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While there is a considerable body of evidence on the influence of individual and situational, and to a lesser extent community factors, on police use of force, little is known about the influence of police agency factors on use of force by police. Greater use of community policing approaches has recently been recommended for U.S. policing agencies, in the wake of a series of high-profile police-involved deaths of predominantly African American citizens. However, there is limited empirical evidence that community policing can influence or impact the use of force by police. The current study uses an online survey of Australian police officers to examine whether frequency of community engagement affects officers' attitudes towards coercive and non-coercive policing responses to a vignette, and whether social distance might explain this relationship. Regression analyses demonstrated that community engagement was positively related to endorsement of non-coercive policing responses and negatively related to endorsement of coercive policing responses. Social distance mediated the former relationship, but not the latter. These results suggest that community policing approaches may increase the propensity for non-coercive policing responses, and that a reduction in social distance to the community is one pathway through which this occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant research on police use of force has established that force is not distributed evenly across communities, with minority threat, ecological contamination, and social disorganisation some of the most common theories used to understand the distribution of police use of force in the US. The current study aimed to test the relevance of these theories for explaining the distribution of serious police use of force events in Australia. We tested a use of force frequency model using negative binomial regression, and a use of force severity model using ordered logistic multilevel modelling. Results demonstrated support for ecological contamination theory, social disorganisation and partial support for socio-economic disadvantage in predicting the frequency of serious police use of force events across communities, while minority threat theory was not supported. In contrast, results suggested that individual and situational factors are more influential in predicting force severity than community characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study identifies subtypes of citizen behavioral characteristics within police use of force events and assesses ecological influences on these subtypes. Data comprised police use of force reports, recorded crime data, and census data. Latent class analysis was applied to 19,900 police use of force events to identify latent classes of citizen behavioral characteristics. A five class-solution demonstrated best fit and comprised the following classes: violent, unstable, and drug or alcohol affected; apparent mental disorder and possessing a weapon; alcohol-related violence; suspicious and fleeing; and violent behavior and threatening a weapon. Chi-square analysis and multilevel logistic regression showed each citizen presentation class was associated with distinct patterns of offence types and contexts for police use of force. Ecological influences were notable for three classes of citizen presentations. The clustering of citizen behaviors within incidents provides insights into the nature and distribution of types of police–citizen encounters where force is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]