The Justice Department's Police-Citizen Contact Survey reveals that just one percent of those who came into contact with police officers claim police used force or threatened to use force against them.
An estimated 45 million Americans — one in five — have some sort of face-to-face contact with law enforcement officers annually, according to a recent US Department of Justice study. And less than one percent of those police-civilian contacts involved lethal or non-lethal use of physical force.
Among those with such contacts, a third seek police help or offer assistance. Another third witness a crime or report a crime to law enforcement officers. A little less than one-third said the police initiated the contact.
About one percent of those who came into contact with police officers claim police used force or threatened to use force against them, although a majority of those respondents concede that their own actions provoked the police response.
The report, which was released to much criticism by those claiming police officers are out of control, provides the first-ever national estimates of the different types of police-citizen contact. It is based on a survey of 6,421 people 12 years and older. The study was based on a sample of United States residents selected to represent the entire population.
Police Citizen Contact
The Police-Citizen Contact Survey found about 23 percent of males, 19 percent of females, 22 percent of whites, 16 percent of blacks and 15 percent of Hispanic residents had some sort of contact with law enforcement officers during a 12 month period.
Persons in their twenties were most likely to have such contacts, while those aged 60 or older were the least likely. Only Hispanics and people younger than 20 reported that police initiated contact more than they did with other citizens.
Fourteen respondents of the 6,421 people questioned, representing approximately 500,000 residents nationwide, said police officers either warned them that force would be used or actually used force. Ten of the 14 also reported that some of their own actions, such as threatening the officers, resisting being handcuffed or fleeing from police may have provoked the police.
The small numbers (7 of the 1,086 whites, 2 of the 97 blacks, and 4 of the 74 Hispanics) made it impossible to reliably compare the use of force against persons of different racial or ethnic backgrounds.
The US Department of Justice study found that only four of the 6,421 respondents said they had experienced force or the threat of force from the police officers and, according to them, they had done nothing to provoke it.
National Crime Survey
The data was generated through a special set of questions asked of household residents as part of the Justice Department's annual National Criminal Victimization Survey, which is released annually.
"These results come from a survey pretest that consisted of a small sample, but they are of sufficient interest that the [Bureau of Justice Statistics] intends to incorporate these questions in the full victim survey," said BJS Director Jan Chaiken in a press release.
According to this survey, the reason for the police-public contact most often cited was for a civilian to report a crime to the police. The least cited police-public contact, on the other hand, involved physical force. The National Criminal Victimization Survey, unlike the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR), is victim-based. The UCR, which is also released annually, is based on figures obtained from federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies.
