NCJ Number
72089
Date Published
1977
Length
599 pages
Annotation
The study explores police behavior and its political significance through examination of data from Reiss' 1966 study of police-citizen interaction in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
Abstract
A review of police literature lead to the conclusion that police behavior is political in that it authoratively allocates values for society and affects the ability of the political system to persist over time. Given that conclusion, the study examines police behaviors (formal decisions to invoke the legal process, the informal manner of the police toward the citizen, and the work effort) in terms of the influence brought upon them by organizational, individual, and situational factors. In the Reiss study, 36 trained observers accompanied nearly 600 police on 840 tours of duty, involving 11,000 citizens and 19,000 dyadic interactions. Multivariate analysis techniques were used to interpret the data in terms of several hypotheses regarding relationships between the above factors and police behavior. While both operational and individual factors were found to influence police behavior in a number of significant ways, situational factors, especially the seriousness of the offense and the offender's manner toward the police, were found to have the greatest effect on police behavior. Other significant situational factors include the race and class of the citizen, the sex of the citizen, and the number of citizens involved in an encounter. It was also found that organizations have some mediation effect on individual and situational factors and that situational factors mediate between individual factors and behavior. Footnotes accompany each chapter and tables are included throughout. A bibliography of about 175 citations is appended.