Police Use of Force and Injury: Multilevel Predictors of Physical Harm to Subjects and Officers

Abstract

The police must on occasion use physical force and weapons in order to apprehend and control subjects and fulfil the police function. It is inevitable that some of these interactions will result in injuries to both subjects and officers, with a range of both tangible and intangible harms and costs. It is therefore important to study injuries related to the use of force with an eye toward identifying opportunities to minimize injury and reduce the harms and costs. Injuries to both subjects and officers were examined in a sample of more than 10,000 use of force incidents drawn from 81 agencies located in 8 states. In addition to describing injury rates across a broad spectrum of situational and agency characteristics, we present multilevel logistic regression models predicting subject and officer injury. Among key findings, we report that the likelihood of injury for both subjects and officers is lower when force incidents end quickly and with the minimal necessary superior level of force relative to subject resistance, and higher for both subjects and officers when subjects flee. At the agency level, we find that the likelihood of injury varies by agency size and type. Finally, we explored possible higher-level variation and found that agencies in the sample from Midwestern states (primarily Wisconsin) have substantially lower injury rates that appear to be associated with their less frequent use of weapons and greater reliance on low-level physical force tactics, as compared to agencies in the sample from Western and other states.