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It is widely thought that perceptions of policing have become polarized along political lines following highly publicized episodes of police violence against minority victims spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter movement and associated counter-movements. Yet, little is known about how the general public interprets events involving police officers as typically reported in mass media headlines, and whether these interpretations differ by political leanings. In this paper, we use a novel experimental design informed by affect control theory to show that liberal and conservatives systematically interpret "clickbait" headlines featuring surprising or ambiguous events involving police officers in systematically different ways. Liberals are more likely than moderates to imagine police misbehaving toward victims perceived to be good, while conservatives imagine victims of police violence to be bad, and thus possibly deserving of mistreatment, even when that information is not specified. We close by outlining the theoretical and practical implication of our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite attempts to rectify the injustices experienced by victims of sexual violence within the criminal justice system, unfounded rates for sexual violence remain high and many victims continue to feel disempowered and voice-less. In this context, police officers are torn between the struggle of representing the voiceless and disempowered, while also needing to protect those who are falsely accused from the stigma of a sex offender. Recognizing the lack of empirical knowledge on the understandings of victims among police who respond to and investigate forms of sex crimes, in this paper we draw on interviews with officers working in Internet Child Exploitation, sex crimes, and sexual assault/child abuse units across 10 Canadian police service organizations to understand how police interpret and respond to child, youth, and adult victims of sex crimes. We unpack the range of interpretations of victims, explore if and how interpretations of victims translate into police perceptions of their interactions with victims and their interpretations of the possible outcomes that can be offered in the investigation, and highlight the difficulties officers encounter as they strive to balance their occupational role with victims' needs. We argue that police interpretations of sexual violence and sexual violence victims are shaped by the officer's adherence to or rejection of understandings of the "ideal victim". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on media framing theory and Bonilla's Silva's theory of color-blind racism this study uses content analysis to examine the coverage of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party in two local Chicago newspapers between 1968 and 1970. Specifically, I analyzed 144 newspaper articles between October 1, 1968 and June 30, 1970 in the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Daily Defender prior to and following the assassination of the chapter's leader, Fred Hampton, in December of 1969. Negative media frames prevailed in the Chicago Tribune, but declined after Hampton's death due to pressure from activists and the public, demonstrating the power of significant events to transform media frames. Still, the Tribune consistently relied on pejorative themes of criminality and communist ideology to portray the Illinois chapter, perpetuating color-blind media frames of abstract liberalism, cultural racism, and minimization of racism. In contrast, the Defender consistently framed the Party positively both prior to and after the death of Fred Hampton. Through their attention to the chapter's community programs and resistance against police brutality and state repression the Defender disseminates oppositional narratives that directly counter those proffered by the Tribune and align with the Illinois chapter's expression of their goals. This study's novel integration of media framing theory and Bonilla's Silva's theory of color-blind racism provides a useful framework to address how structural racism constrains and shapes knowledge of black movements and activists in U.S. society over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police violence continues to be one of the most widely debated topics in contemporary American society. The emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement following the highly publicized deaths of unarmed Black men has further fueled debates surrounding race and police. In this study, we examine the role of racial residential segregation in fatal police shootings. City-level data from the U.S. Census, as well as data on police killings were obtained from Mapping Police Violence (.org) and analysed. Based on index measures of dissimilarity of the 25 largest cities in the United States, we do not find support that more racially segregated cities have more cases of fatal police shootings. Instead, we find support for the racial threat hypothesis, in that, cities that are less racially segregated appear to have more instances of fatal police shootings. These findings are further explored and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health scholars have implicated racism stress as an important factor driving pregnancy health disparities which disfavor Black women. Focusing on micro-level racial discrimination, missing from studies of racism and maternal health is a consideration of how racism, as a macro-level structural force experienced both directly and indirectly, affects health. Conceptualizing highly publicized incidents of police violence as indicators of macro-level racism because they are the result of institutionalized practices in law enforcement, and because they function as contextual, regional- level stressors for the community members located in the geographic regions in which they occur, this study investigates the relationship between the death of Michael Brown in St. Louis County, Missouri and the pregnancy health of the surrounding community, as indicated by preterm birth and low birthweight. Difference- in-differences analyses of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) data reveal in the 9 months following the death of Michael Brown, Black mothers in St. Louis County had a significantly higher rate of preterm birth and a marginally significantly higher rate of low birthweight compared to the control-comparison county during the same period of time and compared to the same 9 months one year prior. This study provides new insights into the relationship between racism and pregnancy health, underscoring the need to consider the "collateral effects" major race-related traumatic events can have on the health outcomes of communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As governance and corporations become transnational in their business and governing efforts, those who are affected tend to identify with one another and combine their efforts of resistance. This paper utilizes multimodal critical discourse analysis and text-mining to examine transnational solidarity efforts between Occupied Palestine and Black communities in the U.S. Through an exploration of tweets, Facebook posts, campaigns, news, and various forms of art, we illustrate the affective intelligence in the political communication (communicative power) between the two groups, drawing connections between their struggles. In addition, this paper illustrates how individual forms of resistance have the power to transform into more powerful forms of collective resistance. Moreover, the paper places the Black strugglein the U.S. and the Palestinian struggle in Occupied Palestine within the larger social context of the global formation of asymmetric wars discussed by Sassen (2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of force by police officers has been a controversial issue in the United States, which has gained media attention in recent years surrounding the deaths of citizens such as Eric Garner and Freddie Gray. Polarization around this issue has increased as movements like BlackLivesMatter receive backlash. Still there is hardly a consensus about where to draw the line between reasonable force and police brutality. Though one thing has become apparent; a racial divide on support for police use of force exists. The purpose of this study is to explore this divide and shed light on the possibility that prejudice plays a role in the attitudes of whites toward police use of force. The results from my findings, using the 2004-2014 GSS, suggest that prejudice plays a role in the racial divide which could hold serious policy implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When, how, and on whom the police enact violence has increasingly become a topic of public concern. Drawing on one year of ethnographic field work at police training academies, this paper identifies three ways in which identifying as a police officer and gaining membership to this occupational group requires participation in institutionalized violent practices. During their academy training, cadets: (1) participate in initiation rituals into violence; (2) practice violence and control; and (3) are subject to violence and suffering as a group. Through these experiences of enacting and enduring violence, cadets come to identify as police officers. Those who are unwilling or unable to participate in these practices are chastised, berated, alienated, and in some cases, they decide to resign. The findings from this paper expand understandings of police violence by pointing to the ways in which the identity of police officers is built and sustained by violent practices. I argue that a re-imagining of the actual identity, and the ways in which new officers gain membership to the group, is required in order change the how the police use violence in their jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores racialized narratives present in the discourse of preppers, a sub-culture of Americans who are preparing for emergencies, disasters, and the collapse of society due to concerns about environmental, social and economic risk. I situate prepping as a racial project, and argue that prepping serves to reinforce white dominance through a variety of color-blind racial narratives that serve obscure the power of relatively privileged Americans who, despite relative privilege, feel powerless in the face of risk society. Strategies used to evade the topic of race includes omission of race during discussions that are generally believed to be racialized (such as police violence), belief in the ultimate responsibility of the individual at all costs, religiously front-loaded racism, in which physiological (and thus fixed) categories are downplayed to emphasis cultural differences that can be considered a matter of choice, and narratives about a return to civil America, in which civility stands in for whiteness, masculinity, and other forms of social privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how people make sense of their continued reliance on an institution that was declared to be unjust. We draw on a unique data set of 60 semi-structured interviews with recently arrested suspects in Cleveland, Ohio - a city currently under federal consent decree due to police use of excessive force. In line with past research, we find that when confronted with unjust conditions, respondents are both skeptical about policing while still believing that the police remain the only viable institution for seeking security in their neighborhoods. Through these interviews we shed light on this apparent paradox by connecting research on legal cynicism with insights from cultural sociology and the sociology of law. In doing so, we examine how people make sense of a bind. On one hand, they reside in a city where the police department is being monitored for excessive use-of-force, and where people report high levels of fear of police; on the other, people identify law enforcement as a much needed and wanted presence in their neighborhoods. We argue that arrested residents of Cleveland make sense of this bind by drawing on multiple and enduring scripts of law enforcement's potential, in spite of current police failures to provide redress for their situations. We conclude that these scripts allow them to aspire to legal recognition despite experiencing the unjustness of legal institutions, and that the polysemic quality of legality provides them with a cultural tool that helps to reconcile the bind in which they find themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In liberal democracies, the police are traditionally conceptualized as the State's principle mechanism for deploying non-negotiable coercive force in response to internal threats to social order. However, in many Latin American countries democratization has undermined the State's control over the police and dislodged the State as the main coercive actor. Based on two years of participant observation and interview data gathered in Caracas, Venezuela this paper argues that by creating alliances with non-state armed actors, state actors have inadvertently incentivized police violence. These alliances suggest to officers that the State has withdrawn its protection of and support for them. This subterfuge breeds a sense of vulnerability and impotence among officers, which operates to justify and encourage extralegal violence and excessive force. The narrative produced within this context envisions the police as a perfidious and estranged subject, thus reconceptualizing the relationship between the police and the state. Furthermore, this narrative overlaps with one utilized by citizens. Indeed, while police and citizens in are often posited as antagonistic groups, their understandings of violence and how to best control it often coincide. Narratives of police impotency and vulnerability are even more problematic because they allow officers to justify the unregulated use of force in a way that makes sense to citizens as well. This convergence of narratives makes police reform and the regulation of police use of force increasingly difficult, as both citizens and officers see the police as under attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A robust body of research demonstrates that African Americans are more likely to be stopped by police than whites net of neighborhood context, crime rates, and other individual level factors. Yet beyond this, we know very little about inequalities in the experience of being stopped by police. Using data on more than 3.5 million police stops in New York City from 2007-2014 and drawing on literatures on race, policing, and the contemporary social movement #BlackLivesMatter, we test a series of hypotheses regarding the associations between race, age, and use of force by police during civilian stops. Findings indicate substantial racial inequalities as well as significant interactions between race and age, suggesting that blacks and whites experience police interactions fundamentally differently, especially young black males. We conclude by considering how inequalities in police-civilian interactions have implications for other sources of inequality in society, including arrest rates, legal cynicism, and involvement in formal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, academic and journalistic attention has been focused on the pervasive injustices of state-enforced crime control systems in the U.S. More broadly, and fueled by the twin forces of social media and the ubiquity of smartphones that allow nearly everyone to serve as a kind of citizen-reporter, dominant culture has finally begun to take seriously the claims of police brutality against communities of color, particularly African Americans. While this attention to state-sanctioned violence is long overdue, a simultaneous trend in in the increase in private citizens' carrying concealed guns speaks to an entrenchment of individualistic responses to crime that are ostensibly operating outside of the state. Some might imagine that the most significant aspect of concealed carry policy is the potential for more gun violence, but my analysis suggests that the gravest threat of this form of state-sanctioned self-defense is cultural insofar as it contributes to a larger ideological justification for neglecting communities that are left out of the spoils of the U.S. political-economy. Police brutality and draconian crime measures may present the most evident forms of state-sanctioned violence, but the state is also complicit in fueling a rhetoric of individualism, and as I will show, this is what makes concealed carry policies both deeply intoxicating for those who take up arms and profoundly consequential for society's most vulnerable. State-sanctioned violence happens via force and neglect, and when it comes to crime discourse, these twin issues are deeply intertwined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police use of lethal force is, taken generally, a very rare occurrence. However, such force is much more likely to be used in economically disadvantaged communities populated by mostly non-white residents. Young black and Latino males are significantly more at risk of encountering such an incident (McElvain and Kposowa 2008). What is surprising is that there is relatively little outcry regarding such events: where is the moral panic? This paper explores why these incidents-- even when recorded on videotape-- do not tend to generate a substantial moral outcry. Considered are two key factors: (1) the collection and availability of statistics that would document the extent to which such incidents occur and (2) the language and logic by which such occurrences are constructed in media accounts. Given that there are no compiled incident data available on the national or even state level makes it difficult to assess the extent to which police use, and possibly misuse, lethal force.Note: Writing this paper compelled me to spend this year systematically collecting data on police use of lethal force using news articles. By the time of the meeting, I will be able to report upon January - June. I will compare what I find to the number of "death by legal intervention" incidents reported by the CDC and will provide some descriptive data summarizing what I find. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research has shown that blacks in Brazil are more likely to be victims of police brutality. However, no research has been done to show whether or not their minority status makes them less likely to report this violence in the form of calling the police or filing a report. Using PNAD data from 1988, this paper examines whether being black or brown (the minority groups in Brazil) or female affects reporting practices when it comes to victimization by the police. Using descriptive statistics as well as logistic regression analysis, this paper will compare reporting practices of whites, blacks and browns. In addition, the paper will examine whether income, age, sex or education level affect reporting practices when a Brazilian citizen is victimized by a police officer. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflict theory holds that coercive mechanisms of social control serve to protect the dominant group from minority threats. We acknowledge the insights of that argument but suggest that it overly simplifies the behavior of social control agents. A notable example involves the police, who may incur heavy costs (criminal sanctions) for using excessive force (police brutality). Certainly minority citizens are disproportionately the victims of police brutality. But why would the police risk using unnecessary force against them when they possess the authority and means to employ the force necessary to accomplish a legitimate duty? We argue that social psychological processes involving cognitions and emotions may play larger roles than group interests in triggering acts of police brutality. Social identity and stereotypes involve cognitions that allow people to categorize and respond rapidly to others. Conditioned emotions such as fear also may elicit swift behavioral responses. These interrelated processes may automatically produce unwarranted acts of aggression against those perceived as threats without intervention of rational deliberation. The difficult conditions of impoverished minority neighborhoods greatly increase the likelihood of such responses occurring. The integrated theoretical model proposed here incorporates the fundamental social, cognitive, and emotional determinants of police brutality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to specify some of the social-psychological determinants that led to the mobilization of deadly state crime in the Latin American authoritarian state context. The Mexican case provides an interesting case in which to specify some of these determinants because hundreds of leftist political party militants, often engaged in legal activities, have been gunned down by state agents (the police, the military, local politicians associated with the dominant party-state) or indirectly by hired guns on behalf of state leaders (Schatz 2001). I argue, in the Mexican case, that leadership authorization of destructive behavior was the critical activating historical condition activating deadly state crime because it created a permissive social milieu that allows for the utilization of more extreme forms of violence including the use of political assassination as a mode of social control. This permissive social milieu was, of course, aided by a passive legal system that generated the almost complete lack of penalties for state-sanctioned brutality. While none of these determinants alone may be sufficient to produce a wave of political-electoral homicides, when they all combine, it makes such destructive behavior very likely to occur. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issue of parental homicides and severe physical assaults of their children by using court ethnography and trail-transcript analysis. Social and structural injustices may generate legal injustices of the most egregious kind. It has been found that racial minorities and African Americans in particular tend to be over-represented as defendants in severe child abuse cases. In all of the physical abuse and homicide cases forensic evidence was extremely compelling.

This paper explores a case of Internet protest that occurred in China in 2003 and explores how the political process model might operate differently in an authoritarian context. The outpouring of public protest and outrage over the Internet that decried the police beating death of a college graduate in China during the spring of 2003 resulted in the abolishment of a key administrative regulation that had long been the source of police abuse. The particular unfolding of this virtual protest suggests that organization and leadership of contentious politics that scholars of social movements have traditionally looked to as fundamental to social movement success need to be constantly created, recreated, renewed and regenerated in an authoritarian context by social movement actors--a process that is more fluid and contingent than the dynamic observed in contentious politics of liberal democratic societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minorities in the United States have often been treated unfairly by law enforcement agencies. Prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States of America, African Americans were the main victims of racial profiling. Since the terrorist attack, however, Arabs/Muslims have become the primary targets for profiling by law enforcement agencies. In both case, racial profiling is discriminatory and it violates the civil rights of innocent people. However, the War on Terror has redefined racial profiling. This paper seeks to map the changing trend and rationale for racial profiling as well as the efforts to combat it. Furthermore, the paper will examine the implications of racial profiling for a democratic society that is increasingly becoming racially and culturally heterogeneous. I argue that racial profiling of Arabs/Muslims is not only an extension of the discriminatory practices to which African Americans and other minorities have been subjugated, but it also opens up new channels for the persecution of the traditionally disadvantaged minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a qualitative study using intergroup contact theory as the theoretical framework to analyze positive shifts in attitudes among students at a historically black university participating in a semester long experiential learning project conducted with a local police department to assist with recruitment efforts aimed at increasing the diversity of its officers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This presentation will report findings related to victimization by police officers who commit crimes in a study of 647 sworn law enforcement officers arrested in 2005-2006. Measurement of victims' gender, age, and relationship to arrested officers suggest that patterns of victimization are persistent across multiple NIBRS categories of criminal offenses, years of service as a police officer/offender, age of police officer/offender, and relationship/age of victims. Patterns of victimization vary based on offenders' agency type (municipal police, county police, primary state police, special police, and sheriff agencies), victim age/gender, as well as crime types (crimes of violence, sexual crimes, crimes of greed, and alcohol/drug-related crimes). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This panel outlines the MSUCF Police Use of Force Policy Study, an NIJ sponsored project (Assessing Police Use of Force Policy and Outcomes). While Phase I of this study examined existing variation in use of force policies nationally, Phase II seeks to determine the extent to which certain types of policy approaches produce tangible beneficial outcomes across eight U.S. cities. The present paper focuses on the latter and offers a preliminary look at force practices across these cities. More specifically, the extent and nature of force usage is explored along with available data on officer/suspect injuries, shootings, citizen complaints, and lawsuits levied for inappropriate force. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing literature examining police officers' use of force against civilians, there have been relatively few empirical studies of the causes and consequences of civilian use of force against the police. Much of the existing research has been descriptive in nature only, and has tended to focus more on civilian murders of police officers and less on non-lethal assaults. Using the FBI's data on Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA), this paper examines several of the factors that are commonly used to predict crime rates and attempts to determine whether such factors may also predict both lethal and non-lethal assaults on police officers. Using a critical conflict theory framework, it is expected that attacks on police officers should be the greatest where there are large populations of racial/ethnic minorities and low income individuals. Spatial analyses will then be used to determine the extent to which those populations cluster in the same areas as both lethal and non-lethal assaults on the police. Finally, the potential consequences of increased attacks on the police are discussed, including the possibility of an increasingly dangerous feedback loop between civilian and police use of force. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TASER devices, which project two small probes that transmit an electrical impulse which results in an immediate loss of the person's neuromuscular control and ability to perform coordinated action for several seconds, are touted by some as a safe, non-lethal weapon for law enforcement. TASER International provides information about "its everyday lifesaving value in law enforcement and our communities." Other reports, however, highlight TASER-related deaths and accusations of inappropriate use of the devices by law enforcement. The current paper examines public perception on the appropriate use of TASERS in a case that is based off an actual incident. A student of Iranian descent was stunned at least four times by officers from the University of California Police Department in the UCLA library after refusing to leave the library when he failed to produce a student ID during a routine check at 11:30 pm. The student did not cooperate with police and encouraged other students to join in his resistance. Subjects were asked to decide if the police acted in accordance with policy or whether the student involved was entitled to civil damages. Results are discussed in accordance with legal guidelines on police use of force. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police work's not pretty. A lot of guys I know are worried about being sued, about the media, about how they'll be portrayed. I'll tell you what pisses me off. We use force on somebody—we're the bad guy even when it's justified. The media gets hold of it and we're the bad guy. Then, somebody shoots us and now we're the hero because we died in the line of duty.Cpl. Jeff MyerTown & Country (MO) Police DepartmentPolice discretion has long been a topic of interest among scholars and practitioners alike, especially as it relates to the use of force. This paper examines the complex relationship between the media and the police, focusing at all times on how that relationship affects officer discretion and the use of force as they do their jobs on a daily basis. The information derives from in-depth interviews with, and observations of, police officers and members of the media working in and around St. Louis, Missouri. For comparison purposes I include information obtained from those working within the St. Louis metropolitan area, surrounding suburbs, and one rural Illinois community. Further comparison is made by interviewing one academy cadet in an order to gain insight into police socialization and its effect on individual beliefs about the media, public perception, and the role of public oversight in shaping police work. The paper concludes by offering concrete suggestions for improving police-media-community relations via education, communication, and heightened efforts toward relationship building. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police scholars attribute police use of excessive force to a variety of factors including individual characteristics, situational contingencies, and organizational determinants. However, little research has focused upon the effect of rising crime rates and governmental as well as citizen demands for more police crime control action on the use of excessive force by the police. This research reports the findings of a longitudinal study on police perceptions of the excessive use of force in one Caribbean nation. A model of the determinants of excessive force is developed based upon current literature that includes situational, individual, and organizational factors as well as the external factor of rising crime rates. The data were collected through surveys, and in-depth interviews with constables and their immediate supervisors in 1994 and again in 2007. Policy implications for the control of excessive force in this developing nation are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from extant literature and theories on police brutalities and misconduct, this maiden study would examine the nature, patterns, and trends of police brutalities in Ghana. Also examined will be the situations and circumstance under which the brutalities occur, the characteristics of the victims of police brutalities and the official reactions to police brutalities. Police brutalities would include physical torture and killing of unarmed civilians. The recurrent problem of police brutalities is examined from both historical and contemporary perspectives. The study would argue that police brutalities have existed since the inception of modern policing in Ghana. Data would mainly come from newspaper and government reports including the various commissions and committees that investigated some of these brutalities, as well as the UN, Amnesty International and Interpol documents. Where feasible, the names of victims, dates and places of victimizations, as well as the circumstances under which these brutalities occurred, the official responses, sanctions of the culprits, and important developments in policing and police accountability would be examined. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1989 the United States Supreme Court held that determinations about the Constitutional appropriateness of police force usage - deadly or not - must be "judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight." While the Court's ruling established a clear standard about the basis for judging officers' actions - i.e., the perspective of a reasonable police officer on the scene - we know little about the sorts of factors that might frame the perspective of reasonable police officers during situations in which they apply force. This paper draws on the results of a study that examined officers' cognitive, emotional, and perceptual reactions during situations in which they employed deadly force against citizens to expand our understanding of what constitutes a reasonable officers' perspective during the tense, uncertain moments when the decision to employ deadly force is made. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers studying the police use of force face the imposing obstacle of precisely measuring incidences of police forceful behavior. Studies utilizing police officers' reports of their own use of force behavior may not accurately measure more serious and illegitimate forms of police forceful behaviors, due to the sensitive and socially undesirable nature of both topics. Studies that utilize observational data are not only expensive and difficult to carry out, but they also run the risk of measuring behaviors adapted to the presence of an observer. Finally, civilian reports of police officers' behaviors also face significant perception biases, most notably, the possibility that civilians' attitudes toward the police (and toward the criminal justice system in general) may influence the accuracy of their reporting. This paper focuses this final phenomenon. Using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods: Community Survey (Earls 1997), this study examines how civilians' attitudes toward the police, and their levels of legal cynicism in general, may shape their reports of police officers' use of excessive force. It is expected that those civilians who report more negative attitudes toward the police, and who report higher levels of legal cynicism in general, will be more likely to report higher levels of police officers' use of excessive force in their neighborhoods. Implications of these findings for the study of police behavior will be discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conducted Energy Device (CED) technology has gained a dominant place in the law enforcement arsenal of less-lethal weaponry over the past several years. It is estimated that more than 7000 law enforcement agencies have purchased such devices and more than 100,000 of them are currently deployed in the field across the U.S. The most common devices in use are the TASER M26 and X26 models. The Center on Force and Accountability of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) conducted two studies on CEDs. For one study, PERF surveyed 82 agencies with at least 100 conducted energy devices in the field and solicited information regarding CED acquisition, use and policy. Regarding policy, questions solicited information on the placement of CEDs on agencies' use of force continua; provisions regarding juveniles, the elderly, and pregnant women; use of CEDS for crowd control, homeland security and against drivers; and so forth. The second study examined incidents across the country in which deaths occurred following CED use and compared them to incidents in which CEDS were used and no deaths occurred. The results of these two studies will be presented. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the coverage of public demonstrations by Turkish Press during the first six months of the year 2001 when a lot of craftsman demonstrations occurred for the first time throughout the country's history. The purpose of the study is to identify the patterns in terms of selective coverage and interpretation of these demonstrations by Turkish press. It is hypothesized that journalists (media professionals) are more likely to select the demonstrations involving police intervention and use of force compared to others. To examine the relationship between police use of force and news value, five newspapers have been selected according to their political tendencies and content analysis has been used to analyze the length of the news, sources of the news, location of the events, and interpretation of the events (including photographs used) by these five different newspapers. It's observed that police use of force was the main indicator for a demonstration to get coverage and compared to other events, demonstrations involving police use of force got more coverage across selected five newspapers as well. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent psychological research is premised on the assumption that police officer decisions to shoot criminal suspects are racially biased, and that officers are more likely to shoot African-American suspects. This assumption is tested with national data on persons killed due to legal intervention, and with data bearing on the African-American share of criminal suspects that law enforcement officers face. The data indicate that the black share of persons killed by law enforcement officers, while higher than the black share of the U.S. population, is lower than one would expect based on the estimated black share of suspects confronted in violent encounters or the black share of suspects who kill police officers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, uses of force were simply referenced at the officer's discretion in incident reports. Then agencies began to require officers to report certain types of force in incident documentation. Today many agencies require officers to complete use-of-force reports, which they mandate through policy for designated force types. This paper will document changes in the force-reporting requirements of U.S. law enforcement agencies over the last 15 years. Results from three national surveys-in 1992, 2003 and 2006-that included near-identical questions on force reporting will provide information on changes in the nature and extent of force reporting. Additional information will be provided on agency review of force reports and the incorporation of force data into early intervention systems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of use of force behavior by police officers has been largely focused on individual, situational, or organizational predictors of that behavior. Although prior work on human behavior, and on police behavior more specifically, has found significant effects of neighborhood context, research on use of force behavior has yet to incorporate these ideas in any systematic manner. The current research seeks to explain the prevalence and severity of force as they are impacted by neighborhood characteristics, with particular attention paid to how those characteristics interact with officer and suspect race, as well as with suspect demeanor. Findings reveal statistically significant effects of these interactions on use of force behavior, demonstrating the need for inclusion of these variables in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory study examines relationships between the force levels applied by patrol officers and the characteristics of the neighborhoods where these events occurred. The data upon which this study is based was drawn from a municipal police department in the southern United States for the year 2000. Geographic information system analysis was employed to link information from Use of Force reports to census block data, thus providing an opportunity to investigate whether severity of force varies with neighborhood demographic characteristics. These characteristics include race/ethnicity, family composition, gender, and age. Accordingly, this research tests prior findings that that associate police use of force with minority group membership, lower socioeconomic status, males, and youth. However, it attempts to do so from the perspective of the overall neighborhood context as opposed to the characteristics of the actual individuals upon whom force was inflicted. An evaluation from this perspective may help to determine whether police officers tend to approach their duties differently in different socioeconomic neighborhoods, at least in terms of use of force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies explain police use force through situational factors and officer/suspect characteristics. Only recently has research in this area examined the more complex nature of arrest and use of force situations. Drawing on Giddens structuration theory this research examines time, space, and their interactive effects within the continuum of force perspective using data collected from six U.S. law enforcement agencies. Results from this research demonstrate the importance of understanding time, space and interactive variables for predicting police use of force, and provide directions for additional theoretically-based research and data collection in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police use of force remains one of the primary concerns in police-community relations. Law enforcement officers are trained in the use of force, including when the use of force is approved. Typically, police officers face many situations during their careers when use of force is appropriate. Generally, law enforcement officers are authorized to use force when restraining resisting or dangerous individuals, controlling illegal or disorderly demonstration, and making some arrests. The use of force strains police/community relations, however, when it is used inappropriately or at unjustifiable levels. Increasing our understanding of the factors that lead to both approved and inappropriate uses of force could help develop improved training for law enforcement officers regarding use of force, and, in turn, facilitate greater community trust and cooperation with law enforcement. Using firearm discharge/assault data collected from the New York City Police Department, 1,654 incidents reported in New York City in 2003 will be examined. Multivariate analysis will explore the factors that lead to police use of force, especially the decision to discharge a firearm. Variables such as incident location, offenders gender and race, officers gender and race, officer prior weapon discharges, and how the officer was called to the scene will be included in the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between neighborhood collective efficacy and police use of force. It is hypothesized that, independent of the traditional predictors of police use of force (i.e. victim race/ethnicity, social class, gender, and neighborhood disorganization and violence), a neighborhoods ability to police itself will influence how much force police officers use in their interactions with the residents of that neighborhood. Those neighborhoods with low levels of collective efficacy are expected to receive increased levels of police force, even to the extent that the police may utilize excessive or extra-legal amounts of force. I argue that this may occur because, based on the neighborhoods inability to resolve issues on its own (low collective efficacy), officers who police these neighborhoods will know that the residents have little capacity to deal with yet another problem, in this case, the police abuse of force. Data on requests for police assistance and police-civilian interactions will be analyzed to uncover how neighborhood collective efficacy influences police abuse of force. It is predicted that, controlling for the number of police-civilian interactions, neighborhoods with more requests for police assistance will experience more instances of police uses of excessive/extra-legal force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]