U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

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
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.