Findings from Prince George's County Police Department

Abstract

this chapter focuses on the Prince George's County Police Department (PGPD), and mirrors work done in conjunction with the Miami-Dade Police Department (Chapters 3 through 5). The PGPD section of this book includes descriptions of both officer and suspect characteristics and an analysis of the patterns of interaction of primary officers and suspects (both sober and impaired). Rather than dedicate an entire chapter to sequential analyses (as we do with MDPD in Chapter 5), we incorporate them into this chapter, largely because of the limited data available. As in Chapter 3, an officer's level of force is analyzed relative to the level of suspect resistance using the Force Factor, an index incorporating both officer force and suspect resistance. Due to limited data, we do not focus on the inconsistencies we were able to highlight in the Miami-Dade analysis. However, this chapter does make a significant contribution to the research in this field, and provides further support for both our findings in Chapter 7 and the conceptual framework we propose in Chapter 8. The data from PGPD were collected during the first six months of 1999 and are based on 244 incidents. The Prince George's County data did not have very many cases with low levels of resistance, which indicates that either force was not frequently used or reports were not filed unless there was significant resistance. It is unclear whether this indicates a reporting bias or a complete population of events.