An Examination of the Effect of a Policy Change on Police Use of TASERs

Abstract

The role that department policy plays in shaping how police officers exercise their discretionary powers to use physical force against citizens is a critical issue in the American justice system. Research has established that department policies regarding officers’ use of deadly force effected firearm use and led to reductions in incidents of officers discharging their weapon. There is a noticeable lack of similar evidence on the effects of policy changes regarding the use of non-lethal force. This study describes the results of an assessment of the effect that a change in policy governing a specific type of non-lethal force—TASERs—in one major police department had on officers’ use of the device. The results show that a move to a more restrictive TASER policy led to a reduction in TASER use. The study also reports on the role that factors besides policy play in officers’ TASER usage.

Keywords

criminal justice policy police decision-making police discretion policy implications

Introduction

A defining characteristic of police work in the United States is the legal authority that officers possess to use force to overcome resistance during an arrest or in the pursuit of some other legitimate police goal (Bittner, 1970). From the dawn of modern American policing in the middle of the 19th century until the last years of the 20th century, officers had but a few options when it came to using physical force against citizens: bodily force (e.g., grabs, punches, and kicks), a baton (or some other blunt instrument), or a firearm (e.g., Gates, 1992). What changed near the end of the 20th century was that a variety of new sorts of non-lethal weapons began to be introduced into American policing (e.g., Hubbs & Klinger, 2002). The type of non-lethal device that has seen the highest level of adoption is the conducted energy device (CED; Adams & Jennison, 2007; Kaminski, 2009). CEDs are a class of hand-held weapons that use low-amperage/high-voltage electricity to disrupt the capacity and willingness of citizens to resist police attempts to control them. Some 10,000 law enforcement agencies presently equip at least some of their officers with CEDs, the vast majority of which are produced by TASER International (Chermak, 2009; Kleinig, 2007; Vilke & Chan, 2007; White & Ready, 2007, 2010). As TASER brand CEDs became more popular in American police work, CEDs came to be known generically as “TASERs” and they became a source of considerable controversy (Miller, 2010).

The first matter of controversy concerns the physiological effect of TASERs, as many commentators have asserted that they are inherently dangerous devices that have caused hundreds of deaths by interrupting normal cardiac rhythm (Amnesty International, 2007; Schlosberg, Levin, Batliwalla, & Daniels, 2005; Zipes, 2012). Studies that have examined the alleged link between TASER usage and death, however, cast serious doubts on claims of TASER-caused mortality (Melekian & Wexler, 2011; Morgan, 2008; Mukasey, Sedgwick, & Hagy, 2008; Vilke & Chan, 2007), and medical research suggests that the electrical current TASERs deliver does not cause heart abnormalities (Bozeman, Teacher, & Winslow, 2012; Dawes, Ho, Reardon, & Miner, 2010; Eastman et al., 2008; Levine, Sloane, Chan, Dunford, & Vilke, 2007). TASER critics do not accept the conclusions of those who assert that TASERs are not inherently dangerous devices (Amnesty International, 2007, 2008; McCray & Andersson, 2012; Schlosberg et al., 2005), so the controversy about the safety of TASERs continues.

A second point of contention is rooted in the long-standing and broader concern that police officers, by virtue of the power inherent in their office, will abuse citizens with whatever instruments they have available (Micucci & Gomme, 2005). For example, when oleoresin capsicum (aka pepper spray) came into widespread use in the 1990s, it came under withering criticism (Alpert & Dunham, 2010). Where TASERs go, in addition to the general concern about unnecessary force, critics have also asserted that police officers are liable to put them to use to torture individuals (see, for example, Bleetman, Steyn, & Lee, 2004; National Institute of Justice [NIJ], 2011), as electricity is a popular form of cruelty in some regimes (Amnesty International, 2008). Given that TASERs couple the generic worry about police abusing their powers with the imagery of electrical torture devices, it is not surprising that some have serious reservations about these devices independent of worries about their lethality.

The twin concerns about death and abuse have led to a line of work that addresses how police administrators might control the use of TASERs by line officers via the issuance of policy directives. This literature, however, consists largely of expository ruminations about the importance of sound policy to control officers’ CED usage (Adams & Jennison, 2007; Kleinig, 2007; Thomas, Collins, & Lovrich, 2010), along with some discussion of reasons why policy might be of limited utility in controlling officers’ actions (e.g., Chermak, 2009). There is essentially no empirical evidence on the role that department policy actually plays in changing line officers use of CEDs (Adams & Jennison, 2007).¹

Within the confines of organizational theory, the present study seeks to narrow the gap in our knowledge about how departmental policy might affect officers’ CED use by examining the frequency of CED use in one major U.S. police department before and after the agency made a major change in its policy governing the use of these devices. Following brief reviews of literature relevant to CED usage and the link between organizational policy and behavior, this article discusses the research site, lays out the analytical strategy used to examine the effects of the policy change on CED usage in the agency, presents the results of the analysis, and concludes with a discussion of what the results mean for enhancing our understanding of the policy–behavior link and for providing police officers with appropriate guidance regarding the use of CEDs. Directions for future research are also discussed in this final section.

Previous Literature

Formal organizations seek to guide the actions of their members through a variety of mechanisms, including the promulgation, dissemination, and enforcement of policies (Eztioni, 1975; Scott, 1981; Van Maanen & Schein, 1977; Terrill & Paoline, 2013). In American police work, law enforcement administrators implement use-of-force policies to guide line officers’ application of physical force against citizens. While the specifics of use-of-force policies across the nation vary considerably, they all have in common the notion that the force officers utilize against citizens in any given instance must be proportional to the resistance displayed by the citizen (e.g., Morrison & Garner, 2011). This idea is often represented with the term force continuum, which delineates the level of force that officers are permitted to use based on the level of resistance citizens exert against the police. At the low end of the generic force continuum, for example, officers are allowed to grab a citizen who passively refuses to comply with an officer’s lawful order.² And at the high end, officers are permitted to shoot citizens whose resistance threatens the life of an officer or another innocent party (by firing a gun at a crime victim or a police officer, for example). Often lying between the poles in use-of-force continua, TASERs and other less-lethal devices (e.g., pepper spray and batons) are available to officers to combat the varying levels of resistance they encounter during arrest situations.

Research on the utility of use-of-force policies in controlling officers’ actions is sparse (Mastrofski, 2004) and limited to directives aimed at the high end of the force continuum. Research on the effectiveness of deadly force policies in controlling police firearms usage began in the late 1970s with Fyfe’s (1978) groundbreaking research, which demonstrated that a move to a more restrictive shooting policy in New York City led to notable reductions in how frequently New York Police Department (NYPD) officers discharged their pistols at citizens. Sherman (1983) found similar reductions in the number of police shootings following moves to more restrictive deadly force policies in Kansas City, Missouri, and Atlanta, Georgia. This same pattern has been disclosed in more recent research as well, such as White’s (2001) report that policy changes that restricted the circumstances under which Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, police officers were authorized to shoot led to reductions in the number of shootings in that city, albeit with some nuances.³ As noted in the introduction, there exists a dearth of similar empirical research on the relationship between force policy and TASER usage (see also Crow & Adrion, 2011; Taylor, Alpert, Kubu, Woods, & Dunham, 2011). And, despite the fact that officers use various forms of non-lethal force exponentially more frequently than they discharge their firearms, there likewise exist few empirical reports on the policy–behavior link for any other form of non-lethal force either. As Terrill (2010) put it,

It has been some 30 years since Fyfe demonstrated the benefits of restrictive deadly force policies. Yet, researchers have not yet sought to determine empirically the extent to which various types of nondeadly force policies might also result in beneficial outcomes. In terms of policy development, we have not yet applied what we learned from research on deadly force to our understanding of nondeadly force. (p. 67)

Given that there exists a scarcity of empirical research on how policy might affect any sort of non-lethal force, the assessment of the policy–TASER usage link presented in this article will not only provide the first empirical look at this specific relationship but will also fill an important gap in the research by empirically assessing how policy affects non-lethal force writ large.

Debate on policy effects on officer behavior is far from over. Mastrofski (2004) noted that there is not enough research on the topic to come to any definite conclusions. He found that it is vitally important to address officer-level decision-making vis-à-vis organizational policies, and that police agencies “are limited in their capacity to manipulate what employees really care about” and are loosely connected to daily decision-making (Mastrofski, 2004, p. 104). Similarly, Novack, Alarid, and Lucas (2003) commented that officers are street-level bureaucrats who have the luxury of deciding how/if they will implement policy. In this sense, it is imperative to understand within-officer differences as a result of policy. Indeed, had scholars and practitioners conclusively found that officers would unequivocally follow departmental policies and procedures, the need for integrity units within departments (e.g., internal affairs) would cease. That is clearly not the case.

Method

The Research Site and the Data

Dallas, Texas, the tenth largest city in the United States (with a 2010 population of approximately 1.2 million), is policed primarily by the 3,500 or so sworn members of the Dallas Police Department (DPD), and is broken up into seven distinct patrol divisions. During time periods under study, DPD monthly staffing levels of uniformed patrol officers averaged 34% of all sworn employees and were spread across the several patrol divisions. In January 2005, the DPD implemented a program whereby all patrol officers who had completed a 4-hr training program on TASER usage could check out one of the 350 TASERs the department had purchased in 2004. The training that the TASER-certified officers completed included instruction on when they were permitted by the DPD use-of-force policy to employ the device against citizens. This policy stated that officers were permitted to deploy their TASER whenever they were met with what the DPD termed defensive resistance, which consists of any sort of physical non-compliance against a lawful police order (such as refusing to stand up when ordered to do so if seated).

This permissive TASER usage policy lasted approximately 1 year. In late 2005, the DPD use-of-force policy was changed so that officers were no longer allowed to use TASERs against citizens who were merely thwarting arrest by failing to comply with an officer’s verbal orders. The new policy limited the use of TASERs to situations in which the resistance a citizen displayed had to reach at least what the DPD called “active aggression,” which essentially means taking some sort of physical action directed at an officer (or an innocent citizen). Under the new policy then, a citizen had to attack, grab, punch, and/or kick at an officer or another innocent before a DPD officer would be permitted to deploy his or her TASER. In force continuum parlance, the new DPD policy placed the TASER at a higher level than was the case with the initial TASER policy (see the appendix).

The policy change instituted by the DPD at the end of 2005 provides an opportunity to assess the effect of said change on the actions of TASER-trained DPD officers by comparing their use of the device under the old and new policies. To do this, we obtained data from patrol supervisor investigative reports of all TASER deployments from January 2005 to August 2005, and then from January 2007 to August 2007. Given the size of the DPD, it took a good bit of time to disseminate the new more restrictive written policy instituted at the end of 2005 and to get officers trained in it. By excluding data from 2006 and starting the second data-collection time frame in January 2007, we ensured that all TASER-qualified members of the DPD would have been exposed to the new policy governing TASER usage. We thus have data from two 8-month periods to compare TASER usage among DPD officers under two notably different policies.

More specifically, the data used for both time periods were collected by gathering administrative reports generated after a DPD officer used a TASER against a citizen. A section of the DPD use-of-force policies in effect during both time frames mandated that officers notify a supervisor whenever they deployed a TASER against a citizen, whether in probe or stun mode.⁴ The supervisor notified was then required to complete a fill-in-the-blank form to record information about specific facets of the incident. These supervisors’ reports were then processed through the chain-of-command and sent to the Internal Affairs Section of the DPD.

The records used for this analysis were obtained from the DPD Internal Affairs Section via a request under the auspices of the Freedom of Information laws laid out in Chapter 552 of the Texas Government Code. The records contained information about each incident in which each DPD officer deployed a TASER at least once during the 16 months under study. During the time frames of interest, DPD officers deployed TASERs a total of 399 times: 292 times during the first 8-month study period (i.e., January–August 2005) and 107 times during the second one (i.e., January–August 2007). This initial information suggests that the policy change did affect how often TASER-armed DPD officers used the device, as DPD officers used TASERs more than 60% fewer times during the 2007 study period than they did during the 8 months examined in 2005. The finding of a notable reduction, however, could be due to some factor(s) unrelated to the policy change. To assess this possibility, we undertook a more exacting analysis, the details of which are described below.

The data showed that a total of 275 different DPD officers used a TASER in at least one incident during the 16 months under study.⁵ We took this information to build a data set that contained 4,400 units of observation, wherein each case consists of 1 month for one officer (275 officers × 16 months = 4,400 officer-months), and all observations were from officers who were employed during both time periods. From here, we set out to measure the change in TASER use within each officer as a function of TASER policy, controlling for other potentially relevant factors. The policy was designed to lower the number of incidents involving the TASER; therefore, we assess the impact of the new policy on officer/month TASER use rates. Before turning to the details of the analysis and results thereof, however, we identify other factors we took into account as control variables, discuss how we measured all predictors, and then provide some descriptive statistics regarding these predictors and our dependent variable.

Variables

We measured the outcome variable—TASER use—as a binary variable where “1” = use during each officer-month and “0” = no use of the TASER by that officer during each month in question. This measurement indicated that officers who used their TASER did so less in than 10% of the months in which they were observed. Table 1 below provides basic descriptive statistics about the variables we measured.

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics.

	M	SD
TASER use	0.09	0.29
Previous TASER	0.80	0.88
Southeast	0.25	0.44
Northeast	0.14	0.34
Central	0.23	0.42
Northwest	0.12	0.33
Southwest	0.18	0.39
North-central	0.06	0.24
South-central	0.02	0.14
Male	0.89	0.32
White	0.20	0.40
Black	0.52	0.50
Latin	0.27	0.44
Summer	0.38	0.48

Source. Dallas Police Department crime analyst records as allowed by Texas Government Code, Chapter 552.

The primary predictor of interest was the policy in effect during each of the two study periods; that is, the less restrictive versus the more restrictive policy. This Level 1 (time-varying) independent variable measured a policy that effectively made use of a TASER more restrictive. To measure this, we simply coded each of the observations (i.e., officer-months) as “0” if it fell prior to the implementation of the more restrictive policy (i.e., in 2005) and as “1” if it fell after the new policy had taken force (i.e., in 2007). Half of the observations (n = 2,200) were prior to the implementation (treatment) of the restrictive policy (coded 0), and the other half were after the treatment of new policy (coded 1). This allows for the interpretation of the TASER event as something occurring absent treatment or in spite of it, and enables an analysis of the effect of new policy on TASER use at the individual level (see also McCoach & Kaniskan, 2010).

An important aspect of this study was an officer’s willingness to use the TASER on a prior occasion. Naturally, the use of the TASER one time would indicate a willingness to use the TASER given subsequent opportunities to do so. To address this important characteristic of TASER use, the present study measured previous deployment of the TASER as a time-varying (Level 1) predictor and was time-lagged to account for the number of deployments occurring prior to any given time period.

Criminal conduct is related to police force usage in that with higher levels of crime and with more serious crime, police officers are more likely, all else equal, to encounter suspects who are willing to resist their efforts to arrest them (Belvedere, Worrall, & Tibbetts, 2005; Engel, 2003; Ferguson & Mindel, 2007; Sobol, 2010). Because crime varies across both space (Cohen & Felson, 1979; Klinger, 2004) and time (Cohen & Felson, 1979; Ratcliffe, 2004), it is possible that TASER usage could be influenced by both the geographical location that DPD officers worked and the timing of the observation periods. Guided by routine activities theory (Cohen & Felson, 1979), we accounted for these possibilities by including both spatial and seasonal measures as controls in our analysis. Our spatial control took into account the patrol district in which officers worked, which allows us to account for differences in criminality at the spatial aggregation that is arguably most relevant for officers’ understandings of crime levels within geographic space (Klinger, 1997). The Southeast Division of the DPD has historically had the highest crime rates of the city’s seven patrol divisions (and it did throughout the two time periods studied), so we used a dummy variable where location of TASER deployment was coded as “1” if the incident occurred in Southeast Division and “0” if it occurred in any of the other patrol divisions.

Our seasonal control was a dummy variable of summer months versus others—as summer months tend to provide more suitable targets in close proximity to motivated offenders (Hipp, Curran, Bollen, & Bauer, 2004), and thus possibly more police interactions with criminals. A greater number of contacts between police and criminals increase opportunities in which TASER events may occur—where incidents that occurred in June, July, and August were coded “1” and incidents that occurred in all other months were coded “0.”⁶ Timing (i.e., growth) was measured as both a linear and a quadratic function (see Equation 1); however, it is important to note that these data are longitudinal, multilevel data where repeated observations are nested within a particular police officer.

If season does matter, the summer season should see an increase in officers’ contacts with violent offenders. Intuitively, an increase in contacts with violent offenders would lead to increased opportunities to use the TASER. In our study, summer months accounted for 38% of the months TASER use was recorded, or roughly a third of the total observation period. This provides an ample time frame to analyze the likelihood that summer months had a relationship to officers’ TASER use after the new policy was in place. This time-varying covariate was coded as June through August (1), any other month (0).

We also measured three aspects of the individual officers who deployed their TASERs during the study periods to account for individual-level factors that could affect TASER usage. Because race/ethnicity could be related to propensity to use force (Brandl, Stroshine, & Frank, 2001; Gau, Mosher, & Pratt, 2010), we measured officer race/ethnicity as Black, White, or Latin, with White as the reference category in analyses. Officer gender could also be related to propensity to use force (Brandl et al., 2001; Gau et al., 2010), so we measured gender as male = “1” and female = “0.” It is also possible that prior TASER usage by officers is related to their willingness to use the device on subsequent occasions, as using the device might enhance officers’ level of comfort with it. To account for this, we measured the number of times each officer had used the TASER prior to each usage during each observation period (i.e., each officer-month).⁷

Analytical Procedure

Because the data include repeated measures of activity (i.e., TASER usage) over time (i.e., 16 months) that are nested within individual police officers, we utilized a multilevel model for change (aka growth curve model), which allowed us to examine the effects of the policy change within- and between-officers over time. We developed a two-level hierarchical non-linear model (logit) where repeated observations over time (Level 1 units) were nested within police officers (Level 2 units). This approach was appropriate as our interests lie in both within- and between-officer differences in the development of TASER use over time, and also in other time-varying and time-invariant covariates that may play a role in TASER use at any given time. When data are nested, multilevel models are needed to relax the independence of observations assumption present in standard regression applications (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2003). This approach allows for an explicit test of our hypothesis while reducing the potential for biased estimates, which would be the case had a non-multilevel approach been applied. A mathematical overview of this approach and its application to longitudinal data can be found elsewhere (see Luke, 2004; Raudenbush & Bryk, 2003; Singer & Willett, 2003).

As the outcome measure was represented by a binary indicator of whether an officer used a TASER in any given month, we used logistic regression to estimate the multilevel model. With all predictors grand-mean centered, the analysis presented herein was carried out in steps. The first step involved the development of an empty growth model (Model 1), which included only the growth parameters (both linear and quadratic functions of time) as predictors at Level 1.

Next, time-varying covariates (i.e., Level 1 predictors) were added to the model (summer season, previous TASER use, and the policy variable), specifying each as a random effect, respectively. These results suggested that each time-varying covariate should be specified as a random effect; however, doing so did not change the model results, thus these variables were specified as fixed for the sake of parsimony (Model 2). That said, the Level 1 parameter estimates reflect how changes above or below the sample mean affect TASER use at any given time.

Third, we incorporated each of the Level 2 (non-time-varying) predictors into the model (Model 3). Each of the Level 2 predictors (officer male, officer race/ethnicity, and district worked) were modeled as predictors of the Level 1 intercept; thus, they represent the direct effect of the covariate on TASER use over time. Cross-level interaction effects were not assessed here as they are beyond the scope of the present study.

The final model (Model 3) is expressed through Equation 1. Robust standard errors are presented with the model results.

\begin{array}{l} {TASER Use}_{i t} = π_{0 t} + π_{1 t} {(Time)}_{i t} + π_{2 t} {({Time}^{2})}_{i t} + π_{3 t} {(Policy)}_{i t} \\ + π_{4 t} {(Previous Deployments)}_{i t} \\ + π_{5 t} {(Summer Month)}_{i t} + e_{i t} \\ π_{0 i} = β_{00} + β_{01} {(Officer Male)}_{t} + β_{02} {(Officer Black)}_{t} \\ + β_{03} {(Officer Latin)}_{t} + β_{04} {(Southeast)}_{t} r_{0 i} \\ π_{ki} = β_{k 0} for k = 1 through 5 . \end{array}

With this analytic approach then, we first translated the previously noted reduction in TASER usage from Time 1 to Time 2 into a longitudinal regression (growth) model, then added a set of time-varying covariates (e.g., summer months, etc.), then added a set of variables unrelated to time (gender, race, etc.) as controls to assess whether the reduction observed over time could be explained by some factor other than the policy change.

Results

Figure 1 below shows the raw (i.e., unconditioned) probability of TASER use each month by DPD officers who employed a TASER at least once during the 16 months covered by the study. The figure shows that the likelihood of an officer using a TASER steadily climbed during the first 5 months that DPD officers carried TASERs with them on patrol, reaching a peak probability above .2 in Month 5, and then dropped a bit over the last 3 months of pre-policy period, settling at a probability of approximately .125. During the time the policy was in effect, the probability of TASER use remained below .1 the entire time, with minor fluctuation around a mean of approximately 0.05.

Figure 1.

Probability of officer using the TASER during an arrest.

Table 2 presents the logistic regression model results. The reduction in the odds of TASER usage from the pre-policy time period to the post-policy time period held with the addition of the time-varying covariates, as indicated by the negative coefficient (β = −2.62, p < .001) for the policy variable in Model 2 of Table 2 below. And it held with the addition of the other controls. As shown in Model 3 of Table 2, during the periods for which the more restrictive policy was in effect, and with all other measured variables accounted for, the likelihood of an officer deploying a TASER decreased by a factor of 2.64 (p < .001).

Table 2.

The Likelihood of an Officer Using the TASER After a Major Policy Change.

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
Time	.229 (.052)***	.495 (.067)***	.603 (.104)***
Time 2	−.019 (.003)***	−.014 (.003)***	−.017 (.004)***
Policy		−2.62 (.397)***	−2.64 (.408)***
Previous use		−.673 (.098)***	−1.11 (.293)***
Summer		−.634 (.202)**	−.605 (.207)**
Officer gender—Male			.328 (.23)
Officer race—Black			−.443 (.208)*
Officer race—Latin			−.008 (.178)
Southeast division			−.068 (.158)
Constant	−2.58 (.183)***	−3.38 (.230)***	−3.97 (.461)***
Log likelihood	−1,299.9832	−1,237.22	−1,229.7816
Bayesian Information Criterion	2,633.524	2,533.514	2,559.294
Number of observations	4,400	4,400	4,400
Number of groups (officers)	275	275	275
Observations per group	16	16	16

Note. Standard errors in parentheses. Pre-policy and post-policy time periods each consisted of 2,200 observations.

p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Regarding other influences on TASER use, some interesting findings presented themselves in the full model. First, we hypothesized that using the TASER at a given point in time would lead officers to more freely use it in the future because use would increase officers’ comfort level with the device. Taken as a whole, the final model indicates that officers who had used the TASER in previous months were less likely to use it subsequently. Also, while we hypothesized that TASER usage would be higher in the summer, our seasonality measure was significant and the negative coefficient indicates that TASER use was less likely during the summer.

Where officer characteristics go, the analysis shows that the race of the officer mattered, but only for White officers. Black officers (β = −.44, p < .05) were less likely than White officers to deploy a TASER. There was no difference for Latin officers. Finally, the geographic location where the officers worked had no impact on their decision to use the TASER, net all other effects. In sum, the policy change appears to have been substantively associated with a reduction in the frequency of TASER use among DPD officers net of other factors.

Discussion and Conclusion

That TASER use dropped significantly after the introduction of the new policy was put in place in the DPD provides evidence that the policy change had its intended effect. This finding should cheer police administrators and others who are concerned about TASERs, for it suggests that officers will follow policy directives intended to guide their use of this widely available, but controversial, force option. The present study should also encourage those concerned about the use of force in police work beyond the immediate matter of TASERs, because it has demonstrated empirically that changes in a policy governing the use of non-lethal force can affect officers’ coercive behavior on the streets. This is important because prior to this point in time similar research had reported only that policy change could influence the use of deadly force in police work (e.g., Fyfe, 1978). The present research has thus provided evidence that the effect of policy on officers’ forceful actions extends to lower levels of the force continuum, at least for TASER use in Dallas, Texas.

Looking through a theoretical lens, organizational theory helps provide a basis for understanding of the results. Police agencies put rules in place to affect officers’ decision-making. The DPD moved from a less restrictive policy to one that is more constraining on its officers’ use-of-force practices. The result was a significantly lower monthly rate of TASER incidents.

Beyond the core question of the effect of the DPD policy change, that the results of the present analysis demonstrated that other factors affected the likelihood of TASER usage is noteworthy. One interesting finding in this regard is that the patrol division variable had no significant effect on TASER deployment, which leaves open the question of potential differences in police decision-making across geographic boundaries as several researchers have suggested (Kane, 2002; Klinger, 1997).

DPD patrol officers were less likely to use TASERs during the summer months, which suggests that officers’ TASER usage is influenced by the seasons, though not in the expected direction. That TASER usage was a bit less likely during summer months does not have a ready theoretical explanation. In addition, when coupled with the place finding (i.e., Southeast) theoretical expectations under a routine activities lens were not borne out where more crime would lead to an increase in police contacts with citizens whose level of resistance may warrant the use of a TASER.

Concerning the crime rate explanation for differences in TASER usage, it has been well documented that the level of resistance that an officer faces may very well dictate how much and how often an officer uses force (Gau et al., 2010; Terrill & Paoline, 2011). While this study was interested in within-officer changes, the amount of crime they faced, and/or the level of resistance they encountered may account for the change in TASER use rates. However, according to the DPD’s arrest reporting system, officers made 2,191 arrests between January and August of 2005, and 2,160 arrests between January and August of 2007.⁸ Concerning other arrests likely to lead to an officer using their TASER, arrests for assaults on public servants (i.e., police officers) were lower in 2005 (114) than in 2007 (131). Although not conclusive, the evidence strongly suggested that officers dealt with roughly the same amount of serious crime, but faced less physical resistance in 2005 (for similar findings, see also Miller, 2010).

Where officer characteristics go, that Black officers were a bit less likely to use TASERs than their White counterparts refutes previous research reporting that minority officers are more likely to use deadly force than are their White colleagues (Fyfe, 1978). This finding is inconsistent with a study by Gau and colleagues (2010) who found that White officers were less likely to use their TASERs relative to officers of other races. The present study also diverged from Gau’s report and found that officer gender was not significant. These findings point the importance of using officers’ race and gender as controls in future research as there is considerable debate concerning the influence that these characteristics have on officers’ decisions to use force (Brandl et al., 2001).

Another unexpected finding was that using the TASER in one instance reduced the likelihood that officers will subsequently use the device. In light of reports indicating that a disproportional number of officers were involved in use-of-force incidents (Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, 1991), this finding was also counter-intuitive. As there is a dearth of research on forceful actions of officers where time-lagged variables were used, scholars should consider this as an important component in future studies.

This conclusion must, however, be viewed in light of a rival hypothesis about the source of the decline in TASER usage after the implementation of the new, more restrictive, DPD policy. It is possible that the decline is due simply to a phenomenon similar to regression to the mean, wherein the initial spike observed over the first several months of TASER availability was due to the novelty of the device, and the reduction after that was simply the effect of this novelty wearing off and TASER usage settled to its “natural” level over time. There is good reason, however, to believe that this novelty-regression notion does not account for the usage pattern observed. DPD’s TASER policy has always required a response by a police supervisor after every deployment, but did not require supervisory response in the wake of any other form of non-lethal force. Given that the added administrative involvement (see also Alpert & MacDonald, 2001) has not changed between the two time periods, differences due to officers using their TASER out of novelty when they could use other forms of less-lethal force (e.g., hand and feet strikes, baton, oleoresin capsicum [OC] spray) that would not require that a supervisor respond are unlikely.

In addition, literature on police subculture notes that line officers typically mistrust supervisors (Paoline, 2004), and that higher-level involvement in their work routines (e.g., via supervisory and other administrative oversight) causes considerable consternation among line officers (see also Terrill, Paoline, & Manning, 2003). The police subculture literature suggests that the novelty-regression explanation concerning supervisor oversight does not account for the temporal TASER usage pattern observed but cannot be dismissed out of hand. In sum, the results disclosed by the inclusion of the controls in the full model yield the non-surprising finding that factors outside the control of police administrators can influence the use of force by line officers (though not always in the fashion expected).

As with any research, there are several noteworthy limitations to this study. In the present study, one of the limitations concerns the generalizability of the findings. During the two time frames under examination, obtaining a TASER at the beginning of the shift was voluntary and officers who opted to not carry the TASER were not represented in this study. Differences between those who carried the TASER and those who did not are not known. However, since the 350 TASERs available for use were evenly distributed across the patrol divisions, there is little reason to believe that officers differed greatly by working in higher crime areas or in divisions with a greater number of minorities. Second, the findings in this article are not generalizable to smaller, rural departments. Certainly, though, police agencies that are contemplating changing their policy should consider the implications of this report.

Another limitation to this study was the inability to access TASER use vis-à-vis other forms of non-lethal force. Supervisors were only required to complete forms when a TASER was used during an arrest. However, there is little reason to believe that officers who used their TASER were more/less likely to use other forms of less-lethal force as they were trained on all DPD authorized use-of-force techniques. Yet, the question as to the effect of informal supervisory disapprobation remains open and is ripe for future research.

Related to the collection of data, one notable issue when using government records is that scholars must rely on information gathered by others who may not be concerned with empirical analyses and may not gather all of the pertinent information. In this study, data collected from supervisor reports were a matter of convenience as reading hundreds of offense/arrest reports to tease out each casual factor (e.g., level of resistance, use of other forms of force, number of officers involved in the encounter, time of day, etc.) was beyond the researcher’s ability. We were limited to only those data contained within the TASER use report forms. Given greater resources, future research should include these relevant factors particularly as they relate to non-lethal encounters.

Finally, data are not available on the proportion of officers who participated in TASER training between the two time periods. We recognize that a limitation in this study was that if fewer officers were being trained in the use of TASERs and, thus, not authorized to carry them would have decreased the number of officers who had the option to use them. However, numerous officers were certified as TASER instructors after the new policy was in place, thus increasing the number of officers who could receive training. This allowed for more officers to receive authorization to carry the device, therefore, unlikely that the proportion of officers who were instructed on TASER use declined.

For the first time, this present study examined the relationship between within- and between-officer differences as they are related to TASER use. In spite of the limitations, this study provides important information about correlates of TASER usage and the important role that policy can play in controlling officers’ use of the device. Our research also raises many questions as well. An obvious one is whether policies of the sort put in place in Dallas would affect officers’ actions vis-à-vis TASER usage in other agencies that might adopt such a policy. All we can say at this point is that the only evidence presently available indicates that a move to a more restrictive policy does reduce TASER usage, that because this evidence is consistent with organizational theoretical expectations that there is every reason to suspect that the move to a more restrictive policy would have results similar to what was found in Dallas.

Another, not so obvious, issue that the present article cannot speak to was whether the more restrictive policy that the DPD adopted is a sound one. There has been substantial debate about just what sorts of citizen resistance should warrant the use of TASERs and thus what sort of policies agencies should adopt about when officers are permitted to use these devices (e.g., Hickman, Piquero, & Garner, 2008; Smith, 2008). Often lost in discussions about where to place TASERs on the force continuum is the matter of what sorts of force officers might opt to use when a citizen’s resistance does not rise to a level where the TASER would be authorized in a restrictive policy regime. A policy such as the one put in place by DPD that restricts TASER usage to active aggression may lead officers to use other force options—such as kicks, punches, and baton strikes—more frequently and/or more times in a given encounter, which might not be optimal, especially in light of research that indicates that some other forms of force are more likely than TASERs to lead to notable injury (e.g., Bozeman, Klinger, & Vail, 2013).⁹ Unfortunately, the data used in the present study did not include information about the forceful actions that DPD officers took besides deploying the TASER, so we cannot speak to this important topic. More comprehensive research that looks at force in the wake of a move to a more restrictive TASER-use policy would therefore be welcomed by policing scholars and practitioners.

The field must await subsequent research that may shed light on important topics such as the possibility that more restrictive TASER policies lead to increases in other forms of force and whether the present findings (i.e., policy effects) hold elsewhere and with other forms of force. In the meantime, policy makers and others interested in directing police officers’ exercise of their vast coercive powers should take note that there now exists evidence from a major police department that policy can influence officers’ actions in the realm of non-deadly force, which is the realm in which the vast majority of the forceful actions that police officers take against citizens in American society lay. We hope that those charged with developing policy and those who wish to influence the policy promulgation process will take this finding—along with the attendant caveats—to heart as they contemplate how best to provide guidance to police officers when it comes to using TASERs and all other non-lethal force options.

Footnotes

Appendix

The source for this information was the Dallas Police Department General Orders.

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.

Notes

Author Biographies

Stephen A. Bishopp is associate director for Research at the Caruth Police Institute in Dallas, Texas. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas (May 2013). He is also a sergeant with the Dallas Police Department and has served with the department for approximately 24 years. His research interests include police policy, use-of-force, promotional systems within police agencies, and criminological theory.

David A. Klinger is associate professor of Criminology and Criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His research interest includes police arrest decisions, the use of force by police officers, the measurement of crime and social control, and the management of risk in high-risk situations.

Robert G. Morris is associate professor of Criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas. He holds a PhD in Criminal Justice from Sam Houston State University (May, 2007). He is the director of the Center for Crime and Justice Studies. His research interests encompass criminological theory testing, quantitative data analysis, evaluating criminal justice policies, and the study of nonconventional criminal offending.

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