The issue of how to measure the impact of situational-, suspect-, and officer-level factors on police actions has long been debated in the policing literature. One promising method is to use interval-level metrics developed via a combined method of concept mapping and Thurstone scaling. Our objective here was to use these metrics to score 667 incident reports from a large (n 1,500) urban police department. From this process, we explored significant trends in how police officers perform during encounters with the public. We found that officers performed better in "higher stakes" encounters and excelled in vigilance situational assessment as well as use of tactics and adapting tactics. Officers tended to receive the worst scores in routine police-citizen interactions and the highest in crisis encounters. Interpretation and implications of these findings for American policing are discussed.

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