This study was designed to be a comprehensive
national survey of law enforcement agencies on police use of force.
Legally, excessive force by police is an amount of physical force more
than necessary to effect a legal police function. One objective of
this survey was to collect information on departmental policies and
practices pertaining to the use of physical force--both deadly and
less than lethal--by law enforcement officers. A further objective was
to investigate the enforcement of these policies by examining the
extent to which complaints of policy violations were reviewed and
violations punished. Additionally, the survey sought to determine the
extent to which departments kept records on the use of force, and to
collect from those agencies that record this information data relating
to how frequently officers used force, the characteristics of officers
who did and did not have complaints filed against them, and the
training of recruits on the appropriate use of force.
The survey was mailed in mid-August 1992. Each
survey package contained a cover letter, questionnaire, a return
envelope, and a postcard, which the departments were to return to the
Police Foundation upon receipt of the packet. The postcard was to
indicate which person within each department was completing the
survey. In early September, a follow-up letter was sent by facsimile
to those departments that had not returned either the postcard or the
survey. Six weeks after the initial mailing, departments that had not
returned either a completed questionnaire or the postcard were sent
another package containing a questionnaire and a revised cover letter.
Telephone calls were made to departments that had returned postcards
but not questionnaires.
A list of law enforcement agencies was used from the Law
Enforcement Sector portion of the 1990 Justice Agency List (JAL)
produced by the Governments Division of the Bureau of the Census. To
ensure adequate representation of all agencies, a stratified sampling
procedure was used to select agencies within jurisdiction size
categories. After the stratification procedure was applied, 28
selected agencies were removed as ineligible. The total sample size
was 1,697 law enforcement agencies.
All law enforcement agencies in the United States.
The law enforcement agency.
self-enumerated questionnaires
Variables include total number of sworn and
nonsworn personnel and total number of sworn personnel by
ethnicity/race, sex, level of education, average age, length of
service, and rank. Additional variables cover number of calls for
service received, number of calls dispatched, whether electrical
devices or chemical agents were provided for use to various staffing
units, information on departmental policies on soft body armor,
information on procedures to file citizen complaints of police
misconduct, information on departmental procedures to investigate use
of force complaints, information on departmental policy and reporting
of police use of force, number of civil and criminal suits filed
because of reports of excessive force, total amount paid in civil
suits involving use of force, number of agency arrests of adults and
juveniles for selected Part I and Part II crimes, and information on
selection and training of police recruits.
The overall response rate was 67.2 percent. By
agency type, the response rates were: municipal police departments -
72.4 percent, county police departments - 88.9 percent, sheriffs'
departments - 54.2 percent, and state agencies - 90.0 percent.
None.
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