Technological Innovation and Police Officers' Understanding and Use of Force

Sierra‐Arévalo, Michael

doi:10.1111/lasr.12383

Cited by 21 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…In keeping with the state's interest in allowing police to forcefully protect their lives (Harmon 2008), officers regularly cite safety concerns as a reason for their use of force. When deploying their TASERs, for example, officers will justify such force on the grounds that it enhances their safety, even in cases where fellow officers view the use of force as plainly excessive (Sierra‐Arévalo 2019a). Similar justifications are used in cases of excessive lethal force, including rare cases in which an officer is convicted of a criminal offense, such as in the police killings of Walter Scott and Laquan McDonald (Crepeau and St. Clair 2018; Schmidt and Apuzzo 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The following presentation of results weaves observations and interactions recorded in field notes with audio recorded interviews. Following the example of other ethnographic work that combines similar data (Contreras 2012; Sierra‐Arévalo 2019a, 2019b), I denote interactions and conversations recorded in field notes with the use of italics and leave data from interview transcripts in plain text.…”

Section: Field Sites and Fieldworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following the example of recent sociolegal scholarship (Hureau and Braga 2018; Sierra‐Arévalo 2019a, 2019b), this study collected “ethnographic interviews” that follow the style of an “informal conversation […] infused with ethnographic elements” (Hureau and Braga 2018: 520; Spradley 1979). These ethnographic interviews were recorded via smartphone or audio recorder with participant consent and subsequently transcribed.…”

Section: Field Sites and Fieldworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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American Policing and the Danger Imperative

Sierra‐Arévalo¹

2021

Law Soc Rev

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In spite of long-term declines in the violent victimization of U.S. police officers, the danger of police work continues to structure police socialization, culture, and behavior. Existing research, though attentive to police behavior and deviance that negatively affects the public, analytically ignores how the danger of policing engenders officer behavior that harms police themselves. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews in three U.S. police departments, this article describes how police are informally and formally socialized into the danger imperative-a cultural frame that emphasizes violence and the need for officer safety-and its effect on officer behavior. As a result of perception mediated through the danger imperative, officers engage in policy-compliant and policy-deviant behaviors to protect themselves from violence. Unfortunately, policy-deviant behaviors such as unauthorized highspeed driving and not wearing a seatbelt, though justified in the name of safety, lead to catastrophic car accidents that injure and kill both police and members of the public. This article concludes with discussion of how seemingly mundane policy deviant behaviors are a reflection of assumptions within police culture that undergird police practices that damage public wellbeing and perpetuate boarder inequalities in U.S. policing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Field Sites and Fieldworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Field Sites and Fieldworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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American Policing and the Danger Imperative

Sierra‐Arévalo¹

2021

Law Soc Rev

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“…Data from multiple departments can thus shed light on how discrete organizations are linked to a broader occupational culture through processes shaped by local context. Finally, I follow the example of past research and use italics to differentiate conversations reconstructed from field notes and memory from my direct observations and interview transcripts that are presented in plain text (Contreras, ; Sierra‐Arévalo, ; ).…”

Section: Field Sites Methodology and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The commemoration of death, organizational memory, and police culture

Sierra‐Arévalo¹

2019

Criminology

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Police scholars document that although there is fragmentation of the so‐called “monolithic” police culture, historically consistent features of the occupational culture of police exist. By drawing on ethnographic observations in three U.S. police departments, I describe how one consistent feature of police culture—the preoccupation with danger and potential death—is maintained by the commemoration of officers killed in the line of duty. Through the use of commemorative cultural artifacts, officers and departments construct an organizational memory that locally reflects and reifies the salience of danger and potential death in policing. Furthermore, commemoration of fallen officers is not restricted to a department's own; the dead of other departments are commemorated by distant police organizations and their officers, maintaining broad, occupational assumptions of dangerous and deadly police work that transcend a single department and its localized organizational memory. Implications for the study of police culture, inequalities in policing, and police reform are considered.

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“…Though such estimates may hold only in very specific (even unlikely) circumstances, they are often preferred on the grounds that there is little stomach for uncertainty among policy makers (see also Manski, 2010Manski, , 2018). 2 Besides network-based research, decades of ethnographic research document how officers' peers shape police behavior on the street, including misconduct and use of force (Hunt, 1985;Sierra-Arévalo, 2019, 2021Van Maanen, 1974;Westley, 1953). 3 See Table 1A for enumeration of CK's original estimates and the same estimates recalculated with spillovers.…”

Section: E N D N O T E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Bad apples and incredible certitude

Sierra‐Arévalo

Papachristos

2021

Criminology & Public Policy

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Research summary: Chalfin and Kaplan attend to the problem of police misconduct with a series of simulation analyses that leverage data on complaints and uses of force in the Chicago Police Department. They conclude that incapacitating officers has minimal effects on misconduct and that, given political constraints, policy makers may prefer broader reforms around accountability and management to removing "bad apples". In this comment, we argue that this conclusion and its policy implications are characterized by "incredible certitude" driven by a selective focus on a subset of their full simulation results and inadequate incorporation of network spillovers into their analysis.Policy implications: Contrary to CK's conclusions, their preferred estimates of the effect of incapacitating "bad apples" on misconduct are squarely within the range of other interventions aimed at reducing police complaints and use of force. Once network spillovers are accounted for, estimates are up to five times as large. We conclude with a discussion of how even small reductions in misconduct can have outsized benefits as measured in both dollars and human suffering, and argue that the removal of problem officers is a normative good that should be pursued on moral grounds.

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Technological Innovation and Police Officers' Understanding and Use of Force

Cited by 21 publications

References 81 publications

American Policing and the Danger Imperative

American Policing and the Danger Imperative

The commemoration of death, organizational memory, and police culture

Bad apples and incredible certitude

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