Front-line supervisors’ perceptions of less-lethal force policies: examining the ‘transmission belts’ of police departments

Abstract

This study uses survey data from five municipal police agencies to examine sergeants’ attitudes regarding the clarity, discretionary assistance, restrictiveness, and guidance of their departments’ less-lethal force policies. In general, sergeants reported favorable attitudes toward their respective policies. However, this support varied to some extent across types of resistance, with somewhat weaker support for departmental policy in regard to lower levels of resistance (e.g., verbal and passive). Analyses reveal some interdepartmental differences regarding sergeants’ attitudes on policy restrictiveness; while sergeants from one department generally reported that their policy was not restrictive enough, sergeants from another department were more likely to feel that their policy was too restrictive. Finally, this research finds that sergeants’ personal views on the appropriateness of different force options to control resistant citizens varied at times from their department's policy. Implications of these findings for practice and research are discussed.

Keywords:

• use of force
• police supervision
• sergeant attitudes
• police policy

Acknowledgements

This article is based on data from the Assessing Police Use of Force Policy and Outcomes project, supported by Grant No. 2005-IJ-CX-0055 by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice. Points of view are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the US Department of Justice. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. The survey administration process for two of the eight departments did not allow for consistent collection of supervisor surveys. One other department did not allow certain sections of the survey to be administered to supervisors. Thus, these three departments were not included as part of the current study.

2. Potential differences in demographic characteristics between the total population of patrol sergeants and the sergeants who completed the survey were examined. Based on a comparison of these characteristics, the final sample closely resembled the population of sergeants with respect to gender, race, age, and length of service. For example, 89.4% of the total population were male and 87.7% of the sample sergeants were male; 82.5% of the total population were white and 82.2% of the sample were white; the median age for both the total population and sample was 42 years; the average length of service for the population was 16.65 years and 15.92 years for the sample.

3. For the purposes of this paper, physically non-assaultive resistance refers to situations where citizens attempt to evade attempts at control and involve some type of physical behavior (e.g., attempts to leave the scene, flee, hide from detection, pull away from officer's grasp). Others may refer to this as defensive resistance.

4. Before combining the agreement categories, we examined the distribution of responses for each question across departments. With few exceptions, the majority of sergeants from CSPD, PPB, APD, and FWPD who agreed with each question responded in the ‘agree somewhat’ category. The only exceptions occurred for KPD sergeants. Generally, KPD sergeants reported agreeing strongly with the questions pertaining to policy clarity, discretionary assistance, and guidance. As such, even though sergeants from all five departments had mostly positive views toward policy, KPD sergeants tended to report stronger levels of agreement in these respective areas.