Police Use of Force: Collection of National Data

• NCJ Number: 165040
• Author(s): L A Greenfeld; P A Langan; S K Smith; R J Kaminski
• Date Published: November 1997
• Length: 38 pages
• Publication Series: BJS Full Reports
• Agencies: BJS
• Publication Type: Survey

Annotation

This report presents information and data on the planning of, recommendations for, and data from the 1996 Police-Public Contact Survey, which measured the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.

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.