Police Use of Force

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.