Demeanor or Crime? The Midwest City Police‐citizen Encounters Study*

Abstract

There is agreement in the literature on policing that demeanor and other extralegal variables help determine police decisions. A recent challenge to that agreement has been issued, however. Klinger (1994) has asserted that nearly all previous quantitative analyses of the effects of demeanor and other extralegal variables are fatally pawed because they failed to limit demeanor to spoken words and failed to control for crime. He concluded that all previous research is suspect until additional analyses of the data sets used in previous research and new observational research are presented. This research starts the first of these tasks by reporting additional analyses of data from three previously published papers based on the Midwest City Police‐Citizen Encounters Study. With demeanor limited to spoken words and crime partially controlled, the reanalyzed data suggest that the effects of demeanor depend on how demeanor is represented and, to a lesser extent, model specification. Consequently, caution with respect to existing reports of the effects of demeanor and other extralegal variables remains necessary. In addition, carefully controlling for crime and limiting demeanor to spoken words may not be the only problems surrounding efforts to assess the effects of demeanor. This research suggests that multiple representations of demeanor and more fully specified models may be important as well.

A comparative study of the attitudes of Urban, Suburban and Rural Police Officers in New Jersey regarding the use of force

“…It was plain that they would not allow anyone to treat them disrespectfully. This coincides with Lundman's [17] literature review on the effect of demeanor on the use of force. Those who act negatively toward the police got treated in a harsher manner.…”

Quantifying law in police-citizen encounters

“…(I did 12Indeed, the validity of extant findings that extralegal variables--particularly demeanor--exert independent effects on police action is currently a source of considerable controversy in criminology. See Klinger (1994Klinger ( , 1996a, Lundman (1994Lundman ( , 1996a, and Worden and Shepard (1996) for details. 13Researchers inclined to treat each individual in encounters with multiple citizens as a separate unit of analysis (e.g., Mastrofski, et aL, 1995) could use separate FAS scores for each individual.…”

Mirage of Police Reform: Procedural Justice and Police Legitimacy

“…David Klinger (1994) first questioned the measurement of demeanor in previous research, arguing that prior studies had failed to adequately isolate and control for crime committed by suspects during their encounter with police (in particular, crime against the police). Although subsequent research found that the original findings regarding the influence of demeanor hold (e.g., Lundman 1994Lundman , 1996Klinger 1995Klinger , 1996), Klinger's critique pushed research to exercise greater care in the conceptualization and measurement of demeanor (and its separation from suspect resistance). However, despite all of the research conducted to date, the demeanor/ resistance question has still not been conclusively answered.…”