Violent Police-Citizen Encounters: An Analysis of Major News

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Penalties and Substantiation Rates: An Effective Deterrent?

According to a national advisory commission report (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1973: 72, 93), "Once a finding sustains the allegations of wrongdoing, disciplinary sanctions commensurate with the seriousness of the offense that are imposed fairly, swiftly, and consistently will most clearly reflect the commitment of the department to oppose police misconduct." The report presented various penalties that could be assessed against officers based on the nature of the charge. Verbal reprimands, suspensions, demotions, reassignment, and permanent removal of duty were suggested. The article closed with the statement that "departments that are serious about preventing police misconduct can do something about it."

The commission also stressed the importance of effective controls from within, as opposed to various modes of external controls. In its view officers must be able to effectively control and monitor their own behavior, especially since there is so little criminal and civil prosecution of police malpractice. In addition, Skolnick and Fyfe (1993: 36) have argued that the attitude of police administrators is an important influence on the thinking of the individual officers: "Most excessive force cases that reach the courts show that the questionable conduct either has happened because superiors are so indifferent to the misconduct as to be grossly negligent in the performance of the duties, or occurs in fulfillment of administrative policy." If police officers do not perceive any risk of punishment for engaging in deviant behavior, then the likelihood that they will engage in this type of behavior increases.

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The Problem of Data

The very few recent studies of serious police malpractice by major governmental agencies have been wrapped in a cloak of secrecy. In the wake of the Rodney King incident, a distinguished citizen panel was appointed by the mayor of Los Angeles. The resulting Christopher Commission, a panel of seven people headed by Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, was designed to provide Los Angeles with an independent study of the practices of the LAPD. This was the first comprehensive and impartial review of a major police department to be made available to the public since the 1973 Knapp Commission Report that studied the New York City.

The Christopher Commission found that officers often used excessive force, especially with minority citizens (Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, 1991). Further, the officers who employed violent techniques were rarely disciplined and were often honored or promoted. The Commission concluded that black citizens were the dominant targets of abuse in contacts with police officers, but that Latinos, Asians, and homosexuals were also victims (Kelling, 1991). The Christopher Commission Report concluded that local policing was not applied in a fair and non-discriminatory way for all citizens of Los Angeles. However, some of its important conclusions and subject matter were judged to be too sensitive to be revealed. According to Gil Ray, a spokesperson for commission, "The commission just felt it was material that needed a gestation period before it became public" ("College to be given," 1991). Interestingly, given that this was a public commission, the archives of the Commission’s study were given to the private University of Southern California, with some of the more critical material to be sealed for 20 years.

Further, in the wake of the Rodney King incident, the United States Justice Department conducted a review of nation-wide allegations of police brutality to investigate regional patterns of abuse and to determine if certain departments had high rates of complaints. Over a six-year period, the Justice department received 48,000 complaints against officers, of which 15,000 were formally investigated. Only 2 percent of the cases judged to merit further investigation resulted in criminal charges against the officers (Bishop, 1991; Campbell and Lopez, 1991; Lewis, 1991). This document, while it was completed in 1991, is not available to researchers or the public despite pressure from the black members of Congress for its release. According to John Conyers (DMI), the intentional withholding of the findings of the report has increased black suspicions about the insensitivity of the governmental response to police brutality at the national level (Bishop, 1991).

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The Research Project

Our research mainly addresses three major policing issues. First, are African Americans and other minority citizens more likely to find themselves victims of police brutality than white citizens? Second, are there certain situations that seem to have a greater likelihood of a violent police-citizen encounter? Third, are police departments taking allegations of violent police misconduct seriously?

Since there are no national statistics concerning police brutality available from any governmental source, we have used data derived from accounts of police misconduct in major newspapers for the period January 1, 1990 to May 31, 1992. We made use of one major Nexis database prepared by Mead Data Central. This database includes fifteen major newspapers updated on a daily basis and made available for computerized searches. These leading newspapers were selected by the Nexis service because of the size of their circulation and their major regional or national importance.

Using the keywords "police brutality," the following major national and regional newspapers were systematically searched for accounts of police malpractice in our time period: The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, The Hartford Courant, The Los Angeles Times, The Minneapolis Star and Tribune, The New York Times, Newsday, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Washington Times.

Out of the database of tens of thousands of articles, a total of 4,770 newspaper stories were retrieved that had at least a brief mention of "police brutality" in them. Due to the general nature of the phrase, not all of these stories dealt with a specific account of police brutality. Some of the articles dealt with "rap" songs that discussed the phenomenon, while others were based on political platforms of reform for candidates running for office. Many of the articles dealt specifically with the Rodney King incident and its aftermath. The King incident prompted many papers to broadly analyze and discuss their own local departments’ practices, while not discussing any specific case of alleged police brutality in any detail. Some of the retrieved articles dealt with the same incident, analyzing the encounter in greater depth or, in some cases, multiple newspapers reported on the same event. Combing through these 4,770 stories we found 130 distinct cases of police violence against civilians with enough detail for analysis.

We must note a few things about these data. For the purposes of this research we have accepted the designation of these incidents reported in these major newspaper accounts as cases of excessive police force, or "police brutality." It should be noted that newspapers use court, police, and community sources and there is a skew in the data toward the larger cities. Incidents of excessive police force were reported for cities in fifteen different states, with the greatest number in the largest states, New York and California. Five newspapers are located in the Midwest, and two are national digest papers that gave modest coverage to the problem of police violence. At the time of the data search, these fifteen media sources were the only newspapers available through the Lexis/Nexis service and no screening or selection process was used by the authors. [1]

The accounts of the acts of brutality varied in richness and depth. The more serious cases in which the officers were charged and tried were greatly detailed, while some other accounts of single police-citizen incidents presented only some basic details, thereby limiting the number of dimensions we can analyze in this paper.

The possibility of media bias in the major newspaper coverage of police brutality should be noted. In essence, the data is representative of the prevalence of news coverage of claims of police brutality and the level of media interest in these allegations. Why have these incidents found their way into the mass media, while many others have been ignored? In today’s racially charged climate, are violent police-citizen encounters with racial overtones more likely to garner the attention of the media than those with all white participants? Given the nature of the data source, these questions are impossible to answer. Conclusions based on this data should be evaluated with these limitations in mind.

Some white readers of our work have suggested that it is only the black and other minority cases that get into the mass media. However, it seems unlikely that an incident where white citizens were beaten up badly by police officers would not make its way into newspapers, especially if the victims were middle or upper class, as is sometimes the case for minority Americans. The opposite problem seems more likely. Martindale (1986: 133), in a discussion of the media and black Americans, has offered the following:

A vivid illustration of the black community’s concern with this problem was provided in the University of Washington seminar report, which noted that although the meeting was set up to consider media-black relations, a considerable amount of time was spent discussing police-black relations. While the black participants were willing to discuss the media, the report stated, they felt such a strong animosity toward the police that the presence of newsmen was sufficient to unleash a flood of criticism against the police. The participants apparently were eager to inform reporters about their grievances concerning police behavior in the black community because they felt that if journalists became aware of this situation and exposed it to the reading public, some corrective measures might be taken.... The media, however, continue to ignore this problem. They also seem prone to present the police only as upholders of law and order, black victims as possibly deserving of their fate, and black witnesses as probably unreliable.

White newspaper editors may feel pressure to affirm the integrity of the local police department and the desirability of the current societal organization. As phrased by Martindale (1986: 134), "Perhaps the media have failed to inquire deeply into this area because the truths that would emerge might prove uncomfortable to white middle-class society."

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Findings

The Racial Characteristics of Officers and Citizens

Examining the 130 relatively detailed cases of encounters reported as police brutality in these major newspapers, we found that the overwhelming majority of the civilian victims of police brutality were African-American. Interestingly, 113 of the victims (86.9 percent) were African American, 13 (10.0 percent) were Latino, and only 5 (3.5 percent) of the victims were non-Latino whites. Additionally, three of the five white victims were in the company of a black person at the time of the police encounter.

In contrast to the citizen data, the data on the officers involved showed a different racial background: 92.8 percent (N=104) were white, 2.7 percent (N=3) were of Latino origin, and 4.4 percent (N=5) of the officers were black (See Table 1). The racial makeup of the officers involved in violent assaults is whiter than the racial composition of larger city police departments. For example, in the city of Chicago, blacks represent 23 percent of the force (Jackson et al., 1991), while in New York City only 8 percent of the officers are black (Mydans et al., 1991). Overall, the Justice Department reports that whites constitute 85 percent of police officers, while blacks and Latinos account for 9 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

As we have noted, police departments were developed to control the poor and "dangerous classes" of urban society (Jacobs, 1979), and selective enforcement of the law by white police officers has been found to be common, with blacks and other minorities bearing a greater number of formal sanctions than whites. The cases reviewed in this analysis lend support to this contention. Almost 97 percent of the victims of police misconduct were minorities, and the vast majority (86.9 percent) of the victims were African American. Furthermore, in three of the five cases in which the victims were white, a black individual was also present. All but one of the altercations that resulted in death involved minority citizens, with black males accounting for the majority of the deaths.

It is significant that there is not a single case of white citizens being targeted for excessive force by black or Latino officers. In the cases involving Latino victims, the officers involved were either white or Latino. There were no cases of brutality involving a Latino victim and a black officer. In the two cases involving allegations of misconduct against Latino officers, the victims were either black or Latino. And in the cases in which the actions of a black police officer came under scrutiny, the victims were in all cases black citizens.


Table 1. Racial Classification of Officers and Victims

The data seem to suggest the existence of a hierarchy of racial or ethnic groups, what Feagin (1989) calls the "ladder of racial dominance." Some groups are positioned higher than others on the ladder, which results in greater power and privileges than lower groups. White citizens were rarely victims of abuse, and if they were, it was at the hands of white officers. Minority officers did not cross the line and assault those of a higher social position. In addition, white officers targeted minority group members for harsh treatment. Latinos seemed to be positioned below whites, but above blacks, in this hierarchy of force. While the low number of cases involving Latino officers suggests caution here, they show that Latino officers seemed to target members of their own group or blacks. These findings are consistent with Carter (1986) who found that Latino officers were more likely to discriminate against Latino citizens than white citizens. In the cases reviewed for this analysis, whites were not targeted by the Latino officers. Black officers were involved in brutality cases only with members of their racial group. There were no cases in which a black officer was involved in an altercation involving a white or Latino victim. Blacks seemed to occupy the lowest position on the ladder of dominance.

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Situational Characteristics

The circumstances leading up to the final violent assault between the police officer(s) and the civilian victims could be analyzed in 113 of the altercations. For these 113 cases, the preceding events can be grouped into nine main categories, listed here in order of greatest occurrence: lack of respect or compliance on the part of the victim; perceived threat; traffic dispute or stop (included malfunctioning equipment or allegations of erratic driving); mistaken identity (the civilian appeared to match a description of an armed and dangerous individual); riot or protest-related incident (citizen was perceived or actually involved in a riot or protest); drug-related arrest (six of the eight reported incidents involved the forcible entry into homes of civilians in a search for drugs that did not exist); police chase or attempted escape; accidental shooting; and questioning or confession. The basis for classification was the circumstance that seemed to contribute the most to the assault. For example, if a motorist was stopped by police officers and proceeded to act in a threatening manner towards the officers, the incident was classified as a perceived threat, not a traffic stop. Only a few of the cases required this type of judgement call. The number of cases falling within each of these categories are displayed in Table 2.


Table 2. Situational Characteristics

The largest proportion (29.2 percent) of the cases involving a violent police-citizen encounter stemmed from a lack of respect or compliance on the part of the citizen toward the police officer. This finding is consistent with previous findings (see, for example, Croft, 1985; Westley, 1970). The actual circumstances surrounding the inadequate display of deference toward the officer were varied: The victim may have refused to provide his or her identification to the questioning officer, the victim may not have followed orders from the officers as quickly or as well as the officers may have liked, the victim may have had a "bad attitude" or failed to give the officer the amount of deference they expected, or, in a few cases, the victim may not have been able to communicate with the officers due to a handicap or lack of fluency in the English language.

Twenty-nine cases (25.7 percent) were the result of a perceived threat -- either the officer felt that his (rarely her) own life or the life of another citizen was in jeopardy. Complaints of brutality that resulted from the circumstances included within this category may be rationalized by many individuals. The police officer(s) involved felt that he or she was in a life or death situation: a gun may have been pointed at the officer or another citizen, or there may have been an escalating physical struggle. According to the findings of this study, more of the victims of police brutality had been disrespectful to officers than had posed a serious physical threat to the officers or other citizens.

In police/minority situations the use of racial slurs can be important. The use of racial slurs or epithets by officers in reference to citizens was noted by the media source in 25 of the 130 cases, with most of the targets of this form of abuse being African Americans. Only two slurs against Latino citizens were reported. Racial slurs and epithets, derogatory statements directed toward a minority group member, have been reported to be common in a number of police departments. For example, the Christopher Commission, in its review of the Los Angeles Police Department, found numerous racist comments in computer transmissions between the cars of the patrol officers, including some from sergeants who were on street patrol. Further, citizens are not the only recipients of racist treatment by the police officers. Janine Bouey, a light skinned black female officer with the Los Angeles Police Department complained to the department about the use of racial slurs that were made against suspects while in her presence (Serrano and Soble, 1991). Gregory Thomas, also of the Los Angeles Police Department, complained to a supervisor on several occasions that a fellow officer continually referred to him as "boy" and made racist jokes on Martin Luther King Day (Hudson, 1991).

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Penalties

Of the 130 cases we analyzed, only 17 (13.1 percent) had a penalty reported against the officer involved. The actual penalties are listed in Table 3. A total of five officers lost their jobs, six were either reassigned to desk duty or suspended with pay, four were suspended from duty without pay for 10 to 60 days, and only two officers were charged with criminal offenses.

The percentage of these cases with officers being punished is a bit higher than the comparable percentages reported by several departments cited in the newspaper accounts. This may be because incidents reported in the newspapers probably of a more serious nature. For example, in Long Island, New York, out of 600 complaints of excessive force over a four year period (1987-1990), only nine of the complaints (1.5 percent) resulted in any punishment. In these cases the most severe penalties involved officers losing a few days pay or some accrued time. In 31 years, only one officer has been fired for the use of excessive force on Long Island (Tayler and Bessent, 1991). Similarly, the Chicago Tribune reported that in 1989-1990, there were 15,596 citizen complaints filed against the city of Chicago Police Department, with only 329 (2.1 percent) upheld. Many of these cases resulted in a suspension of less than 30 days. Additionally, the Justice Department reported that of 48,000 complaints against officers over the past six years, only 2 percent resulted in charges against the officer involved (Jackson, 1991). In complaints where black citizens are involved, there seems to be an even greater likelihood that the officers will not be punished. In a study of 4,400 complaints from 1987 through mid 1990, the Los Angeles Times reported that only 8.4 percent of the complaints were substantiated. The study indicated that black citizens who filed complaints against white officers had the worst chance of substantiation, with only 4 percent of these complaints found to be valid by Internal Affairs investigations. Black citizens in the city of Los Angeles comprise only 13 percent of the city population, but account for 41 percent of the official complaints against officers (Rohrlich and Merina,1991).

Several reasons have been proposed for the few penalties given to police officers because of malpractice: the lack of credible witnesses and victims; the tendency for jurors not to convict officers; and the need to maintain a working relationship between the District Attorney’s office and the police department. In a trial, the defense attorneys for the accused officers have access to school, work, medical, and arrest records of complainants and victims. However, personal information concerning the officers is not obtainable (Tayler, 1991). If the victim has a long criminal history, the jury may not find the testimony credible. Jurors are reluctant to convict officers who are charged in brutality cases. In one of the cases analyzed in this study two officers admitted on the stand that they had beaten a car theft suspect, and that something inside of them had "just snapped." The officers were found not guilty (Freed, 1991).


Table 3. Summary of Penalties

Before a complaint can ever be considered for prosecution, the complaint must first be filed with an agency. While some departments have outside agencies that also take complaints, in most cases the complaint must be filed directly with the police department the victim is complaining against. According to the Hartford Courant, when a complainant first enters the station to file a complaint against the Hartford Police Department, he or she is first told that they could be arrested for filing a false police report (Barger and Thibault, 1991). Further, in a sworn testimony given by Robert Sobel, a former Los Angeles County Sheriff Sergeant, Sobel stated that he had "shortstopped" citizen complaints against those under his command to protect them. Sobel called the complainants and gave them the impression that their complaint was being thoroughly investigated (Merina, 1991).

In his public testimony, Cawley gave an example of how the "Us vs. Them" mentality works in a real-life situation. He explained, in his experience, the treatment a civilian would receive at the precinct if he attempted to report an officer's brutality:

He [the Desk Officer] would give [the complainant] the paperwork to fill out. Then they'd ask him for a pen. He'd tell you listen there's a bodega across the street, go there and buy it. I'm not helping you. Then if they needed any help with [the complaint form], he wouldn't help them. Then if the person went through all the aggravation to fill out the complaint report ... they'd tell you, 'Listen, we have to get it typed now. There's a waiting line for the typing. It's going to be about three hours, so sit right there and wait.' Half the time people would say, 'Three hours, you got to be crazy', and they would leave. As soon as they left, he'd crumple it up and throw it right in the garbage. (Tr. 130)

-- The City of New York: Commission Report: Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Procedures of the Police Department, by Milton Mollen

In a review of practices within the Oakland, California, police department, Skolnick and Bayley (1986) have discussed problems associated with departmental investigation of officers. James Chanin, an attorney who advises citizens on the filing of brutality complaints, says that he never advises clients to seek redress through Internal Affairs: "If someone comes in with black and blue marks and says this officer beat me, they will not seriously entertain the notion that the officer could have done it -- or even if they do, there’s no set of circumstances where they’ll find the complaint substantiated" (quoted in Skolnick and Bayley: 157).

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Discussion and Conclusions

Our data suggest that police brutality is a national problem. The major newspapers we examined from January 1, 1990 to May 31, 1992 reported 130 detailed and important cases in 15 different states. Significantly, the nation’s leaders do not seem to be willing to face these facts. The early 1990s report prepared by the Justice Department, the only nationwide review of police brutality, has not been released in any detail. While our data have some flaws, they are among the best available at this time.

The Kerner Commission report, which was prepared more than two decades ago, stated that to earn respect, police officers and the courts must administer justice in a way that is free from discrimination or prejudice. Unfortunately, the findings of our study suggest that street-level justice still is not administered in a color-blind fashion. Minority citizens accounted for the vast majority of those who were abused in a serious manner by (mostly white) police officers. These findings suggest that some serious racial discrimination exists in the application of U.S. law enforcement in the 1990s.

Our analysis uncovered several interesting findings. One was the possible existence of a "ladder of dominance" among the racial groups. In terms of who gets targeted, whites were found to be the least likely, then the Latinos, and finally the blacks. In addition, there is a similar pattern for the officers. In the few cases involving allegations against black officers, the citizens were all black. For the few cases of Latino officers, the complainants were either black or Latino, not white. Only in the case of white officers were the complainants from all three groups. This finding held true for both male and (the few) female officers. This pattern suggests that officers may only assault those whom they view as members of an equal or inferior racial group. However, before a definite conclusion can be drawn, more cases involving minority police officers would need to be analyzed. Our finding here is only suggestive.

Another interesting finding is the relative lack of penalties given to the officers involved in violent altercations with citizens. Even though the percentage of officers who were penalized in this analysis was somewhat higher than other reported statistics, in this analysis only 13 percent of the officers received some sort of penalty for their alleged involvement in assaults against citizens. Further, in only 3 percent of the cases was the officer ultimately relieved of duty. If harsher penalties were applied, perhaps the rate of police brutality against citizens would decline. We can also recall that the Los Angeles Times study found that black officers were twice as likely as their white peers to be found guilty of misconduct. If the complainant was white, the substantiation rate for black officers was twice that for white officers, while Latino officers were penalized three times more often. It would be interesting to see if this finding could be replicated on a national scale, perhaps controlling for offense of the officer and other important considerations.

Some might suggest that the higher violent crime rates of black Americans might be one reason for the higher rate of police violence against black Americans, especially black men. The idea is that violent criminals are more threatening and thus more likely to provoke police violence. Thus, according to 1992 Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics, black citizens accounted for 45 percent of the total number of arrests for violent offenses (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1993). Mutalia (1982) found that black citizens accounted for 60 percent of those who died in 1,428 justifiable shootings by police officers from 1975 to 1979. According to Mutalia, the disproportionate rate of black victims who were fatally shot by the police was in direct proportion to the level of crime committed by black citizens. However, the data suggest that this proportion is much higher than the arrest-for-violent-crime rate.

Our data suggest some serious problems with this argument. The proportion of black citizens who are victims of police brutality is higher (86.9 percent) than the rate reported for their involvement in violent criminal activity that resulted in arrest (45 percent). Furthermore, as the examination of situational characteristics demonstrates, African American citizens do not have to be involved in the commission of a crime to be victimized: having a disrespectful attitude towards the officer, being involved in a routine traffic stop, or just resembling a violent criminal could very well make an otherwise law-abiding citizen become a target for abuse. In nearly 75 percent of the cases, the victim was not recognized by the officer at the scene as being a direct threat to the officer or other citizens.

In our data more minority citizens were assaulted for lack of compliance/respect to an officer than for posing a serious threat to the officer or another civilian. It is significant that all the victims of abuse in these circumstances of "disrespect" were black or Latino. According to the earlier Kerner Commission report (1968), a criminal justice system cannot function effectively unless it receives the respect of the people it serves. However, by the same token, the criminal justice system must prove itself deserving of respect before the people will defer to it or its agents. Acts of brutality do not instill respect, only resentment and fear.

In the categories in which the officers’ behavior was more proactive in nature, the social class of the victim seemed to have some relation with the assault. Pro-active cases included the traffic stop and mistaken identity categories. In these incidents, the officer stopped the victim on his or her own accord; the civilian did not come to the officer’s attention as a result of answering an assigned call. In the mistaken identity incidents, the officer stopped the citizen because he or she resembled a bank robber, mugger, or drug dealer that was reportedly loose in the neighborhood. According to the descriptions given in the media, the victims whose assault stemmed from a case of mistaken identity were of middle or upper class status. Further, half of those assaulted as a result of an incident related to traffic were of middle or upper class: college students, a former Los Angeles Lakers star, a former police liaison officer, and a successful entrepreneur. In situation where the civilians were indeed of middle or upper status and victims of pro-active enforcement by police officers, the victims were all black. These data suggest that these African Americans may have come to the attention of the police because of their "violation" of the white image of their racial group, that is, they were not lower-class blacks. The middle and upper class status of these black individuals may have indicated to the officers that the victims possessed wealth and resources that rightfully belonged to whites like themselves.

James Q. Wilson (1968) has argued that the class of the victim is more important than race as a determinant of police mistreatment. In his view race only accentuates the brutality. However, our data seem to contradict this argument. If Wilson were correct, more lower-class whites should be the victims of police brutality, and reports of police abuse against higher- class blacks should not be so common.

Finally, in our view the cost to the taxpayer of the misconduct of police officers needs to be addressed at the level of public policy. In reviewing cases for this analysis, we found that since 1989 taxpayers have paid out at least $134 million in awards to citizens alleging police brutality, with another $116 million in lawsuit awards pending. These costs did not include legal fees, which in many cases can be substantial. In the County of Los Angeles alone, $20 million had been paid to citizens alleging police brutality since 1989; this figure does not include $34 million in litigations fees in the same time period. Since only 22 different cities were found to report costs associated with lawsuits alleging police misconduct, the actual nationwide figure is certainly much higher. The costs of police brutality are not simply the scars on the minority victims, which are the most serious, but also the high costs for local governments in the United States.

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Notes:

1. The number of incidents reported by state were: Alabama (1), California (35), Connecticut (3), Florida (1), Georgia (1), Illinois (7), Louisiana (1), Maryland (2), Massachusetts (7), New Jersey (1), New York (52), Tennessee (1), Texas (4), Virginia (2), Washington (6), Washington, D.C. (4).

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