Assaults on police officers in American cities.

Abstract

Hitherto, no research has looked for correlates of assaults by citizens on police officers in American cities. To explore this question assault rates by citizens on police officers (expressed per 1,000 policemen) were obtained for 1974 and 1975 for all large cities that fully report such data (n = 26).l The product-moment correlation between the rates for the two years was 0.94 (twotailed p < 0.001), indicating that these rates are highly reliable. The assault rates for 1975 were not significantly related to the number of police officers in the cities in 1975 (r = -0.22), the number of police officers per 100,000 population in 1970-1975 (r = -0.20), the population of the cities in 1970 (r = -0.20), the population density in 1970 (r = -0.28), the percentage of the population that was black in 1970 (r = 0.06), the percentage of the population below the poverty level in 1970 (r = 0.06), the degree of residential segregation in 1970 (r = 0.19), the crime index rate in 1975 (r = 0.14), the rate with which police officers were murdered in the period 1970-1975 (r = 0.13), the mean annual temperature (r = 0.09), the number of days per year below freezing (r = -0.35), and the elevation above sea level (r = -0.01 ) .* , This study failed to find any correlates of the assault rates on police officers. It may be that reporting practices for what constitutes an assault on a police officer vary widely from city to city, so that although the rates are reliable, they are not valid or comparable. It may also be that the crucial variables are related to the kinds of men recruited as ,policemen, their training, and departmental organization. Unfortunately no comparative data exist for such variables. REFERENCE