Content area
Full text
Kim Michelle Lersch: University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, Florida, USA
Police misconduct and malpractice have been widely discussed in the wake of several recent highly publicized incidents: the 1991 beating of Rodney King by four white police officers and the riot that ensued, the death of a young African American motorist at the hands of the police in a Pittsburgh suburb and the racist comments and alleged misconduct of Los Angeles Police Department Detective Mark Furman. Although a number of descriptive studies exist, relatively little theoretically based research on this topic has been conducted in the past 20 years.
In response to the riots of the turbulent 1960s, a number of studies were conducted with a focus on interactions between police officers and citizens, especially minority citizens. Recent studies of police misconduct have concentrated mostly on the use of deadly force by police officers; only a few have examined the non-lethal use of force and other forms of police misconduct. Apparently because of the sensitive nature of the findings, the detailed sections on police malpractice in two large-scale studies of police misconduct - a review of police complaints by the Justice Department in response to the King incident and a portion of the Christopher Commission report on malpractice in the Los Angeles Police Department - have not yet been made available for analysis.
The literature on police malpractice shows little integration between theory and descriptive analysis (for evidence documenting this point, see Chamlin, 1989; Sherman, 1980). Many empirical studies examine rates of police shootings of civilians, but few of these are theoretically based. Another problem with existing research on violent encounters between police officers and citizens is due to the relative rarity of this phenomenon; conclusions must be drawn from a small number of police-citizen incidents (for example, Reiss, 1968; for a discussion of violent incidents, also see Bayley and Garofalo, 1989; Fyfe, 1989).
In this study I address several of the methodological and theoretical deficiencies found in many previous studies. To guarantee a sufficiently large number of violent and nonviolent police-citizen incidents for examination, I use as a database the official complaints that were filed with a large southern municipal police department over a three-year period. I employ conflict theory to aid in...