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Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine police use of force using individual, contextual, and police training factors, expanding prior research by including multiple police agencies in the sample, thus producing research findings that can be more easily generalized. Design/methodology/approach - The data for the current study were derived from several primary sources: the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Census, Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and 1997 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS). Findings - Among individual level variables, age and arrestee's resistance were significant explanatory factors. Violent crime rate and unemployment rate were significant factors as the neighborhood contextual variables. Finally, in-service training was a significant organizational-level explanatory factor for levels of police use of force. Originality/value - The paper bridges the gap in research between contextual factors and police use of force. It also deepens our understandings of the association between organizational factors and use of force by incorporating police training into the analytical model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]