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Progress Toward National Estimates Of Police Use Of Force, Joel H. Garner, Matthew J. Hickman, Ronald W. Malega, Christopher D. Maxwell

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

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 …