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Progress toward national estimates of police use of force

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  • Joel H Garner
  • Matthew J Hickman
  • Ronald W Malega
  • Christopher D Maxwell

Abstract

This research builds on three decades of effort to produce national estimates of the amount and rate of force used by law enforcement officers in the United States. Prior efforts to produce national estimates have suffered from poor and inconsistent measurements of force, small and unrepresentative samples, low survey and/or item response rates, and disparate reporting of rates of force. The present study employs data from a nationally representative survey of state and local law enforcement agencies that has a high survey response rate as well as a relatively high rate of reporting uses of force. Using data on arrests for violent offenses and the number of sworn officers to impute missing data on uses of force, we estimate a total of 337,590 use of physical force incidents among State and local law enforcement agencies during 2012 with a 95 percent confidence interval of +/- 10,470 incidents or +/- 3.1 percent. This article reports the extent to which the number and rate of force incidents vary by the type and size of law enforcement agencies. Our findings demonstrate the willingness of a large proportion of law enforcement agencies to voluntarily report the amount of force used by their officers and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) program to produce nationally representative information about police behavior.

Suggested Citation

  • Joel H Garner & Matthew J Hickman & Ronald W Malega & Christopher D Maxwell, 2018. "Progress toward national estimates of police use of force," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(2), pages 1-23, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0192932
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192932
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Hanke, Penelope J. & Gundlach, James H., 1995. "Damned on arrival: A preliminary study of the relationship between homicide, emergency medical care, and race," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 23(4), pages 313-323.
    2. Schuck, Amie M., 2004. "The masking of racial and ethnic disparity in police use of physical force: The effects of gender and custody status," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 32(6), pages 557-564.
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