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Studies on bystander behaviour showed that bystanders regularly intervene in conflicts and crime in public in order to de-escalate, yet these studies focus solely on the way citizens manage situations in the absence of police. Bystanders, however, are also present while police officers carry out their work and might help or challenge their performance. Based on 15 interviews with police officers and participant observation during 12 police shifts in the Netherlands, this study provides insights into the way officers perceive bystanders and experience their actions. Police officers describe bystanders as a dilemma they have to face during encounters: they want to convey a positive and fair image of themselves towards bystanders, yet also want to control the situation and show their authority. The diversity of bystander actions and the dilemma's officers face imply that more attention should be given to bystanders of police action in both research and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Use of force incidents involving police officers and civilians are complex, multi-faceted, and interactional. Officer force and civilian resistance are frequently measured at their maximum level or in relation to one another. While this approach is informative, it does not fully reflect the complexity of these encounters that contain a series of sequential actions taken by both parties. These processes are difficult to capture using traditional data collection efforts as they require time consuming independent coding of each action. Using data from two municipal police agencies, this study outlines a methodology for unpacking these complex interactions and examines sequentially based incident characteristics and their relation to the highest levels of force and resistance. Results reveal the importance of total actions and the starting point of force and resistance, which has specific implications for our understanding of how these interactional encounters change over time and police use of force more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

»Fühle es Kommen: Situative Wendepunkte bei Begegnungen zwischen Polizei und Bürgern«. Studies of antagonistic interactions, specifically in policing, frequently view (de)escalation as a linear process without considering how officers perceive and anticipate interactional processes. We argue however that officers perceive tense encounters with civilians as characterized by a back-and-forth going of various trajectories, goals, and directions. Based on our interactionist and ethnomethodological conceptualization of interactional trajectories, we analyse 25 video interviews and 46 elicitation interviews. Our analysis focuses on officers' interpretations of "turning points," e.g., sudden shifts in their own, their colleagues', or civilians' bodily behaviour that redirect their projected trajectories and which necessitate police action, sometimes violence. This article moves beyond a purely situational understanding of police-civilian encounters by incorporating officers' accounts of their experiences and bodily actions, as elicited by watching video recordings of police-civilian encounters. We argue that our conceptualization of trajectories and turnings points as well as our video-based interview method shed light on the importance of bodily action police-civilian encounters; maintaining public order is to anticipate and redirect perceived turning points that potentially disturb routinized patterns of bodily actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the relationship between a suspect's race and participants' evaluations of police-civilian interactions. Participants were assigned to one of four role play conditions that manipulated a suspect's race (Black, White, or Latino): (1) as a police officer evaluating their own interaction with a suspect, (2) as a civilian evaluating their own interaction with a suspect, (3) as a police officer evaluating the interaction between another police officer and a suspect, and (4) as a civilian evaluating the interaction between another civilian and a suspect. Participants read a vignette and rated how resistant and disrespectful they found the suspect. Overall, White suspects were rated as more resistant than both Latino and Black suspects and more disrespectful than Black suspects. Moreover, participants evaluating their own interaction with the suspect rated the suspect as more resistant than participants evaluating the interaction of another person with the suspect. Finally, participants playing the role of a civilian rated the suspect as more resistant than participants playing the role of a police officer. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of the current national concern about police-civilian relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]