated the cumulative percentages for each of the 45 subway stations in Philadelphia, visually represent the concentration of crime via a Lorenz Curve and summarize the level of concentration by calculating the Gini coefficent. Bernasco and Steenbeek (2017) proposed that the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient be adopted as the standard methodology for measuring and reporting crime concentrations. Although these measures were developed to summarize and depict income inequality, they have since been applied to the study of crime concentration.³ Because these methods can be used as a measure of concentration for any variable measured at the ratio or interval level, they are also an appropriate method to explore the use of force incident concentrations.

We use the Lorenz curve to plot the cumulative percentage of use of force incidents on the vertical axis against the cumulative percentages of subway stations on the horizontal axis. Whereas past studies of the law of crime concentration typically reported 50% and 25% concentration levels, all cumulative percentage statements are depicted in a single Lorenz curve graph (Bernasco and Steenbeek, 2017). The Gini coefficient is a summary measure bounded between 0 and 1, where 0 would indicate perfect equality or an even distribution of use of force incidents across all subway stations and 1 would indicate that all use of force incidents concentrate at a single subway station. Using Bernasco and Steenbeek’s (2017) notation, we calculated the Gini Coefficient as follows:

G = (\frac{1}{n}) (2 \sum_{i = 1}^{n} i y_{i} - n - 1)

where G is the Gini Coefficient, n is the total number of subway stations, y_i is the proportion of use of force incidents occurring at station i, and i is the rank order of the subway station when the subway stations were ordered by the number of use of force incidents y.

Results

Of these 45 subway stations in Philadelphia, 31 had at least one recorded use of force incident occur at them. Put another way, our data indicate that 14 or about 31% of subway stations in Philadelphia did not record a single use of force incident from 2012 to 2016. Initial bandwidth estimates indicate that between 0.4% and 1.6% of street segments in a given jurisdiction will account for 25% of crime, and 2.1% and 6% of street segments within a given jurisdiction will account for 50% of crime. Use of force incidents on Philadelphia’s subways exhibits spatial clustering that is similar to those reported across numerous jurisdictions where the law of crime concentration was examined. In Philadelphia, about 25% (n = 38) of all use of force incidents occurred at only one subway station. When put in the context of the law of crime (here, use of force) concentration, the percentage is just outside the estimated initial bandwidth: 25% of use of force incidents that occurred on Philadelphia’s subway system occurred at only 2.2% of the city’s subway stations. Although outside of the estimated bandwidth reported by Weisburd, this is the smallest bandwidth that could have been achieved given n = 45 subway stations. This should be noted as a constraint for research examining spatial concentrations when the unit of analysis has a low n. When examining 50% concentration, the percentage of subways stations is likewise just outside of initial bandwidth estimates of the law of crime concentration’s bandwidths of 2.1% and 6%: Only 8.8% of subway stations (n = 4) account for about 52% of all use of force incidents that occurred at Philadelphia’s 45 station subway stations.

Figure 1 depicts the Lorenz Curve (the dotted line) relative to the line of equality (the solid line). The Lorenz curve’s deviation from the line of equality, along with a Gini Coefficient of 0.72, further highlights the highly concentrated nature of use of force incidents across Philadelphia’s subway stations, and this concentration is not dissimilar from the law of crime concentration bandwidths uncovered by Weisburd (2015).

Figure 1.

Lorenz curve of cumulative percentage of use of force incidents (n = 151) against the cumulative percentage of subway stations in Philadelphia (n = 45); Gini coefficient = 0.72.

Discussion

Eck et al. (2017) reported that many social phenomena exhibit spatial concentration; they concluded that, ‘Among natural and social phenomena demonstrating concentration, crime does not stand out as being particularly concentrated—some phenomena are more and some are less concentrated than crime’. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that use of force incidents concentrate spatially. This is not to say that our finding of use of force concentration is unimportant. As Eck et al. (2017) concluded:

If criminologists had payed attention to concentration evidence throughout the natural and social sciences, they would have expected crime concentration. Because there does not appear to be anything peculiar about crime’s concentration, it is likely that processes that give rise to concentration in physics, geology, biology, economics, medicine, computer sciences, and other disciplines have analogs in the study of crime. Researchers and theorists should adapt these processes to explaining crime.

Relatedly, others have examined the spatial concentration of outcomes that are not exclusively of interest to criminologists through the lens of the Law of Crime Concentration with great benefit. For example, Carter et al. (2018) concluded that there is applicability of spatial concentration methods to studying opioid overdose deaths after they demonstrated a geographic concentration similar to, but a bit more concentrated than, those reported by Weisburd (2015). The policy implications of the Carter et al. (2018) findings are clear: social interventions, such as those targeting public health crises like opioid overdose deaths, would be well served by adopting a targeted geographic approach not unlike hot spot policing interventions. We too believe much can be borrowed from our understanding of crime hot spots and applied to our understanding of the concentration of use of force incidents if this relationship is replicated in future work. As police agencies explore evidence-based solutions, which aim to mitigate the volume of use of force incidents, such an approach may prove to be fertile ground for theory and policy development. In our experience, however, this will require police agencies to commit to developing more robust data on police encounters where force is applied. Before we move on to research questions that we believe would be useful for scholars to explore, we touch on several data collection recommendations given our experience in Philadelphia.

Data collection and analysis recommendations

A criminologist making the case for more robust data collection and increased data availability is akin to a child arguing the merits of increasing the availability of candy. In the context of use of force data, a push for more and better data is not a novel recommendation (see Kane, 2007). To probe whether a crime and place perspective can contribute to our understanding of why the use of force incidents concentrate at few geographic locations, however, environmental criminologists will require finer geographic data and greater detail. An example from our research endeavor here is a useful case in point. In developing our data collection instrument to extract variables from SEPTAPD’s use of force reports, we made an a priori attempt to collect geographic information at a very fine geographic scale. For example, some of the variables we attempted to code were (1) the location within a subway station (i.e. on a stairwell and on a platform) (2) distance from entrance, (3) number of entrances, (4) confined/enclosed space, and (5) inside lighting quality. The purpose of this endeavor was to attempt to understand whether the context and conditions of the location of the use of force incident may increase the likelihood of force being applied or escalating. We quickly learned, however, that the reports did not offer such a robust view of the situation. With strong police–researcher partnerships, plans for systematically collecting these types of data could be established to the benefit of both the researcher, who will have finer geographic and contextual data to analyze, and the police practitioner, who would benefit from a more thorough analysis.

Moving down the context cone of resolution

The responsibility to address the lack of a crime and place perspective in the use of force literature should not fall squarely on the shoulders of police leaders. Crime and place scholars, with their unique perspective on environmental influences on crime, could play a role in further understanding the importance of these influences on police use of force. Few have dipped their toes into this literature. We know, for example, that environmental design (Taylor and Gottfredson, 1986) and the presence of crime generators and attractors such as pawnbrokers and homeless shelters (McCord and Ratcliffe, 2007), drug treatment centers (Taniguchi and Salvatore, 2012), high schools (Roman, 2005), halfway houses (Rengert et al., 2005), and public housing communities (Haberman and Ratcliffe, 2015) all play a role in contributing to crime problems. Theorizing (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1993; Cohen and Felson, 1979) has framed these analyses and has helped to uncover and explain these relationships. Yet this is absent from much of the use of force literature. The use of force literature may benefit from theory development that explains this potential concentration of use of force events, and analyses framed around environmental criminology theories could result in a more spatially nuanced understanding of where and why these events occur. It will be up to criminologists to undertake these endeavors.

Technology as a data collection tool

To the end of compiling data sets capable of answering more spatially nuanced questions, technology may play a role. More specifically, the proliferation of bodyworn camera technology may be a useful source of contextually rich data. After all, some of the strongest research into the use of force correlates has stemmed from data collected as part of observational research (Terrill, 2003, 2005). As an added benefit, bodyworn camera video can be viewed, paused, and assessed as to the strength of interrater reliability. The availability of bodyworn camera video would have allowed us to collect much of the data we were unable to capture via examination of officer use of force reports. This video may be a useful tool that criminologists can exploit for collecting highly detailed data on police use of force encounters.

Future research questions

Overlapping hot spots?

One of the more consistent predictors of whether force will be applied is whether an arrest is being effected. It could be, then, that we see an overlap in hot spots of crime and police use of force.⁴ To our knowledge, this relationship has not been demonstrated yet in the literature. Although neighborhood crime has been found to be a significant predictor of use of force in previous literature, Haberman (2017) demonstrated that hot spots of different crime types do not necessarily overlap. Haberman’s work could provide a model for an analysis that examines whether police use of force hot spots and crime hot spots overlap. This analysis would likewise provide a useful starting point for theorizing about the relationship between the use of force and the concentration at places.

A manifestation of hot spots via officer and supervisor assignment?

Policing is geographic in nature—officers are assigned to administrative boundaries such as sectors when on patrol. It could be that the concentration of use of force at few places is a manifestation of this geographic deployment scheme if a minority of officers are responsible for large portions of use of force. We know, for example, that complaints against police have been found to be concentrated among relatively few officers (Michelle Lersch and Mieczkowski, 1996). If this is the case, the concentration of use of force incidents may be manifesting due to the geographic assignment of police combined with the concentration of use of force incidents among a small group of officers.

Likewise, the influence of supervision may contribute to this manifestation of concentration of use of force at relatively few places. Going back to Fyfe’s (1988) work on police use of deadly force, for example, the relationship between the use of deadly force and the service of Frank Rizzo as both Police Commissioner and Mayor was striking. More specifically, trends of police use of deadly force increased during the years that Rizzo served in these positions and decreased when he left these offices. If, as Fyfe (1988) demonstrated, supervision matters, the geographic concentration of use of force incidents at few places could be an artifact of differential supervision at these places. Here again, we know of no such studies that have examined this question.

Influence of the built environment?

As noted, we unsuccessfully attempted to develop a data set with geographically fine variables, such as whether an instance of force occurred on a stairwell or train platform, and the distance from the station entrance. The purpose of this endeavor was to probe whether officers were more likely to resort to force given variables related to the built environment. The built environment influences crime (MacDonald, 2015), and we attempted to apply this knowledge to the study of use of force. If predictive environmental features are uncovered in future research, it may be possible to adapt principles related to crime prevention through environmental design (Cozens et al., 2005) and situational crime prevention (Clarke, 1980) to endeavors related to reducing the use of force incidents. At the very least, officers could be equipped with knowledge about whether certain environmental features, contexts, or situations might make them more likely to have to use force. To our knowledge, this is an area of research that has not yet been explored.

Limitations

One limitation of literature supporting the Law of Crime Concentration is that extraneous factors such as the size of a street block or the amount of foot traffic that a street block experiences will play a role in structuring the geographic distribution of crime, and these are not controlled for. Our work suffers from the same limitations, and it could be that ridership and station size plays a role in determining how concentrated crime at subway stations in Philadelphia is. However, work that examines this relationship beyond identifying the bandwidths of concentration aboveground can and have controlled for such factors via variables such as street length (Favarin, 2018). Although theoretical, measurement, and research design considerations when studying transit systems are significant (Ceccato and Newton, 2015) and their discussion beyond the scope of this research note, we simply note that this can be overcome in future work by controlling for factors such as station size or ridership figures.

Conclusion

In this article, we demonstrated that police use of force mimics the Law of Crime Concentration’s bandwidths that were uncovered by Weisburd (2015). The concentration of use of force at relatively few locations suggests that a crime and place perspective may play a role in further understanding police use of force and developing policy solutions for curtailing these events. However, much will be required before environmental criminologists can adequately answer these questions. Specifically, there is a need for data with greater spatial and contextual information. In addition to making recommendations for improving data granularity, we proposed several useful research questions and recommendations for theory and policy development.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Evan T Sorg

Notes

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