Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Access Criminology and Criminal Justice journals now

CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references - click here to get started.

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Crime & Delinquency
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Hickman, M. J.
Right arrow Articles by Piquero, A. R.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Organizational, Administrative, and Environmental Correlates of Complaints About Police Use of Force

Does Minority Representation Matter?

Matthew J. Hickman

Seattle University

Alex R. Piquero

University of Maryland, College Park

Minority representation among police personnel, relative to the communities they serve, has long been advanced as an explanatory factor for the prevalence of negative police—public interactions as well as police agency responsiveness to public concerns, particularly with regard to the use of force. But minority representation has rarely been studied empirically and on a large scale. The present study examined minority representation and additional organizational, administrative, and environmental correlates of citizen complaints about police use of force in 496 large municipal police departments. Data were drawn from the 2003 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Results indicate that (a) rates of force complaints were higher among agencies having greater spatial differentiation, internal affairs units, and higher violent crime rates; (b) the percentage of complaints sustained was higher among agencies characterized by greater formalization and lower where collective bargaining was authorized for officers; and (c) minority representation was unrelated to complaint rates nor to the percentage of complaints sustained. Implications for the policing literature as well as future refinements for the LEMAS survey are discussed.

Key Words: minority representation • police • complaints • use of force

Crime & Delinquency, Vol. 55, No. 1, 3-27 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0011128708316977
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?