No abstract

A growing body of evidence shows that minorities are disproportionately the targets of police brutality, but important theoretical questions about the causes of that inequity remain unanswered. One promising line of research involves structural‐level analyses of the incidence of police brutality complaints; however, existing studies do not incorporate variables from alternative theoretical explanations. Drawing on the community accountability hypothesis and the threat hypothesis, we tested the predictions of two prominent structural‐level explanations of police brutality in a study of civil rights criminal complaints. The study included cities of 150,000+ population (n = 114). The findings reveal that two community accountability variables—ratio percent Hispanic citizens to percent Hispanic police officers and the presence of citizen review—were related positively to police brutality complaints, partially supporting that perspective. Two threat hypothesis measures of threatening people—percent black and percent Hispanic (in the Southwest)—were related positively to complaints, as predicted. The relative degree of support for the two hypotheses is assessed.

Macrolevel studies of police killings generally focus on testing the conflict and community violence hypotheses. This research generally supports both the conflict proposition that minority threat is related to police violence and the community violence proposition that locations with higher levels of violence have a greater number of police-caused homicides. However, some of the most common proposals to reduce police-citizen violence, namely changing police personnel, are largely overlooked in existing research. The majority of studies that have examined police homicides do not acknowledge the possibility that the personnel composition of police agencies may affect levels of police violence. The current article extends previous lines of research on police-caused homicides by including measures of the personnel composition of police agencies as predictors of police-caused homicides. More specifically, this study examined the influence of minority and female representation within large municipal police agencies on police-caused homicides. The findings show that more diversified departments do not have significantly lower levels of police-caused homicides. The results do, however, support both the conflict and community violence propositions. Furthermore, the pattern of findings suggests the existence of a generalized threat in the nation's largest cities.

During the past 20 years, there has been an expanding body of research examining citizens’ attitudes toward the police. Most of this research has been directed at assessing the determinants of these attitudes. In contrast, less attention has been focused on the reasons why citizens hold certain attitudes. The present study uses the survey responses of 613 residents of a midwestern city to examine the information accessed by citizens when responding to questions regarding their general and specific attitudes toward the police. The findings suggest that citizens focus on attributes of agencies and encounters, some focus on the behavior of officers during interactions, and others base their attitudes on general perceptions of the occupation of policing. Furthermore, the referent employed by citizens is not always consistent with the attitude object (i.e., general questions elicit specific responses). The likelihood that police agencies can influence citizens’ attitudes is also assessed.

The present study examined homicides by police officers, testing threat, community violence, and organizational hypotheses. Using UCR, SHR, Census, and LEMAS data the study extends previous research by examining the relative impact of community violence, inequality and race, and organizational characteristics on the number of killings of felons by police officers in large US cities. The findings show that measures of racial threat and community violence were related to police killings. Measures of organizational policies were largely unrelated to the number of police killings. Overall the study extends research in the area, yet it also points to a more general need for research on the effects of organizational factors on police violence.