Progress toward national estimates of police use of force.

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

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0192932

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.

Highlights

The authority to use physical force is one of the most distinguishing and controversial aspects of American policing
Three-quarters of all force incidents were reported by local police agencies and nearly 60 percent of the incidents were reported by the 1,009 police and sheriff agencies with 100 or more officers, confirming once again the highly concentrated nature of American policing in a relative small number of large agencies
This research examines the utility of the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey for producing national estimates of the amount and rate of use of force used by State and local law enforcement agencies

Summary

Introduction

The authority to use physical force is one of the most distinguishing and controversial aspects of American policing. While use of force has been a topic of both public and scholarly interest for many years, this interest intensified in the wake of the 2014 deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, and several subsequent controversial fatal police actions. In addition to public protests and a kind of ‘crisis of confidence’ in the police, these events put the spotlight a long standing problem: the lack of national data about police use of force. When individuals ranging from members of the public to members of Congress asked, “How often does this happen?” the disappointing answer they received was, “We don’t know.”. President Obama created a Task Force on 21st Century Policing whose members were charged. When individuals ranging from members of the public to members of Congress asked, “How often does this happen?” the disappointing answer they received was, “We don’t know.” Later that same year, President Obama created a Task Force on 21st Century Policing whose members were charged

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