Unpacking Sequential Actions Within Use of Force Incidents

• Author: Rob Tillyer
• DOI: 10.1177/10986111211049549
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Police Quarterly

2022, Vol. 25(2) 178–200

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111211049549

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Unpacking Sequential

Actions Within Use of Force

Incidents

Rob Tillyer

1



Abstract

Use of force incidents involving police officers and civilians are complex, multi-faceted, and

interactional. Officer force and civilian resistance are frequently measured at their maximum

level or in relation to one another. While this approach is informative, it does not fully reflect

the complexity of these encounters that contain a series of sequential actions taken by both

parties. These processes are difficult to capture using traditional data collection efforts as they

require time consuming independent coding of each action. Using data from two municipal

police agencies, this study outlines a methodology for unpacking these complex interactions

and examines sequentially based incident characteristics and their relation to the highest levels

of force and resistance. Results reveal the importance of total actions and the starting point of

force and resistance, which has specific implications for our understanding of how these

interactional encounters change over time and police use of force more broadly.

Keywords

sequential actions, use of force incidents, police-civilian encounters

Introduction

Use of force by the police has generated research activity dating back several decades (e.g.,

Garner et al., 1995;Henriquez, 1999), but in recent years, interest in these actions—including

threats, attempts, and use as a means to gain civilian compliance—have intensified (e.g.,

Hollis, 2018;Terrill et al., 2018;Willits & Makin, 2018). Critical aspects of studying and

1

Department of Criminal Justice, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Rob Tillyer, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Texas at San Antonio, 501 W. Cesar E. Chavez

Blvd., San Antonio, TX 78207, USA.

Email: Rob.Tillyer@utsa.edu

understanding force actions include the scope of actions that constitute force and its mea-

surement, and the complexities associated with measuring police-civilian encounters that

provide the context for these actions.

Research has evolved from measuring force actions as a simple dichotomy to

measurement of force on a severity continuum and now frequently includes analyzing

a force factor

1

(Alpert & Dunham, 1997,1999;Crawford & Burns, 1998;Garner

et al., 2002;Garner et al., 1995;Terrill & Paoline, 2012;Terrilletal.,2018). Related,

there is variability in the actions that are considered force. For example, while use of

weapons (e.g., a firearm or TASER) and physical actions are generally considered

force, there is less consistency in consideration of verbal commands and handcuffing

as force actions (Fridell, 2017;Hollis, 2018;Klahm et al., 2014;Klinger, 1995;

Terrill, 2003;Willits & Makin, 2018;Wolf et al., 2009).

2

Selecting the scope of

actions is critical to conclusions drawn as lower levels of force (e.g., hands on) are

more commonly used by police and generally are understudied relative to more

serious actions (Bayley & Garofalo, 1989;Garner et al., 1995,2018;Klinger, 1995;

Terrill, 2003;Torre s, 2 018 ).

Measurementdecisions also have direct implicationsfor prevalence estimates (Terr ill ,

2003). Use of forceis a rare occurrence, but estimates suggest approximately one to five

percent

3

of police-civilian encounters result in force depending on the definition and

measurement of force actions (Davis et al., 2018;Friedrich, 1980;Garner et al., 2018).

Force prevalence is als o influenced by the type of police-civilian encounter, with force

more likely to occurin more serious situations such as arrest(Davis et al., 2018;Hickman

et al., 2008).

Decisions regarding force measurement and scope of actions also underscore the

challenges with representing interactional events in a manner that supports greater

understanding. Studies generally focus on the most severe type of force (and resistance)

applied in the encounter, but frequently they do not measure the sequential nature of

these actions to fully unpack the complexities of these events. Recent exceptions

include the use of body-worn camera (BWC) footage to measure time to force use and

duration of force (Willits & Makin, 2018; also see Hickman et al., 2015;Hine et al.,

2018;Kahn et al., 2017;Wolf et al., 2009).

The current study

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contributes to these efforts by examining police-civilian en-

counters as transactional events in an effort to build knowledge about how events

change over time. This is accomplished by applying a detailed coding instrument to

narrative descriptions of force encounters that occurred in tw o police agencies across a

30-month period. This effort focuses on the total number of actions within the en-

counter and how the starting level of police force and civilian resistance may be

instructive in understanding the overall level of force and resistance severity throughout

the encounter. The measurement of each sequential action also offers an ability to

measure the difference between the initial action in the encounter and the starting level

of force and resistance. Disentangling these micro-level interactions and measuring

these characteristics is a valuable next step to better understand the complexity of

police-civilian encounters that involves use of force by the police.

Tillyer 179