Too Many Missing Cases: Holes in Our Knowledge about Police Use of Force

• Author: James J. Fyfe
• Date: 01 December 2002
• DOI: 10.3818/JRP.4.1.2002.87
• Published date: 01 December 2002
• Subject Matter: Article

Too Many Missing Cases • 87

*Too Many Missing Cases:

Holes in our Knowledge About

Police Use of Force

James J. Fyfe

John Jay College of Criminal Justice

City University of New York

and New York City Police Department

JUSTICE RESEARCH AND POLICY, Vol. 4, Special Issue, Fall 2002

© 2002 Justice Research and Statistics Association

This article is based on a paper prepared for the National Research Council, Division of

Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Committee on Law and Justice, Meeting

of the Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practices, Washington, DC,

April 11, 2002.

*Abstract

This paper argues that one of the primary responsibilities of a democracy is to report

accurately on how often its own agents kill or injure its citizens. The United States

fails this responsibility: there are available to citizens no systematic or meaningful

national data describing the frequency and consequences of police use of force in this

country. Instead there exist only some local data provided by unrepresentative police

agencies or obtained by the media under court order, and some aggregate data and

estimates that cannot be linked with specific agencies. The paper reviews existing

data and offers suggestions that would provide both citizens and public officials with

a clearer picture of the efforts of their police to minimize use of force.

88 • Justice Research and Policy

This paper discusses the existing state of data on use of force by U.S. police, and

offers some recommendations for collecting and disseminating information that

will better inform citizens, scholars, public officials, and the police themselves.

The short version of the current situation is this: ours is a democracy that

does not tell us how often we are forcibly injured or killed by the people we pay

to protect us. Our lack of knowledge is rooted in the home-rule principle, which

has made it impossible for any central governmental agency to collect and pro-

vide systematic and comprehensive data on use of force by police. Instead, stud-

ies of police force typically have described or estimated use of force either in the

aggregate or by reporting on the experiences of one or a few agencies. Some of

these agency-specific studies were based in jurisdictions that voluntarily opened

their doors to researchers. In other cases, agencies were compelled by courts or

other government authorities to allow study of their records. The next section

reviews some of these works not as an exhaustive survey of the literature, but

solely to illustrate both their contributions and the data needs they do not address.

*Aggregate Studies of Police Use of Force

Aggregate studies of police use of force typically collect and report data from

several jurisdictions without indicating the contribution of each jurisdiction studied

to the aggregate figures presented.

Pate and Fridell

Pate and Fridell’s (1993) work is illustrative. They surveyed a stratified sample

of all state agencies, all municipal and county law enforcement agencies serving

populations of 50,000 or more, and random samples of agencies with popula-

tions between 25,000 and 49,999 (20% sample); 10,000 and 24,999 (10%

sample), and less than 10,000 (2%). After some further refinement, they de-

rived a sample of 1,697 agencies, of which 1,111 (65%) responded to their

survey (pp. 49–52). They then conducted and presented analyses of agency prac-

tices grouped by agency type (e.g., sheriff, county, city, state) or other variables

(e.g., size of population served). In reading their extensive work, we learn that

93.8% of sheriffs require reports when deputies shoot and kill citizens (p. 66) or

that state police agencies are more likely than other types to sustain citizens’

complaints of use of excessive force (p. 118).

International Association of Chiefs of Police

Aggregate studies have also been conducted by the International Association

of Chiefs of Police (IACP). IACP collected data on use of force from 110 agencies