Abstract
When police abuses occur, they tend to involve groups of officers, rather than lone officers acting independently. The impact of individual acts of police abuse is evident, but the way in which groups of abusive officers emerge within police forces is still not fully understood. A key question is what leads some officers to engage in use of force with some colleagues but not others? This study provides a starting point to answer this question, by exploring ‘force partnerships’ – including officer characteristics and network dynamics that lead officers to become co-involved in use of force incidents. Drawing from nearly 12,000 use of force reports across seven New Jersey police departments, we examine the network ties among 1,894 officers involved in at least one force incident. We operationalize and define network ties between officers as any instance where they were involved in the same use of force incident. By aggregating this data across all officers and force reports, we reconstruct a network of force interactions. We then estimate exponential random graph models to examine the which officer-level attributes, such as race/ethnicity, rank, and tenure, as well as network structures, are associated with higher probabilities of any pair of officers’ becoming co-involved in use-of-force incidents.
Publication
Journal of Reserach in Criminology and Delinquency, Online First
Principal Investigator
Dr. Marie Ouellet’s research focuses on delinquent groups, including how they emerge and evolve, and how networks structure this process. She is currently leading a longitudinal study on police networks to better understand the informal structure of policing, including organizational cohesion and fragmentation within departments, and the consequences of these network structures on the diffusion of behaviors and attitudes. Ouellet’s work has been published in Criminology, Criminology & Public Policy, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and Justice Quarterly.
Assistant Professor
Dr. Hashimi’s research centers on issues pertaining to policing and policy, peer influence and crime, and violence prevention efforts. Specifically, Dr. Hashimi employs social network analysis and various other research designs to uncover patterns of criminal and non-criminal behaviors that relate to co-offending, police misconduct, police use of force, and gang involvement.
Assistant Professor
Logan Ledford is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at East Tennessee State University. His research interests focus on policing, police legitimacy, and the application of network methods to criminal justice issues.