Garner Joel H, Hickman Matthew J, Malega Ronald W, Maxwell Christopher D
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Portland State University, Portland, OR, United States of America.
Department of Criminal Justice, Seattle University, Seattle, WA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Feb 15;13(2):e0192932. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192932. eCollection 2018.
This research builds on three decades of effort to produce national estimates of the amount and rate of force used by law enforcement officers in the United States. Prior efforts to produce national estimates have suffered from poor and inconsistent measurements of force, small and unrepresentative samples, low survey and/or item response rates, and disparate reporting of rates of force. The present study employs data from a nationally representative survey of state and local law enforcement agencies that has a high survey response rate as well as a relatively high rate of reporting uses of force. Using data on arrests for violent offenses and the number of sworn officers to impute missing data on uses of force, we estimate a total of 337,590 use of physical force incidents among State and local law enforcement agencies during 2012 with a 95 percent confidence interval of +/- 10,470 incidents or +/- 3.1 percent. This article reports the extent to which the number and rate of force incidents vary by the type and size of law enforcement agencies. Our findings demonstrate the willingness of a large proportion of law enforcement agencies to voluntarily report the amount of force used by their officers and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) program to produce nationally representative information about police behavior.
本研究建立在三十年来为得出美国执法人员使用武力的数量和比率的全国性估计数所做的努力之上。此前为得出全国性估计数所做的努力存在武力测量不佳且不一致、样本小且缺乏代表性、调查和/或项目回应率低以及武力比率报告不一致等问题。本研究采用了对州和地方执法机构进行的全国代表性调查的数据，该调查具有较高的调查回应率以及相对较高的武力使用报告率。利用暴力犯罪逮捕数据和宣誓就职警官人数来推算武力使用方面缺失的数据，我们估计2012年州和地方执法机构共发生337,590起使用身体武力事件，95%的置信区间为±10,470起事件或±3.1%。本文报告了武力事件的数量和比率因执法机构的类型和规模而异的程度。我们的研究结果表明，很大一部分执法机构愿意自愿报告其官员使用武力的情况，以及执法管理与行政统计（LEMAS）项目在生成有关警察行为的全国代表性信息方面的相对优势和劣势。
