Is Indonesian Police Violence Excessive? The Dynamics of Police Shootings, 2005–2014

Abstract

In Indonesia, debates about police use of force occur in the absence of data, with empirical and theoretical consequences for how the problem of police shootings is framed and understood. This article makes a first contribution to addressing that absence by analysing the National Violence Monitoring System dataset for spatial and temporal patterns in police shooting rates across provinces from 2005 to 2014, the nine years prior to the first term of President Joko Widodo. It assesses the causal relationship between police shootings and officer perceptions of threat in the environments where they operated threat. For the period surveyed, it is found that while police shooting rates were comparatively low, police officers had a significant monopoly on firearm-related violence and operated in environments of low perceived threat. No causal relationship is found between police shootings and police perceptions of threat.