Why do police use force?

www.PoliceScienceDr.com

Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

Why do police use force?

 

The first and obvious answer is that they deal with some of the worst members of society you could think of. Just imagine the people that normal individuals would run away from, those are the people that the police have to run towards. Some of those people are often not very nice, rational or reasonable. When the police do use violence, it looks very bad and often makes the headlines, because they’re in uniform and are supposed to protect us. Out of context, however, you should refrain from making a snap judgement on who was at fault there – the officers or the members of the public, until you know the circumstances better. Undoubtedly, there are and have been incidents of police using violence completely without any moral ground whatsoever. In some countries, that is still the norm. I’m speaking about Western police forces here though, which should be bound by modern laws and accountability. In general, only 2% of police-citizen encounters involve violence (MacDonald, J. M., Kaminski, R. J., & Smith, M. R., 2009). Also, most violent police-citizen interaction is predicted by the citizen’s demeanour, not the officer’s (Engel, R. S., Sobol, J. J., & Worden, R. E., 2000). I’m not talking about extreme incidents such as riots, mass demonstrations, terrorist incidents or football games here. I’m talking about 1-on-1 incidents of use of force by police officers and what the factors are that can contribute to it. Police, like any other profession, should aim to be the best they can be.

In this video, we’ll talk about research on three factors that can lead to police getting involved in violent incidents: the officer’s heart rate, self-control and carrying weapons....