Police force use in different neighborhoods
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Police coercion is always a hotly debated matter. The police have always been vindicated for committing serious crimes against the citizens they are sworn to protect. There are several instances of police brutality in America. Some of the cases are never solved. The victims and their families remain tormented for the rest of their lives. Research has noted that the police behave differently in different neighborhoods. Force is a core police function. The police use force for varied reasons, mainly to coerce the suspect. The main concern among the citizens has always been the nature and intensity of the force. Video leaks of police force often spike heated national debates. For example, the murder of George Floyd led to widespread protests in the country. The citizens protested how the police officer committed the crime. The incident opened up wounds of prior cases of police brutality among the black community. The African-America felt that the police force was always targeting them. The focus of this paper was to investigate whether the police behave differently in different backgrounds. The paper aimed to find out the reasons for the odd behaviors in different neighborhoods. The other research question was: do sociodemographic factors influence forceful police behavior? The research was conducted in Indiana and Florida. The researchers chose the Indianapolis and St. Petersburg police departments.
The police use force to apprehend suspects in different instances. Researchers use different perspectives to elaborate on the use of force. The first one is the situational or sociological perspective that focuses on the impact of the neighborhood’s social position on disciplinary police behavior. In this model, the police are inclined to use force towards people of a particular caliber such as the poor, the minority, and the young. Besides, the use of force is biased towards disrespecting, abusive, mentally incapacitated, and also towards individuals who try to resist capture. Essentially, society sets the police to use force. The second view is the psychological perspective, where the officer’s traits, experiences, and perceptions are posited to affect police behavior (Terrill & Reisig, 2003). This perspective is individualistic. Hence, a police officer will behave in a manner that is dictated by their behavior and experiences. The theory moves away from laying blame on society.
The third approach examines the role of the organization in the usage of force. The theory sympathizers stress on both official and informal characters of the society. The styles of policing reflect the organization’s rules, SOPs, incentives, administrative direction, and disincentives. Hence, officers within a given department are likely to behave similarly when they embrace their vision. All these perspectives fail to elaborate on why the use of force varies in different settings. Aggressive police tactics are unevenly distributed across urban neighborhoods. Most of the earlier studies did not focus on these. However, one study observed and interviewed Oakland patrol officers and shed light on some of the issues which are the focus of this paper. According to this study, the police form prejudiced opinions about neighborhoods depending on their interaction with its people (Terrill & Reisig, 2003). This was a social and psychological perspective. Officers are led by past experiences to conclude the high violence rates in specific groups. For example, the black community is more likely to cause trouble than the white society, or that poor people are more likely to commit crime than the rich ones.
Ecological contamination is a concept introduced by Wenham and Piliavin that states that all people in labeled bad neighborhoods are condemned to the same fate of brutal force. Wenham and Piliavin argue that the site where an individual is arrested determines the measures that the officers use instead of the person’s character. Bayley and Mendelsohn concur with this approach. According to them, the police are more aggressive and punitive when making arrests in lesser class and high lawbreaking vicinities. Smith’s study observed that aggressive force is not necessarily dictated by the race of a person but by the ethnic configuration of the neighborhood (Terrell & Reisig, 2003).
Some critics, however, disagree that the police tend to use more hostile measures in disadvantaged backgrounds. Goldstein’s report observed that the police rarely made arrests or made reports for cases from depressed societies. The study assumes a more neutral approach. It is, therefore, difficult to conclude that the police are inclined to use more force in depressed communities. Nevertheless, the paper considered the methodology of all the prior researchers. The definition of aggression differs from one study to another. Hence, there is a chance that the results are different. It is important to note that the suspect behavior is perhaps the most crucial determinant of police use of force.
The research utilized four sources of data namely: systemic social observation, crime records, in-person police interviews, and census reports. In systemic social observation, the researchers were trained for 45 hours to develop a third party disinterested trait. The approach gives researchers a rare opportunity to observe police activity on the ground. The observers always took notes on each field day. Since the topic is rather sensitive, the police names were coded. A total of twelve beats in each city were designated, and observers consigned to journey with these officials. The degree of social distress was used to select the beats from each site. The criteria used include the proportion of female-headed families, fraction of jobless persons, and the level of poverty. Systematic social observation was recorded in 97 out of the 98 beats (Terrill & Reisig, 2003).
The researchers defined a police encounter as one that involved face-to-face communication between the citizens and the police officers. This was to rule out meaningless encounters such as greetings. A total of 6500 encounters were detected in Indianapolis and 5500 in St. Petersburg. The other definition considered was the meaning of a suspect. A suspect is a wrongdoer, a peace disturber, or a one to whom a complaint had been submitted. Any person who was interrogated, searched, verbally warned, threatened, or arrested was also designated as a suspect. The inclusion criteria present a problem of defining the use of force which is the focus of this paper. A total of 3544 encounters involving 305 police officers were recorded. 136 encounters were excluded when they could not be mapped to a given neighborhood. The researchers also excluded data from eighteen neighborhoods because of the few interactions. After sorting, the data consists of 3330 police encounters nested in 80 neighborhoods (Terrill & Reisig, 2003).
Forceful police behavior are deeds that impose physical injury on the suspect. One shortcoming of the definition is that it includes regular procedures of arrest like pat-downs and handcuffing. This is why the researchers’ sort to include observers in the researchers to report excessive use of force. Some scholars argue that threats and commands should be included in the research because of the coercive nature of these acts. In the case of commands, the deed to harm is implicit, whereas a threat is explicit (Klinger, 1995). The dependent variables capture both physical and oral displays of force. The force was grouped into four namely: none, verbal, physical restraint which comprised handcuffs and pat-downs, and impact strategies that involved pain compliance methods and takedown maneuvers. All the four categories were coded using the numbers one to four respectively. In 42% of police meetings, no force was applied, 37% of the cases used verbal coercion, 19% utilized restraint methods, and only 2% of the cases involved impact means (Terrill & Reisig, 2003). The police may use more than one category of force to restrain a suspect. The study only focused on the highest level utilized. The study excluded force applied by secondary police officers. The researchers excluded categorizing the force into either excessive or non-excessive. Such inclusion would stretch the scope of the research.
The second part was identifying the independent variables. The researchers used the 1990 census data to sort the neighborhood. It focused primarily on disadvantaged groups based on economic status. The investigators included the homicide rate to capture the variations in crime. The homicide rate was 93 in the Indianapolis neighborhood based on the 1995-year report and at 23 in St. Petersburg. The encounter level variables were based on sociodemographic traits such as gender, minority groups, age, and wealth. The observers included factors such as suspect appearance, officer features, and officer outlooks in some of the multivariate models. To comprehend the use of force in certain neighborhoods, one must appreciate that citizens interact daily with the police. The interactions lead to police preformed opinions of the characters of specific neighborhoods. Non-observational studies occlude this important factor. It is essential to remember that this research could not pinpoint when the opinions developed since the studies are often conducted for short periods.
The findings supported the ecological contamination hypothesis. The police are expected to use sophisticated levels of force in high crime zones and environs with extraordinary numbers of concentrated disadvantage people independent of suspicious presentation. The findings also support the psychological perspective that guides the police to form prejudiced opinions about particular areas and individuals. The sites are viewed as areas of high danger and the police are forced to take hard precautionary measures. The police use impact strategies to handle high crime areas. Regrettably, suspects found in these areas will be handled in the same manner regardless of their presentation. The cynical behavior of the police is worse towards suspects who are not from the designated bad neighborhood. The findings noted that sociodemographic factors such as race, class, sex, and age influenced the behavior of the police. The race is only a paramount factor within a given social setting. The results showed that the police used more force when handling male, young, and lower class suspicious persons regardless of the neighborhood setting (Terrill & Reisig, 2003).
Future research should focus on understanding the views of the police officers towards specific neighborhoods that form the basis of their behavior. After understanding the opinions, future researchers would now postulate an explicit framework that will allow additional empirical testing. Upcoming research should also consider the impact of other neighborhood aspects on forceful police behavior. The observers noted the police behaved differently with suspects at the beginning of the sessions. Hence, it is possible not to know what would have transpired in their absence. The results of this research are therefore not conclusive and a more holistic approach should be adopted in future studies.
References
Klinger, D. A. (1995). The microstructure of nonlethal force: Baseline data from an observational study. Criminal justice review, 20(2), 169-186.
Terrill, W., & Reisig, M. D. (2003). Neighborhood context and police use of force. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 40(3), 291-321. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427803253800
