U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

Police Use of Force

NCJ Number
165040
Date Published
November 1997
Annotation
Reports the results of the Police-Public Contact Survey and describes a project to acquire use of force data from law enforcement agencies.
Abstract

Reports on two data collection efforts:

  • A pilot test of the Police-Public Contact Survey (administered as a supplement to the BJS National Crime Victimization Survey), which gives the results of more than 6,000 interviews with U.S. residents age 12 or older representative of the U.S. population as a whole. The survey reports that about 21% of residents age 12 or older (about 44.6 million) had at least one face-to-face encounter with a police officer in 1996. Of these, an estimated half million were threatened with use of force or had force used against them by police.
  • Development of a database of files from law enforcement agencies on police use of force, being established by the International Association of Chiefs of Police under a grant from BJS and NIJ jointly.

More recent data on this subject are available from Contacts between Police and the Public: Findings from the 1999 National Survey.

Date Published: November 22, 1997