Criminology Explains Police Violence

Philip Matthew Stinson Sr., Philip Matthew Stinson Sr

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780520300095
• eBook ISBN: 9780520971639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Criminology Explains Police Violence offers a concise and targeted overview of criminological theory applied to the phenomenon of police violence. In this engaging and accessible book, Philip M. Stinson, Sr. highlights the similarities and differences among criminological theories, and provides linkages across explanatory levels and across time and geography to explain police violence.

This book is appropriate as a resource in criminology, policing, and criminal justice special topic courses, as well as a variety of violence and police courses such as policing, policing administration, police-community relations, police misconduct, and violence in society. Stinson uses examples from his own research to explore police violence, acknowledging the difficulty in studying the topic because violence is often seen as a normal part of policing.

ONE

Understanding Police Violence

Policing scholars have long argued over the conceptualization of police violence. William Westley argued that police violence includes any amount of force used by a nonfederal sworn law enforcement officer that cannot be accounted for under the auspices of lawful necessity in the line of duty.¹ Lawrence Sherman, however, conceptualized police violence as the “justified and unjustified use of any physical force (including deadly force) against citizens.”² This book focuses on police violence that involves unjustified physical force, including violence-related police crime through intimidation, coercion, or threats of violence. Most acts of police violence never come to the attention of prosecutors or the general public.³ Acts of police violence are often hidden crimes that are not counted or labeled as crime because everyone recognizes that policing is violent. Police officers encounter violence as a normal part of their patrol duties in street encounters with citizens and rarely is police violence recognized as law-breaking behavior. It is often explained in the legalese of officers being justified in using force and in using that amount of force necessary to effectuate arrests or some other lawful police activity. Victims of police violence are often left with no recourse because their complaints are viewed as untrustworthy and often lack corroboration. And law enforcement is exempt from law enforcement because police officers do not like to arrest other police officers.⁴

Police are allowed to use that amount of force that is reasonably and proportionately necessary to effectuate an arrest or otherwise protect public safety.⁵ Since the 1960s policing scholars have examined factors that influence police use of force, and quantitative studies have focused on predictors such as individual, organizational, community, and situational variables. The studies have found that situational factors largely influence the decision of a police officer to use coercive force.⁶ Police officers resort to violence in street encounters with physically aggressive persons and in situations where someone resists police efforts to control a situation. The research on officer decisions to use deadly force primarily focuses on situational risk faced by a police officer in a scenario when the officer must decide to shoot or not shoot a person. Other research has found that situational factors are also the primary determinants of police use of nondeadly force.⁷ Determinations of whether a police officer’s use of nondeadly force was legally justified, excessive, or even criminal are largely subjective and discretionary, made on a case-by-case basis by investigators and prosecutors. A police officer who uses excessive levels of force may be criminally prosecuted for his or her actions, but most police violence never comes to the attention of prosecutors, and researchers have struggled to determine the extent and nature of police violence. This chapter identifies various methodologies that have been invoked to measure police violence and, more generally, police misconduct, police corruption, and police crime.

The study of police violence has been hampered by conceptual confusion and lack of consistent definitions for related terms. Police misconduct involves those behaviors by sworn law enforcement officers that violate the administrative policies of an officer’s employing law enforcement agency (e.g., police department, sheriff’s office, etc.) and can result in internal administrative or disciplinary sanctions against an officer.⁸ Police corruption consists of organized occupational deviant acts committed in violation of recognized norms within the law enforcement community. Some acts of police corruption are unethical because the behavior violates departmental policy or is for an improper purpose, while other acts of police corruption are crimes for which an officer could be prosecuted. Both police misconduct and police corruption fall within the realm of police deviance as abuse of authority or occupational misconduct. Police crime involves the criminal behavior of sworn law enforcement officers who, by virtue of their employment, are empowered with the general power of arrest pursuant to statutory authority.⁹ In the broadest conceptualization, police violence includes any use of physical force (including, but not limited to, the application of deadly force), whether justified or unjustified, against any person, by a sworn law enforcement officer acting pursuant to his or her police authority or power.¹⁰ Not all acts of police violence are crimes, although because this is a criminological theory book the focus herein is largely on unjustified police violence. Since 2014, media attention to numerous fatal shootings by police officers across the United States has resulted in scrutiny on law enforcement practices and the use of deadly force by the police. See this chapter’s policy box, “When Can Police Use Deadly Force?” for an overview of the legal standard for when a sworn law enforcement officer is justified in using deadly force.

MEASURING POLICE VIOLENCE

Closely related to the process of conceptualizing police violence is the process of measurement. Hubert Blalock defined measurement as “the process of attaching numbers to objects” and noted that measurement has long been a neglected area in social science research.¹¹ As in all the sciences, the purpose of measurement in the social sciences, including criminology, is “to quantify, count, or assign meaningful scores to variations in some phenomenon, using valid and reliable methods.”¹² Measurement is performed through the specification of operational definitions for the procedures used in measurement.¹³ Much of the criminological research on the police has been hampered by inadequate measurement methodologies, including failure to invoke operational definitions in the research design.¹⁴ Scholars have long struggled with the measurement of police violence because there are no official data collected or available for research analyses.¹⁵ Additionally, crimes committed by sworn law enforcement officers often go unreported because police officers do not like to arrest other police officers.¹⁶ Researchers have resorted to a variety of measurement methodologies to study police behaviors such as police violence, including quasi-experimental designs, surveys, sociological field observation studies, investigations by independent commissions and watchdog organizations, reviews of agency records, and content analysis of media reports. Investigative reporting by news media organizations has also contributed to the body of knowledge on various types of police misconduct.

Official Data Are Lacking

Government efforts to collect, analyze, and disseminate information such as statistical data on the incidence and prevalence of police violence acts have been almost nonexistent. Official government efforts to collect data on police violence have been largely the result of political crime-control rhetoric to stem moral panics and public outrage after specific incidents of police violence have been captured by citizens in video recordings, fueling national news headlines. One such failed effort occurred after the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers; federal legislation was enacted that requires the US Department of Justice to collect data on the use of excessive force by police officers and requires the US attorney general to “publish an annual summary of the data acquired under this section.”¹⁷ No such annual summary of police use of excessive force has ever been published in the more than two decades since the law first mandated it.¹⁸ FBI director James Comey went so far as to say in 2016 that “Americans actually have no idea” about police violence because the federal government had not bothered to collect the data.¹⁹ In 2015, the US Department of Justice announced two new projects for collecting data on police violence. The Bureau of Justice Statistics plans to count arrest-related deaths, but by early 2018 the project had stalled. Similarly, the FBI plans to track the number of people killed by police across the United States, but by early 2018 only 1,600 of the 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies across the country had agreed to submit data for the project, and initial data collection had not yet commenced.²⁰

Investigations by Independent Commissions and Organizations

Numerous times in the past century independent commissions were established by state governors or large-city mayors to investigate allegations of police corruption after public outcry over a police scandal.²¹ Additionally, roughly every twenty years for more than a century independent commissions were established to investigate widespread allegations of police corruption in the New York Police Department, including the Lexow Commission in 1895, the Curran Commission in 1913, the Seabury Commission in 1932, the Gross Commission in 1954, the Knapp Commission in 1973, and the Mollen Commission in 1994.²² Typically these commissions have been established by an executive order granting the commission the legal authority to hire investigators and other staff, to grant immunity to cooperating witnesses, and the subpoena power to compel production of documents and require testimony under oath under threat of being held in contempt.

Most of these New York City commissions dealt with police corruption scandals not involving police violence. The Knapp Commission, for example, identified two types of corruption-involved police officers in the New York Police Department in the early 1970s: “grass-eaters” and “meat-eaters.”²³ It defined grass-eaters as police officers who engage in petty acts of corruption such as accepting small cash gratuities, and it found that the majority of police officers who engage in corrupt activities fall into this type. The Knapp Commission also identified a small percentage of New York police officers who were meat-eaters. The meat-eaters spent much of their workdays aggressively seeking out situations to exploit for their own financial gain, including narcotics and gambling activities for profits in the thousands of dollars. In addition to distinguishing between the petty corruption of grass-eaters and the more serious form of meat-eater police corruption, the Knapp Commission identified five factors that influenced the nature and extent of an officer’s corrupt activities, including (1) the character of the officer, (2) the branch of the police department where an officer was assigned, (3) the geographic area within New York City where an officer was assigned, (4) the officer’s assignment (e.g., foot patrol or vehicle patrol), and (5) the officer’s rank within the police department.

Two decades later, the Mollen Commission found systemic changes in the nature of police corruption within the New York Police Department. No longer was there a proliferation of grass-eater corruption involving petty acts of corruption. By the 1990s the situation was reversed, and the Mollen Commission determined that the more serious form of meat-eater corruption was prevalent, “primarily characterized by serious criminal activity” fueled by a dramatic rise in cocaine trafficking that created new opportunities for corruption throughout the New York Police Department.²⁴

The Mollen Commission found that much of the drug-related police corruption in New York City in the 1990s involved officers using their police powers to actively assist, facilitate, and strengthen the illegal drug trade throughout the city. Numerous sources alleged that street drug dealers often paid corrupt police officers to work hand in hand with them to facilitate their drug-related criminal enterprises and activities. The Mollen Commission developed an erosion theory of police corruption: much police corruption seemed to be the result of constant exposure to opportunities for drug-related corruption in crime-ridden police precincts that worked to change the behaviors and attitudes of some police officers across the city. The commissioners hypothesized that the constant exposure to opportunities for drug-related corruption also worked as erosion on other police officers, who developed a tolerance for widespread police corruption throughout the department. While some corrupt officers in the New York Police Department were motivated by greed and profit, others were drug users themselves. Some corrupt officers cultivated relationships with drug dealers who lived in the precincts where the officers worked, and soon these officers were selling illegal drugs while they were on duty and even when off duty. Other corrupt police officers acquired illegal drugs while on duty and then sold the drugs while off duty in their own neighborhoods and towns, often outside New York City. Some corrupt off-duty police officers of the New York Police Department even robbed drug dealers they had previously encountered while on the job. The findings of the Mollen Commission represented the first official acknowledgment that some police crime occurs while officers are of...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Police Violence
• 1 • Understanding Police Violence
• 2 • Deterrence, Rational Choice, Victimization, and Lifestyle Theories
• 3 • Individual-Level Theories
• 4 • Social Structure Theories
• 5 • Social Process Theories
• 6 • Societal Conflict and Legitimacy Theories
• 7 • Integrationist Perspectives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index