Police Quarterly

The role officer experience plays in shaping behavioral choices has received considerable attention. Officer experience has most often been captured by measuring years of service in policing literature. Thus, the field’s understanding of how officer experience shapes behavior choices is limited because years of service are not experienced monolithically. The current study employed multivariate, multilevel models to test three research hypotheses based on existing theoretical explanations of police behavior and psychology literature to more fully explore the influence of officer experience on discretionary search behavior. The results indicate that years of service provide an incomplete understanding of how experience motivates behavior in the traffic stop search context. A more complete understanding requires accounting for aspects of exposure to certain situational characteristics, activities undertaken, and work performance, suggesting that failing to incorporate multidimensional operationalizations of experience limits our ability to fully understand the influence of officer experience on decision making.

The force factor method has garnered much attention and application in police use-of-force research, but the reliability of the method has yet to be intensively studied. Using official reports from the Seattle Police Department during a two-and-a-quarter-year period (n = 1,240), officer–suspect interactions were coded from the content of report narratives. Static force factors compared the maximum force applied by the officer with the maximum level of suspect resistance. Dynamic force factors were also recorded, including up to 10 iterations of dyadic action/reaction coded using the same coding scheme. The coding of force factors was completed independently by two teams working at different institutions in a fully crossed design. Evidence on the interrater reliability and subsequent utility of force factors is presented and discussed. Results indicate acceptable levels of agreement across coding teams and support the use of force factors as a central tool for studying asymmetrical social encounters and the proportionality of force.

We explore the question of whether some of the often conflicting evidence of racial profiling can be cleared up using red light camera observations to measure racial disparities in traffic violations. Using data from cameras at intersections matched to census data, we find that although citations from the red light cameras are issued to a disproportionate number of minorities based on the racial composition of the surrounding location, the racial composition of the violator is consistent with the racial composition of the block group in which they reside. Our study indicates that red light cameras may have a present and future role in assisting public policy makers on issues of racial profiling thresholds.

An overwhelming body of literature points to a relationship between experiencing adversity during childhood and later violence in adulthood. This study addresses a gap in existing research by testing of the impact of four prior childhood adversities on resistant behaviors toward law enforcement officers. A four-level ordinal dependent variable measuring passive resistance, verbal resistance, police action resistance, and physical resistance was created using data from the nationally representative, 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities. A generalized ordinal logistic regression model tested the effects of childhood adversities on resistant behaviors toward law enforcement officers. Physical victimization during childhood and adulthood predicted resistant behaviors toward law enforcement officers above and beyond the effects of prior victimization during only childhood and only adulthood. This study found a strong association between prior physical victimization, foster care involvement, and resistant behaviors after adjusting for demographic, situational, and criminal background variables.

Police perceptions of procedural justice are less well understood than citizen perceptions. Our paper compares the views of police officers and citizens of a routine Australian policing encounter, the Random Breath Test. We examine perceptions of two versions of their encounter: a business as usual and a more explicitly procedurally just interaction. Our results indicate that the procedurally just version affected the views of police officers, but not drivers, regarding the reasons for conducting Random Breath Tests. It also appears that police officers believe that the encounter has a greater impact on drivers’ views than the drivers report themselves. This study has important implications for policing as it demonstrates that incorporating procedural justice within police-citizen interactions affects police officers as well as the citizens. It also highlights the importance of using external (e.g., larger community) measures, in addition to internal measures (e.g., within police organization), when assessing the effectiveness of police organizations to ensure a more complete picture.

The job of the police has become increasingly complex as the role of the police has expanded to incorporate new responsibilities ranging from the creation of police-community partnerships to dealing with mentally ill persons in more humane and effective ways. It is no longer enough to measure response time, arrests, and clearance rates. Police managers need to know whether their agencies have the confidence of the community, whether members of the public believe that they are being treated fairly when they request services or when they are stopped by an officer, whether leadership is creating a positive work environment and culture of integrity, and whether services are being provided in a cost-efficient manner. In this article, we give a short history of performance measures for policing. We then describe a project that is attempting to develop a standardized suite of performance measures that are well tested, reliable, inexpensive, and easy to use. Field-tests found that the producing this richer set of performance measures is feasible for a diverse set of police agencies.