Elsevier

Journal of Criminal Justice

Volume 37, Issue 6, November–December 2009, Pages 542-552
Journal of Criminal Justice

The impact of agency context, policies, and practices on violence against police

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2009.09.003Get rights and content

Abstract

This study examined agency-level factors that impact the level of violence against police. The independent variables represented both agency context (e.g., violent crime rate, population characteristics) and agency policies and practices (e.g., backup and body armor policies) and were linked to constructs within routine activities theory. Information on agency policies and practices came from an agency survey. Data for the dependent variable―agency counts of officer killings and assaults over a three-year period―came from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Negative binomial regression was used to assess the impact of the independent variables on the dependent measure. Three of the independent variables—measuring body armor policies, agency accountability, and violent crime—had statistically significant relationships with violence against police.

Introduction

In late 2001, the Department of Justice reported that, on average, 1.7 million workers are victims of nonfatal work place violence each year.1 In addition, each year, another 900 employees are murdered while on the job. All told, work place violence accounts for one-fifth of all violent crime (Duhart, 2001). In the context of analyzing these findings, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) (1996) has identified ten risk factors for assaults in the work place, seven of which apply to police officers: contact with the public, having a mobile work place, working with unstable or volatile people, working alone or in small numbers, working late at night or during early morning hours, working in high-crime areas, and working in community-based settings. Arguably, an eighth risk factor, guarding valuable property or possessions, would also apply to police officers.2 Consistent with this analysis, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1995, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1996, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 2002 research places law enforcement officers second only to taxicab drivers in rates of work place homicides. Research addressing all violent victimizations in the work place (i.e., nonfatal assaults as well as homicides) indicates that law enforcement, as an occupation, has the highest violent victimization rate (Duhart, 2001, Warchol, 1998).

This victimization of police has adverse impacts at multiple levels. Violence affects individual police officers, their families, their colleagues, the department, and the law enforcement profession as a whole. Most potent are the losses and grief associated with the death of an officer. The impact is severe for the officer's surviving family members, fellow officers, the department, and the community. Victimization costs (for assaults as well as deaths) also manifest in lost work time, lower morale, effects of serious injury, negative effects on recruitment, and increased stress (Kaminski & Sorensen, 1995). Departments face financial costs in the form of early retirement pay, sick days, health care, and replacing officers lost to injury or death.

Many law enforcement agency policies, practices, and procedures, as well as police training and equipment, are geared toward enhancing the safety of officers on the job. Improved equipment, new training, and refined policies have characterized these efforts over the past two decades. These changes have coincided in time with significant reductions in the rates at which officers are violently victimized (Fridell and Pate, 1995, Fridell and Pate, 2001). While this correspondence between changes and rates of violence against police, as well as common sense, would seem to imply that agency interventions can impact the level of officer victimizations, there has been little research that has assessed the impact of these various organizational policies and practices on violence against officers. Instead, research has focused primarily on agency context. As described below, the research has focused on the impact on violence against police of environmental factors such as crime and community demographics.

The purpose of the current study was to identify the factors reflecting both agency context and policies and practices that impact on the levels of serious assault and murders of on-duty police officers experienced by agencies. The independent variables were factors that reflect theoretical constructs from routine activities theory—exposure, proximity, attractiveness, and guardianship. The dependent variable was a three-year count of incidents in which officers were seriously assaulted or murdered.

Section snippets

Correlates of police victimization

To reduce the tragedies and associated costs of police victimizations, one must attempt to understand what factors impact on violence against police. Levels of felonious killings of officers have been attributed to some factors that represent agency context, such as region (Boylen and Little, 1990, Kaminski et al., 2000), population characteristics (Chamlin, 1989, Kaminski et al., 2003), economic disadvantage or disparity (Jacobs and Carmichael, 2002, Kaminski and Marvell, 2002, Lester, 1987,

Routine activities theory and violence against police

As interest in violence against police has grown, researchers have attempted to understand it in the context of theories developed in connection with other types of violence. For example, assaults on police may result from subcultural values that provide normative support for such violence, in order to protect such values as honor, courage, or manliness (Kaminski et al., 2000, Meyer et al., 2001). Most notably, this “subcultural” theory of violence has been invoked to explain an oft-reported

Methods

For this agency-level study, multivariate statistical analyses were used to identify the factors—related to agency context as well as agency policies and practices—that impact the level of violence against police. The target subjects were the 158 local law enforcement agencies (i.e., municipal and county agencies) that submitted National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data for 2001 and that served populations of 50,000 people or more. The data for the dependent variable—counts of

Analysis and results

As discussed above, violence against the police is a rare event with a disproportionate number of departments reporting zero events. To compensate for this, a three-year count of LEOKA events was used as the dependent measure in the analysis. Table 2 includes the descriptive analysis of the three-year count of LEOKA incidents with a mean of 29.5 LEOKA events and a standard deviation of 39.9 for the 122 agencies included in the analysis.10

Summary and discussion

The number of law enforcement officers slain in the line of duty has decreased steadily since a peak in 1973. Even with this heartening downward trend, however, members of the police profession are still among the most victimized workers in the country.

Research on this important topic—that extends back to the 1960s—has suffered two major deficiencies. First of all, with few exceptions, studies have not assessed the impact of police policies/procedures on violence against police. Second, most of

Conclusion

Over 2,500 officers have been slain in the line of duty since this phenomenon peaked at 134 in 1973. Fortunately, the number and rate of felonious killings of law enforcement officers has been reduced by over one-half since the early 1970s. While this trend is clearly a good one, law enforcement is still the most dangerous profession in terms of on-the-job violence when both homicides and assaults are considered. In order to understand and continue this downward trend in felonious killings, and

Acknowledgements

The research described in this journal article was supported by a grant to the Police Executive Research Forum (Grant 5 R01 0H007946-02) from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the CDC or the Police Executive Research Forum. The authors acknowledge the valuable contributions of a project advisory board comprised of police practitioners and researchers.

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