Understanding the Use of Force By and Against the Police

The masking of racial and ethnic disparity in police use of physical force: The effects of gender and custody status

“…Conducted in 1994, it focused on assessing the occurrences and correlates of police use of nonlethal force. Garner, Buchanan, Schade, and Hepburn (1996) conducted overall assessments of racial and ethnic differences and concluded that the race of bsuspects played no role in predicting the police use of force, but because Latino suspects used less force than other suspects on one measure, race was listed as an inconsistent predictor of forceQ (p. 8).…”

Police Use Of Excessive Force: A Case Study Of Lethal (Deadly) Force

“…Younger officers and officers with fewer years of experience are more likely to become involved in the use of deadly force and shooting incidents. In addition, Garner et al (1996) studied 1,585 adult custody arrest situations in Phoenix, Arizona, and reported that the race of the suspect and the race of the officer were not predictive of use of excessive force. However, they found that incidents involving male police officers and male suspects were more likely to involve force.…”

Early Intervention Program Criteria: Evaluating Officer Use of Force

“…These levels, as indicated on the department's use of force report, are also displayed in ascending order of seriousness on Table 2 with frequencies and proportions. Like many police organizations, this department employed a use of force continuum concept to describe the levels of force that are justifiable in response to given levels of suspect resistance (Garner et al, 1996;More, 1998;Stetser, 2001;Terrill, 2001Terrill, , 2003. Under this concept the force levels officers applied should be driven by the severity of resistance encountered (Holmes, 1997), thus placing officers in compliance with the department's general policy of using the minimum force necessary to control a situation.…”

“…Thus, the meanings for positive and negative values were just the opposite from those calculated here (i.e., we subtract resistance from force, not force from resistance). The rationale for adopting this variation in the value calculation is that it reflects the principle that use of force should be driven by resistance encountered (Garner et al, 1996;Holmes, 1997;More, 1998;Stetser, 2001;Terrill, 2001Terrill, , 2003.…”

“…2 Borrowing from research designs employed by both Alpert and Dunham (1999) and Garner, Schade, Hepburn, and Buchanan (1996) only the most serious use of force reported by an officer in a given incident was considered in the analyses of 2. The analyses conducted here eliminated from consideration two force levels listed on the use of force report due to the relative infrequency of these acts reported as the highest force levels applied in a given incident: Threatened Use of Chemical Agent (n = 5) and Threatened Use of Impact Weapon (n = 7).…”