Police Use of Force

• NCJ Number: 165040
• Author(s): Lawrence A. Greenfeld, Bureau of Justice Statistics; Patrick A. Langan, Ph.D., Bureau of Justice Statistics; Steven K. Smith, Ph.D., Bureau of Justice Statistics; Robert J. Kaminski, National Institute of Justice
• Date Published: November 1997
• Publication Series: Contacts Between Police and the Public
• Publication Type: Publication

Annotation

Reports the results of the Police-Public Contact Survey and describes a project to acquire use of force data from law enforcement agencies.

Abstract

Reports on two data collection efforts:

• A pilot test of the Police-Public Contact Survey (administered as a supplement to the BJS National Crime Victimization Survey), which gives the results of more than 6,000 interviews with U.S. residents age 12 or older representative of the U.S. population as a whole. The survey reports that about 21% of residents age 12 or older (about 44.6 million) had at least one face-to-face encounter with a police officer in 1996. Of these, an estimated half million were threatened with use of force or had force used against them by police.
• Development of a database of files from law enforcement agencies on police use of force, being established by the International Association of Chiefs of Police under a grant from BJS and NIJ jointly.

More recent data on this subject are available from Contacts between Police and the Public: Findings from the 1999 National Survey.