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Higher education and police use of deadly force
Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 9, pp. 317-331 (1981). Pergamon Press, Printed in U.S.A.
0047-2352/81/040317-15502.00/0 Copyright © 1981 Pergamon Press Ltd
H I G H E R E D U C A T I O N A N D POLICE U S E OF D E A D L Y FORCE
LAWRENCE W. SHERMAN School of Criminal Justice State University of New York at Albany Albany, New York 12222
Criminal Justice Research Center Albany, New York 12203
MARK BLUMBERG
Department of Criminal Justice Central Missouri State University Warrensburg, Missouri 64093
ABSTRACT The evidence on the impact of higher education on police use of force is mixed, perhaps because of the characteristics of different indicators or samples. This study compares the educational levels of officers who did and did not shoot their weapons, who shot following different types of citizen behavior, and who shot with and without justification over a seven-year period in the Kansas City, Missouri police department. Virtually no significant differences emerge, but the absence of differences even when controlling for assignment, age, and length of service may be due to the lack of older college graduates in the sample. Until more and older college graduates are available for study it is probably not possible to conclude what impact college, and different kinds of college education, have upon police use of deadly force.
For the past half century, higher education for police officers has been a central element in police reformers' strategies of change (Vollmer, 1936; Fogelson, 1977). Yet the evidence on the impact of higher education on police behavior is decidedly mixed. Taken as a whole, studies testing the proposition that college-educated officers perform "better" are both poorly designed
and internally inconsistent, showing better performance on some measures and not on others (Smith, 1978). Even when the valueladen concept of "performance" is abandoned in favor of searching for differences in specific aspects of police behavior, different indicators of the same behavior yield different results. The relationship between higher educa-
317
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L A W R E N C E W. S H E R M A N and MARK B L U M B E R G
tion and police use of force is a prime example of the tendency for research findings to vary among the different indicators used to measure the behavior: citizen complaints against an officer, officer injuries from or assault by citizens (which usually means the force was returned), and discharges of firearms. Both Cohen and Chaiken (1972) and Cascio (1977) have found that officers with higher levels of formal education had fewer complaints made against them, either in general (Cohen and Chaiken, 1972) or specifically about excessive use of force (Cascio, 1977). Cascio also found that more educated ofricers in his sample of 940 officers in one large department suffered fewer injuries from assaults, but Hale and Wilson (1974:20) found that the more educated officers in their pooled sample of 1,745 officers from 13 southwestern police agencies were more likely to be assaulted. And officers involved in violent incidents in another city were found to have more education, on average, than the department as a whole (Milton et al., 1977:91). On the other hand, a study of 347 officers in still another large police department found that there were no significant differences among officers in their probabilities of engaging in shooting incidents, since the distribution of all shootings among the officers fit both the negative binomial and Poisson distributions of shootings that would be expected by chance (Inn and Wheeler, 1977). Depending on where and how police use of force is measured, then, more educated police officers appear to use force less often, more often, or just as often as less educated officers. The impact of higher education on police behavior (if any) may therefore be less homogeneous than some have implied, ~even within relatively specific areas of police behavior. Accumulation of findings using the same indicators, rather than measuring the same concepts with different indicators, might be the best long-term approach to specifying the impact of college education on police behavior. This study follows that approach by contributing another finding based on police records of the use of deadly force.
T H E DECISION TO S H O O T A police officer's decision to discharge a firearm at another person is a rare, important, and highly discretionary event. Inn and Wheeler's (1977) sample of 347 patrol and tactical officers, for example, found only 28.24 intentional shootings per year (over a 34-month period), or a rate of .08 discharges per officer per year. Even at that relatively high rate (two or three times the rate for New York City officers reported by Fyfe [1978:355]), an officer who remained in those operational units would only be expected to discharge his or her weapon once every 12 years, or only twice in a 25-year career. Philosophically, however, it can be argued that there is no more important decision that any agent of criminal justice can make than the taking of life. The police make that decision far more often than judges or juries. In 1976, for example, when no one was executed and 233 persons were sentenced to death after conviction for a crime, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reported that 295 persons were killed by legal intervention of police (Sherman, 1980a). An independent assessment of the NCHS data set suggests that the latter figure may be too low, and that the actual number of citizens killed by police may be twice as high, perhaps as high (for 1976) as 590 (Sherman and Langworthy, 1979). The legal opportunities for police officers to kill people probably occur far more often than either the rate of shooting or the number of citizens killed suggests, which would make the decision to shoot a highly discretionary one. Approximately half of the states still allow police to shoot at any fleeing felony suspect if that is the only means available to effect an arrest (Finch, 1976). There is no readily available estimate of the frequency of flight from arrest by felony suspects in those jurisdictions, but it is at least possible that the police decide not to shoot as often as they decide to shoot. It is also possible that police decisions not to shoot extend beyond fleeing felon situations
Higher Education and Police Use of Deadly Force into defense-of-life situations, in which less discretion might be expected. 2 Black (1979:12) provides an example from a " m a n with a gun" dispatch recorded by field observation in 1966: The first officers to arrive were confronted by a black man with a .38 revolver who said that he and his wife had no need for the police. Talking from behind a tree, one officer asked the man to let his wife out of the house, and assured him that the police would take no action against him if he were to come out as well. But the man would not be convinced, and continued to threaten the police with his gun. At this point one of the officers called headquarters and was told by a deputy chief to "pull out" since the man "'had not committed any real assault." All of the officers left shortly thereafter, and no further action was taken. This example provides a sharp contrast to the m o r e recent shooting by two Los Angeles Police D e p a r t m e n t officers of one Eulia Love, a black w o m a n who had refused police orders to drop a knife with which she had threatened gas c o m p a n y employees who had a t t e m p t e d to disconnect service at her h o m e (Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, 1979). Both cases provided a possible defense-of-life justification for shooting, but in one instance (indeed, where the danger seemed greater), the officers decided not to shoot. The discretionary nature of decisions to shoot in both fleeing felon and defense-oflife situations is further d o c u m e n t e d by the absence, to the authors' knowledge, of either rules or police disciplinary actions requiring police officers to shoot. Police d e p a r t m e n t s have rules about when not to shoot, and officers have been dismissed and criminally prosecuted for breaking those rules. The authors know of no similar actions resulting from an officer's failure to shoot. As one officer said, "the d e p a r t m e n t leaves it up to your conscience" once the situation allows a shooting under law and policy. M o r e o v e r , the discretionary nature of the decision to shoot may be reflected in the wide variations across cities in the rates of
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police shootings (Robin, 1963; Uelman, 1973; Milton et al., 1977; Sherman and Langworthy, 1979), variations that cannot be explained easily with differences in crime rates. And if the differences in shooting rates do reflect differences in police behavior, those differences could be explained at several different levels of analysis (Sherman, 1980b): the individual characteristics of police officers, characteristics of citizenpolice encounter situations, organizational characteristics of police departments, and the characteristics of the communities they serve. At the individual level of analysis, there are a variety of theoretical grounds for predicting that an officer's education should make a difference in his or her decision to shoot or not to shoot. Unfortunately, the different grounds lead to predictions in different directions.
H Y P O T H E S E S ON T H E E F F E C T S OF COLLEGE One theoretical approach might argue that college-educated officers are less likely to use their guns in a given situation because college inculcates such qualities as selfcontrol, reflection on more issues related to a decision, and a more liberal outlook in general (Feldman and Newcomb, 1969; Wilson, 1975). One nonacademic critic of liberal education for police even argues that by making police more aware of the moral implications of the decision to use deadly force college may cause danger to the officers and others by making them hesitate too much (Carrington, 1979:31). A second theoretical approach would hold that college-educated police officers are more likely to use their guns because college inculcates a stronger sense of duty (Wilson, 1975:113), leading them to be excessively aggressive and more likely to make arrests. This argument receives some support from an empirical finding that more educated officers do make more arrests (Bozza, 1973), and the difference between the Eulia Love shooting and Black's example of a decision not to shoot is clearly a
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LAWRENCE W. SHERMAN and MARK BLUMBERG
difference along a dimension of how aggressively or legalistically police behave. A third prediction might be derived from the recent findings that the kind of college education police receive is very different from what is traditionally thought of as a college education (Sherman and National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police Officers, 1978). As measured by the books used in a nonrandom sample comprising one-fourth of all the police education programs in American colleges, universities, and community colleges, the content of college education for police appears to be little different from what all police officers are already taught in police academies (Sherman and McLeod, 1979). If that is generally the case, then there may be no reason to predict that college-educated officers will differ from less educated ofricers in the frequency with which they use deadly force, since there is no difference in the content of their education.
RESEARCH DESIGN As in any study of higher education and police behavior, testing these three predictions is not without its problems. Four common problems in studies of this kind are the relative rarity of four-year college graduates in police departments, the frequent difficulty of gathering data on other factors that may suppress or explain away any observed correlations, the crude treatment of years of higher education as a quantity (rather than something that varies substantially along qualitative dimensions), and the absence of direct measures of behavior. The present study suffers from all but the last of these general problems of research on higher education. Moreover, three special problems confront any study of individual differences among officers in the frequency with which they use deadly force. One is the difficulty of standardizing the length and kind of exposure police officers have to assignments in which weapons are likely to be used: ~ A second and related problem is the inability
to retrieve, through archival sources, the number of situations in which officers could have shot their guns (under law and policy) but did not. The third problem is that the exposure to the risk of shooting may not be independent of the occurrence of shootings, in the sense that those officers who shoot may reduce their total exposure by leaving an operational unit, or leaving police work altogether. ~ Within the constraints of time and the resources of a larger study of homicides by police, the study attempted to deal with these design problems. Using the investigation reports that are required to be filed every time an officer discharges a firearm, the authors identified the presumed universe of officers who fired their weapons from 1972 through 1978 in the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department (N = 239, four of whom shot only themselves and for one of whom educational level was not determined). An equal number of comparison officers were randomly selected from the universe of officers who served for any length of time during the study period and did not fire their weapons. Similar background data was then gathered on both groups of officers from their personnel files. In addition to the distinction between officers who did and did not shoot their guns, two other criterion variables were examined. Since the differences in the kind of shooting incidents officers become involved in were also of interest, two qualitative measures were employed: whether or not the shooting was subsequently ruled justified by the department, and the conduct of the person shot at immediately before the shooting but subsequent to the officer's intervention in the situation (assaulting the officer with a gun; assaulting the officer with other weapons or no weapon; fleeing; or bystander, accidental, or other circumstances). 5 The latter measure was arranged ordinally according to the distance of each category from the most conservative moral position on when to shoot, defense of life (as measured by assault with gun). The measurement of higher education was not nearly as sensitive. Like most
Higher Education and Police Use of Deadly Force
previous studies, all this one could do was to quantify formal education by the number of years of college work completed. (For an exception that differentiates among the types of higher educational institutions ofricers attend, see Wycoff and Susmilch, 1979.) The study could not even determine the educational levels of the shooting ofricers at the time of the shooting. It was able, however, to measure both shooting and nonshooting officers' educational levels at the time of their appointment, and then to determine their education level as of March 1979 (if they were still in the department). ~ A third measure, change in educational level, was derived from comparing education at appointment to education in 1979. The study also measured several variables likely to be related to both education and deadly force, and therefore to be possible suppressor or explainer variables. Social class background, known to be related to education (Feldman and Newcomb, 1969), and the use of violence generally (Wolfgang and Ferracuti, 1967) were measured by classifying father's occupation within the precise score values (Duncan, 1961:122123) or ranges (Blau and Duncan, 1967:122-123) of the Index of Occupational Status. Age and length of service, both known to be inversely related to the aggressiveness with which officers work (Sherman, 1980b) and inversely related to level of formal education (Sherman and National Advisory Commission, 1978:141), were standardized by measuring those variables as of the date the officer (both shooting and nonshooting) first began an operational assignment within the study period. The most important control variable, the variation across "beats" or assignments in the amount of crime or other activity that might provide legal opportunities (or necessity) for officers to use deadly force, was the most difficult to measure. The solution here was to weight each officer's period of service in each patrol beat with the annual average arrest rates per officer for the beat's patrol division for 1976 to 1978. The procedure was complicated by the fact that before 1976
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there were only three patrol divisions in Kansas City, Northeast, Central, and South, but in 1976 the three divisions were split into five. The beats remained the same, however, so that officer assignment from 1972 to 1976 could be labelled in terms of the arrest rates for 1976 and after. Those arrest rates appeared fairly stable in relation to each other for 1976, 1977, and 1978, as the rates for the three patrol divisions did in 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975, so the weighting of all years based solely on the more geographically refined data available for 1976 to 1978 does not seem inappropriate. Arrest rates both for all crimes and just the violent crimes of murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated and simple assault were both computed and the rankings were identical by division for each. The annual mean violent arrest rates per officer for 1976 to 1978 (of 2.6 per officer in the North and South Patrol Divisions, 8.3 per officer in the East and Metro Patrol Divisions, and 13.4 per officer in the Central Patrol Division) were multiplied by the number of months each officer was assigned to each of those areas (with Narcotics, Vice, and Tactical officers not assigned to a division given the same score as Central, the higher exposure area, because of their high exposure to arrests) and divided by 12, yielding a measure of exposure to arrest opportunities that could lead to deadly force that ranged from 0 to 94. The upper limit represents those officers who spent all seven years of the study period in the Central Patrol Division (or 7 x 13.4). A further complication is that for the period before 1976, the months were estimated from these officers" assignments in January of every year, since time did not permit a complete search for each of the 473 officers in all 48 monthly assignment rosters. Beginning in 1976, complete assignment information was easily accessible for each officer. It is the authors' impression, however, that transfers across patrol divisions were relatively infrequent, and that little more precision would be gained by examining every possible month for the entire period.
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This solution may suffer on ecological fallacy, for even in a high crime area a passive officer may avoid many opportunities for arrests that others may seek out. Short of observation of the officers and the situations they encounter, however, these data provide the best control for the variations across officers in their legitimate opportunities to use deadly force. Finally, it should be noted that this research design does not, strictly speaking, allow one to test predictions about rates of shooting a m o n g officers with different educational levels. Because the rate of shooting in the sample is not representative of the rate of shooting in the population of Kansas City police officers, predicting from education to shooting is inappropriate (Hirschi and Selvin, 1967:235-255). Since the sample is representative of the educational levels of shooters and nonshooters (and of those who shoot at different rates), however, it is appropriate to compare those levels to see if they are descriptively, as distinct from predictively, related to differences in shooting.
FINDINGS Although the Kansas City Police Department is probably more educated than most, the sample drawn suffers from the same relative lack of variance in educational levels that other studies have found. While one-third (36 percent) of the combined sample of 473 shooting and comparison officers had at least one year of college at the time they joined the police department, only 6 percent had completed four years of college. By 1979, more than half of the 373 officers in the sample who were still in the department had completed at least one year of college, and one-quarter had completed four years of college,7 but this still leaves the sample highly skewed in the direction of non-college graduates. Less than one-third (29 percent) of the remaining officers in 1979 showed a measured increase in their educational level since appointment, leaving the sample skewed on that variable as well.
Nonetheless, the sample allowed enough cases in all categories (with some combining of categories) to conduct statistical tests. Table 1 displays the relationships of education at appointment, education in 1979, and change in education to whether the officer shot during the study period. Table 2 displays the same relationships controlling for arrest exposure levels, which are strongly related (y = .53, p = .00) to whether officers discharge their guns. None of the relationships is statistically significant. A more refined classification of arrest exposure level might conceivably show different results when controlling for that variable, since differences across educational levels may be more likely to emerge when the opportunities to use force are greater. The small number of cases above 50, however, necessitated splitting the arrest exposure categories at a relatively low level, equal to two years or more in the Central Division or ten years or more in the North or South Divisions. Almost no differences were found among educational levels of officers who shot their guns during the study period when compared to the kind of shooting incidents they were involved in. As Table 3 shows, almost two-thirds (60 percent) of the officers with three years of college at appointment, and more than half (56 percent) of the officers with one or two years of college fired their weapons in response to an assault, whereas less than half (43 percent) of the high school graduates shot under those circumstances. But the differences are insignificant, and the pattern reverses itself for educational levels in 1979. Change in education shows statistical significance, but of an internally inconsistent pattern that fails to support the second theoretical prediction. Officers who increase their education the most are nearly twice as likely as officers with no measured increase in education to have shot in response to citizens fleeing rather than for other reasons, but those shooting officers with one to three years increase in their educational level were the least likely of the three educational change groups to have shot at fleeing citizens and the most likely to have shot because of an assault.
Higher Education and Police Use of Deadly Force
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TABLE 4 EDUCATIONAL LEVELS OF OFFICERS INVOLVED IN SHOOTING INCIDENTS BY DEPARTMENTAL RULING ON JUSTIFICATION OF THE SHOOTING, KANSAS C|TY ( M o . ) POLICE DEPARTMENT,
1972-1978
Departmental Ruling Justified Educational Level
Percent
(N)
Percent
(N)
75.8 71.9 76.2
(141) (69) (16)
24.2 28.1 23.8
(45) (27) (5)
21.0 31.9 27.9
(25) (22) (19)
23.2 32.6 32.0
(43) (15) (8)
1. At A p p o i n t m e n t G . E . D . and high school 1 to 3 years college 4 or more years college
N=
303
X~ = .54
df = 2
2. In 1979 G . E . D . and high school 1 to 3 years college 4 or more years college N=256
X~ = 2.93
X~= 2.25
p = .76
79.0 68.1 72.1 df - 2
3. Changes in Education No increase 1 to 3 years increase 4 or more years increase N = 256
Unjustified
(94) (47) (49) p = .23
76.8 67.4 68.0 df =2
Whether shootings were justified also appears to have had almost no connection to officer educational levels, as Table 4 shows. Once again, none of the relationships even approaches significance. Of the variables (other than arrest exposure) theoretically selected for multivariate analysis, all three were significantly related to whether an officer shot his weapon during the study period: father's occupational status (y - - . 1 8 ) , officer age (y = - . 3 8 ) , and length of service (~/ = - . 3 8 ) as of first date of operational assignment in the study period. Two of them were also significantly related to education (age [y = - . 3 5 ] and length of service [y = - . 4 6 ] ) . The joint
y - .1)7
y =.15
(142) (31) (17) p-.32
y = .20
effects of these variables with education on shooting thus seem well worth examining. Unfortunately, a meaningful multivariate analysis controlling for age and length of service is not possible with the present sample characteristics. As Table 5 shows, the vast majority of college-educated ofricers, and particularly college graduates, in this sample had less than one year of service at the time they began their operational assignments during the study period. Only eight of the college graduates had more than one year of service. The entire sample, to be sure, is skewed towards the earlier years of a police career, as assignments to operational units usually are. Only 23 percent of the
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entire sample had m o r e than ten years of service as of their entry into the sample. But only 8 percent of the college graduates had that much service. A similar distribution (data not displayed) exists for age and educational level. Consequently, the study could only control for age and length of service in three crude categories, neither set of which captures any differences there might be in shooting behavior a m o n g different educational levels for m o r e experienced officers. It was also impossible to control for arrest exposure levels, since they were so highly correlated with age and length of service. The control categories for age were 21 to 24, 25 to 30, and over 30; the control categories for length of service were less than one year, two to five years, and six or more years. In order to attain minimum cell sizes, all three education measures had to be dichotomized, losing any possibility of testing the proposition that college graduates behave differently when age or length of service are held constant. None of the relationships was significant. A meaningful control for father's occupational status was introduced, however, while controlling for arrest exposure level as well. Table 6 presents separate mean levels of college education for nonshooting and shooting officers, in both low and high arrest exposure categories, whose fathers had lower-class (e.g., factory worker) or lower-middle-class (e.g., clerk) occupations, and whose fathers had middle-class (e.g., police officer [Duncan Score = 40]) and upper-middle-class (e.g., factory or store manager) occupations. The use of a t-test with mean education violates our argument that education should not be treated as an interval level measure, but cross-tabulation produces too many problems with small cell sizes. For whatever the t-tests are worth, they show no significant differences at all. CONCLUSIONS These findings contain enormous uncertainty because of the m e a s u r e m e n t prob-
lems we have discussed, and any interpretations should be made with great caution. Two interpretations are likely to be drawn from these findings. One interpretation might stress the generally insignificant relationships, and chalk the findings up as still another "debunking" study showing that the police reformers were misguided in their expectations for higher education (assuming, of course, that the reformers would want officers to use deadly force less often). An alternative version of this interpretation might be that the findings support the third theoretical prediction noted above: that the education police officers have been receiving is so similar to police academy training that it makes no difference in their behavior. We prefer a more cautious interpretation, one that stresses the limitations of the available data and allows for speculation about what different kinds of data might show. It is still possible, for example, that the effects of youth and inexperience themselves counteract any effects of education. Given the growing evidence (reviewed in Sherman, 1980b) that less experienced ofricers are more aggressive in detection and arrest practices, with particularly marked changes after ten years of service, any restraining effects of education on the use of deadly force may be totally swamped by the stronger effects of youth and not emerge until officers have matured in their role. It may also be possible that graduates of different kinds of college programs have different rates of shooting. A small liberal arts college in which ethics is a required course may have a different impact on officer shooting behavior than a community college that includes technical instruction on firearms and range practice in its curriculum. In short, the present study is far from conclusive about higher education and the use of deadly force. It is even less conclusive about the value of higher education for improving "'police performance," the many components of which are not necessarily consistent for individual officers. There is some reason to believe that. as an extremely rare event, the use of deadly force
329
Higher Education and Police Use of Deadly Force
TABLE 6 E D U C A T I O N A L LEVELS OF SHOOTING AND NONSHOOTING OFFICERS BY ARREST EXPOSURE LEVEL AND FATHER'S OCCUPATION
Low Arrest Exposure (0-27)
Educational Level 1. When Father's Occupation ~< 39 a. Education at Appointment Nonshooters Shooters b. Education 1979 Nonshooters Shooters 2. When Father's Occupation /> 40 a. Education Appointment Nonshooters Shooters b. Education in 1979 Nonshooters Shooters
Mean Years College
High Arrest Exposure (28-94)
2- Tailed Mean t- Test years (N) Probability College
2- Tailed t- Test (N) Probability
.57 .75
(30) (32)
.53
.82 .84
(23) (62)
.97
1.71 1.60
(17) (20)
.86
1.52 1.51
(21) (53)
.98
.86 .92
(29) (13)
.90
.70 .81
(20) (36)
.74
1.56 1.55
(20) (11)
.99
1.19 1.39
(16) (33)
.68
may be unrelated to other aspects of police behavior. What can be concluded from this study is that at the present time there is probably an insufficient number of college graduates in most police departments to conduct meaningful multivariate analyses of the effects of higher education on police behavior. Since Kansas City's police department is probably better educated than most (Sherman and National Advisory Council, 1978:37), the limitations of the present sample will be even greater in studies conducted elsewhere. The recent increase in educational levels of police officers may mean that within the next decade such studies can be done. But until sufficient variation in both educational levels and other important ofricer characteristics is present, it is difficult to see how any study of higher education and police behavior can be conclusive.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This article is a revised version of a paper presented to the American Society of Criminology, Philadelphia. Pennsylvania, November 1979. This writing was supported in part by the National Institute of Mental Health, Center for Studies in Crime and Delinquency, Grant No. 1 R O I M H 31335-01 CD, "'Homicide by Police Officers,'" to the Criminal Justice Research Center, Albany, New York. The cooperation of Chief Norman Caron and the Kansas City, Missouri Police D e p a r t m e n t is gratefully acknowledged.
NOTES See, for example, the conclusion of one federal court in Ice et al. v. A r l i n g t o n Count)' et al., No. 7 4 - 6 4 5 - A (E-D. Va., August 1976). 2 Although it is often difficult to classify shooting situations after the fact, several studies have attempted to do so. Kobler's ( 1975:165) national study of news clippings found that 40 percent of the police killings in his sample were defense-of-life situations. A Boston Police D e p a r t m e n t (1974) study of shooting incidents in that department found that half of
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L A W R E N C E W. S H E R M A N and M A R K B L U M B E R G
them were directed at fleeing felony suspects. A Philadelphia study (Jackson, 1979) found that half of the persons hit by police bullets in Philadelphia from 1970 to 1978 were fleeing at the time.
Carrington. F. E. (1979). Remarks, Proceedings of the National Symposium on Higher Education for Police Officers. Washington, DC: Police Foundation.
Inn and Wheeler's (1977) solution of examining only patrol and tactical officers who missed no more than 15 days of duty a year is unsatisfactory for several reasons. First, shooting-prone officers may be more likely to miss more than 15 days of duty. Second, other studies have found that 12 percent (Kobler, 1975:189) to 18 percent (Milton et al., 1977:27; Fyfe, 1978:160) of police shootings occur while officers are off duty. W h e t h e r assigned to a desk or a radio car, off duty all officers are allowed to carry guns and enforce the law.
Cascio, W. F. (1977). Formal education and police officer performance. J. of Police Sci. and Admin. 5, no. 1:89 96.
Hence the negative binomial and Poisson tests used by Inn and W h e e l e r (1977) may be inappropriate for police use of deadly force. Since those tests are very sensitive to the n u m b e r of officers who shoot two or three times, the fact that many officers may remove themselves (or be removed by their superior) from exposure to shootings after the first shooting may artificially suppress a distribution not fitting the chance distributions that would occur if all officers who shot once remained on the force and in operational assignments. Since the mean age at departure in this sample was lower for shooters (33.7 years) than for nonshooters (37.1 years), it would seem that shooting and further exposure to the risk of shooting are not independent.
Cohen, B., and Chaiken, J. M. (1972). Police background characteristics and performance: Summao,. New York: New York City Rand Institute. Duncan, O. D. (1961). A socioeconomic index for all occupations. In Occupations and social status, ed. A. J. Reiss, Jr. New York: Free Press. Pp. 109-138. Feldman, K. A., and Newcomb, T. M. (1969). The impact (~f college upon .students. San Francisco: Josscy-Bass. Finch, F. R., Jr. (1976). Deadly force to arrest: Triggering Constitutional review. Harvard ('ivil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Rev. 2:361. Fogelson, R. M. (1977). Big city police. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fyfe, J. (1978). Shots fired: An examination ~f New York City Police rirearms discharges. Ph.D. dissertation, School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany. A n n Arbor: University Microfilms.
5 Both of the m e a s u r e s were drawn from an incidentbased data file rather than an officer-based one and therefore have larger N sizes since some officers were repeat shooters.
Hale, C. D. and Wilson. W. R. (1974). Personal characteristics of assaulted and non-assaulted o~: ricers. Norman: Bureau of G o v e r n m e n t Research, University of Oklahoma.
This m e a s u r e has a built-in source of error. Derived from a list of all officers receiving incentive pay for holding a 2-year, 4-year, or master's degree, it omits those who went from 0 to I and 2 to 3 years of college education completed.
Hirschi, T, and Selvin, H. C. (1967). Principles of survQ' attalysis. New York: Free Press.
7 Of the 100 officers who dropped out of the sample, 62 were from the comparison group and 38 were from the shooting group. Since both education and shooting were strongly and inversely related to age, this differential dropout rate probably inflates the educational level of the comparison sample at time 2, since the less educated older officers may have comprised the bulk of the dropouts through retirement.
Inn. A. and Wheeler, A. C. (1977). Individual differences, situational constraints, and police shooting incidents. J. o[Appl. Soc. Psych. 7, no. 1:19-26. Jackson, A. J. (1979). Deadly ¢k~rce: Police use of firearms 1970-78. Philadelphia: Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia. Kobler, A. (1975). Figures (and perhaps some facts) on police killings of civilians in the United States, 1965-1969. J. o f Sot. Issues" 31:185-91. Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners (1979). Report on police use ~¢'deadly force and the shooting ~f" Eulia Love. Vol. 1: The shooting o f Eulia Love.
REFERENCES Black, D. (1979). Dispute settlement by the police. Unpublished manuscript, Yale University.
Milton, C. M.; Halleck, J. W.; Lardner, J.; and Abrecht. G. L. (1977). Police use o f deadly force. Washington, DC: Police Foundation.
Blau, P. M., and D u n c a n , O. D. with Tyree, A. (1967). The American occupational structure. New York: Free Press.
Robin, G. D. (1963). Justifiable Homicides by police. J. o f Crim. Law, Criminol. and Police Sci. 54:224-231.
Boston Police D e p a r t m e n t (1974). The use of deadly force by Boston police personnel. Unpublished manuscript.
Sherman, L. W. (1980a). Execution without trial: Police homicide and the Constitution. Vanderbih Law Rev.
Bozza, C. M. (1973). Motivations guiding policemen in the arrest process. J. o f Police Sci. and Admin. 1, no. 4:468-476.
--(198()b). Causes of police behavior: The current state of quantitative research. J. of Res. in Crime attd Delinq. 17. no. 1:69-100.
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331
Sherman, L. W., and Langworthy, R. (1979). Measuring homicide by police officers. J. of Crim. Law and Criminol. 70, no. 4:546-560.
study of police policy regarding the use of deadly force in Los Angeles County. Loyola [of Los Angeles] Law Rev. 6:1.
Sherman, L. W., and McLeod, M. (1979). Faculty characteristics and course content in college programs for police officers. J. o f Crim. Just. 7, no. 3 (Fall) :249-267.
VollmeL A. (1936). The police and modern society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sherman, L. W., and the National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police Officers (1978). The quality o f police education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Smith, D. C. (1978). Empirical studies of higher education and police performance. Washington, DC: Police Foundation. Uelman, G. F. (1973). Varieties of police policy: A
Wilson, J. Q. (1975). Thinking about crime. New York: Basic. Wolfgang, M. E., and Ferracuti, F. (1967). The subculture of violence. London: Tavistock. Wycoff, M. A., and Susmilch, C. E. (1979). The relevance of college education for policing: Continuing the dialogue. In Police work: Strategies and outcomes in law en/?~rcement, ed. D. M. Petersen. Beverly Hills: Sage. Pp. 9-35.
0047-2352/81/040317-15502.00/0 Copyright © 1981 Pergamon Press Ltd
H I G H E R E D U C A T I O N A N D POLICE U S E OF D E A D L Y FORCE
LAWRENCE W. SHERMAN School of Criminal Justice State University of New York at Albany Albany, New York 12222
Criminal Justice Research Center Albany, New York 12203
MARK BLUMBERG
Department of Criminal Justice Central Missouri State University Warrensburg, Missouri 64093
ABSTRACT The evidence on the impact of higher education on police use of force is mixed, perhaps because of the characteristics of different indicators or samples. This study compares the educational levels of officers who did and did not shoot their weapons, who shot following different types of citizen behavior, and who shot with and without justification over a seven-year period in the Kansas City, Missouri police department. Virtually no significant differences emerge, but the absence of differences even when controlling for assignment, age, and length of service may be due to the lack of older college graduates in the sample. Until more and older college graduates are available for study it is probably not possible to conclude what impact college, and different kinds of college education, have upon police use of deadly force.
For the past half century, higher education for police officers has been a central element in police reformers' strategies of change (Vollmer, 1936; Fogelson, 1977). Yet the evidence on the impact of higher education on police behavior is decidedly mixed. Taken as a whole, studies testing the proposition that college-educated officers perform "better" are both poorly designed
and internally inconsistent, showing better performance on some measures and not on others (Smith, 1978). Even when the valueladen concept of "performance" is abandoned in favor of searching for differences in specific aspects of police behavior, different indicators of the same behavior yield different results. The relationship between higher educa-
317
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L A W R E N C E W. S H E R M A N and MARK B L U M B E R G
tion and police use of force is a prime example of the tendency for research findings to vary among the different indicators used to measure the behavior: citizen complaints against an officer, officer injuries from or assault by citizens (which usually means the force was returned), and discharges of firearms. Both Cohen and Chaiken (1972) and Cascio (1977) have found that officers with higher levels of formal education had fewer complaints made against them, either in general (Cohen and Chaiken, 1972) or specifically about excessive use of force (Cascio, 1977). Cascio also found that more educated ofricers in his sample of 940 officers in one large department suffered fewer injuries from assaults, but Hale and Wilson (1974:20) found that the more educated officers in their pooled sample of 1,745 officers from 13 southwestern police agencies were more likely to be assaulted. And officers involved in violent incidents in another city were found to have more education, on average, than the department as a whole (Milton et al., 1977:91). On the other hand, a study of 347 officers in still another large police department found that there were no significant differences among officers in their probabilities of engaging in shooting incidents, since the distribution of all shootings among the officers fit both the negative binomial and Poisson distributions of shootings that would be expected by chance (Inn and Wheeler, 1977). Depending on where and how police use of force is measured, then, more educated police officers appear to use force less often, more often, or just as often as less educated officers. The impact of higher education on police behavior (if any) may therefore be less homogeneous than some have implied, ~even within relatively specific areas of police behavior. Accumulation of findings using the same indicators, rather than measuring the same concepts with different indicators, might be the best long-term approach to specifying the impact of college education on police behavior. This study follows that approach by contributing another finding based on police records of the use of deadly force.
T H E DECISION TO S H O O T A police officer's decision to discharge a firearm at another person is a rare, important, and highly discretionary event. Inn and Wheeler's (1977) sample of 347 patrol and tactical officers, for example, found only 28.24 intentional shootings per year (over a 34-month period), or a rate of .08 discharges per officer per year. Even at that relatively high rate (two or three times the rate for New York City officers reported by Fyfe [1978:355]), an officer who remained in those operational units would only be expected to discharge his or her weapon once every 12 years, or only twice in a 25-year career. Philosophically, however, it can be argued that there is no more important decision that any agent of criminal justice can make than the taking of life. The police make that decision far more often than judges or juries. In 1976, for example, when no one was executed and 233 persons were sentenced to death after conviction for a crime, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reported that 295 persons were killed by legal intervention of police (Sherman, 1980a). An independent assessment of the NCHS data set suggests that the latter figure may be too low, and that the actual number of citizens killed by police may be twice as high, perhaps as high (for 1976) as 590 (Sherman and Langworthy, 1979). The legal opportunities for police officers to kill people probably occur far more often than either the rate of shooting or the number of citizens killed suggests, which would make the decision to shoot a highly discretionary one. Approximately half of the states still allow police to shoot at any fleeing felony suspect if that is the only means available to effect an arrest (Finch, 1976). There is no readily available estimate of the frequency of flight from arrest by felony suspects in those jurisdictions, but it is at least possible that the police decide not to shoot as often as they decide to shoot. It is also possible that police decisions not to shoot extend beyond fleeing felon situations
Higher Education and Police Use of Deadly Force into defense-of-life situations, in which less discretion might be expected. 2 Black (1979:12) provides an example from a " m a n with a gun" dispatch recorded by field observation in 1966: The first officers to arrive were confronted by a black man with a .38 revolver who said that he and his wife had no need for the police. Talking from behind a tree, one officer asked the man to let his wife out of the house, and assured him that the police would take no action against him if he were to come out as well. But the man would not be convinced, and continued to threaten the police with his gun. At this point one of the officers called headquarters and was told by a deputy chief to "pull out" since the man "'had not committed any real assault." All of the officers left shortly thereafter, and no further action was taken. This example provides a sharp contrast to the m o r e recent shooting by two Los Angeles Police D e p a r t m e n t officers of one Eulia Love, a black w o m a n who had refused police orders to drop a knife with which she had threatened gas c o m p a n y employees who had a t t e m p t e d to disconnect service at her h o m e (Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, 1979). Both cases provided a possible defense-of-life justification for shooting, but in one instance (indeed, where the danger seemed greater), the officers decided not to shoot. The discretionary nature of decisions to shoot in both fleeing felon and defense-oflife situations is further d o c u m e n t e d by the absence, to the authors' knowledge, of either rules or police disciplinary actions requiring police officers to shoot. Police d e p a r t m e n t s have rules about when not to shoot, and officers have been dismissed and criminally prosecuted for breaking those rules. The authors know of no similar actions resulting from an officer's failure to shoot. As one officer said, "the d e p a r t m e n t leaves it up to your conscience" once the situation allows a shooting under law and policy. M o r e o v e r , the discretionary nature of the decision to shoot may be reflected in the wide variations across cities in the rates of
319
police shootings (Robin, 1963; Uelman, 1973; Milton et al., 1977; Sherman and Langworthy, 1979), variations that cannot be explained easily with differences in crime rates. And if the differences in shooting rates do reflect differences in police behavior, those differences could be explained at several different levels of analysis (Sherman, 1980b): the individual characteristics of police officers, characteristics of citizenpolice encounter situations, organizational characteristics of police departments, and the characteristics of the communities they serve. At the individual level of analysis, there are a variety of theoretical grounds for predicting that an officer's education should make a difference in his or her decision to shoot or not to shoot. Unfortunately, the different grounds lead to predictions in different directions.
H Y P O T H E S E S ON T H E E F F E C T S OF COLLEGE One theoretical approach might argue that college-educated officers are less likely to use their guns in a given situation because college inculcates such qualities as selfcontrol, reflection on more issues related to a decision, and a more liberal outlook in general (Feldman and Newcomb, 1969; Wilson, 1975). One nonacademic critic of liberal education for police even argues that by making police more aware of the moral implications of the decision to use deadly force college may cause danger to the officers and others by making them hesitate too much (Carrington, 1979:31). A second theoretical approach would hold that college-educated police officers are more likely to use their guns because college inculcates a stronger sense of duty (Wilson, 1975:113), leading them to be excessively aggressive and more likely to make arrests. This argument receives some support from an empirical finding that more educated officers do make more arrests (Bozza, 1973), and the difference between the Eulia Love shooting and Black's example of a decision not to shoot is clearly a
320
LAWRENCE W. SHERMAN and MARK BLUMBERG
difference along a dimension of how aggressively or legalistically police behave. A third prediction might be derived from the recent findings that the kind of college education police receive is very different from what is traditionally thought of as a college education (Sherman and National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police Officers, 1978). As measured by the books used in a nonrandom sample comprising one-fourth of all the police education programs in American colleges, universities, and community colleges, the content of college education for police appears to be little different from what all police officers are already taught in police academies (Sherman and McLeod, 1979). If that is generally the case, then there may be no reason to predict that college-educated officers will differ from less educated ofricers in the frequency with which they use deadly force, since there is no difference in the content of their education.
RESEARCH DESIGN As in any study of higher education and police behavior, testing these three predictions is not without its problems. Four common problems in studies of this kind are the relative rarity of four-year college graduates in police departments, the frequent difficulty of gathering data on other factors that may suppress or explain away any observed correlations, the crude treatment of years of higher education as a quantity (rather than something that varies substantially along qualitative dimensions), and the absence of direct measures of behavior. The present study suffers from all but the last of these general problems of research on higher education. Moreover, three special problems confront any study of individual differences among officers in the frequency with which they use deadly force. One is the difficulty of standardizing the length and kind of exposure police officers have to assignments in which weapons are likely to be used: ~ A second and related problem is the inability
to retrieve, through archival sources, the number of situations in which officers could have shot their guns (under law and policy) but did not. The third problem is that the exposure to the risk of shooting may not be independent of the occurrence of shootings, in the sense that those officers who shoot may reduce their total exposure by leaving an operational unit, or leaving police work altogether. ~ Within the constraints of time and the resources of a larger study of homicides by police, the study attempted to deal with these design problems. Using the investigation reports that are required to be filed every time an officer discharges a firearm, the authors identified the presumed universe of officers who fired their weapons from 1972 through 1978 in the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department (N = 239, four of whom shot only themselves and for one of whom educational level was not determined). An equal number of comparison officers were randomly selected from the universe of officers who served for any length of time during the study period and did not fire their weapons. Similar background data was then gathered on both groups of officers from their personnel files. In addition to the distinction between officers who did and did not shoot their guns, two other criterion variables were examined. Since the differences in the kind of shooting incidents officers become involved in were also of interest, two qualitative measures were employed: whether or not the shooting was subsequently ruled justified by the department, and the conduct of the person shot at immediately before the shooting but subsequent to the officer's intervention in the situation (assaulting the officer with a gun; assaulting the officer with other weapons or no weapon; fleeing; or bystander, accidental, or other circumstances). 5 The latter measure was arranged ordinally according to the distance of each category from the most conservative moral position on when to shoot, defense of life (as measured by assault with gun). The measurement of higher education was not nearly as sensitive. Like most
Higher Education and Police Use of Deadly Force
previous studies, all this one could do was to quantify formal education by the number of years of college work completed. (For an exception that differentiates among the types of higher educational institutions ofricers attend, see Wycoff and Susmilch, 1979.) The study could not even determine the educational levels of the shooting ofricers at the time of the shooting. It was able, however, to measure both shooting and nonshooting officers' educational levels at the time of their appointment, and then to determine their education level as of March 1979 (if they were still in the department). ~ A third measure, change in educational level, was derived from comparing education at appointment to education in 1979. The study also measured several variables likely to be related to both education and deadly force, and therefore to be possible suppressor or explainer variables. Social class background, known to be related to education (Feldman and Newcomb, 1969), and the use of violence generally (Wolfgang and Ferracuti, 1967) were measured by classifying father's occupation within the precise score values (Duncan, 1961:122123) or ranges (Blau and Duncan, 1967:122-123) of the Index of Occupational Status. Age and length of service, both known to be inversely related to the aggressiveness with which officers work (Sherman, 1980b) and inversely related to level of formal education (Sherman and National Advisory Commission, 1978:141), were standardized by measuring those variables as of the date the officer (both shooting and nonshooting) first began an operational assignment within the study period. The most important control variable, the variation across "beats" or assignments in the amount of crime or other activity that might provide legal opportunities (or necessity) for officers to use deadly force, was the most difficult to measure. The solution here was to weight each officer's period of service in each patrol beat with the annual average arrest rates per officer for the beat's patrol division for 1976 to 1978. The procedure was complicated by the fact that before 1976
321
there were only three patrol divisions in Kansas City, Northeast, Central, and South, but in 1976 the three divisions were split into five. The beats remained the same, however, so that officer assignment from 1972 to 1976 could be labelled in terms of the arrest rates for 1976 and after. Those arrest rates appeared fairly stable in relation to each other for 1976, 1977, and 1978, as the rates for the three patrol divisions did in 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975, so the weighting of all years based solely on the more geographically refined data available for 1976 to 1978 does not seem inappropriate. Arrest rates both for all crimes and just the violent crimes of murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated and simple assault were both computed and the rankings were identical by division for each. The annual mean violent arrest rates per officer for 1976 to 1978 (of 2.6 per officer in the North and South Patrol Divisions, 8.3 per officer in the East and Metro Patrol Divisions, and 13.4 per officer in the Central Patrol Division) were multiplied by the number of months each officer was assigned to each of those areas (with Narcotics, Vice, and Tactical officers not assigned to a division given the same score as Central, the higher exposure area, because of their high exposure to arrests) and divided by 12, yielding a measure of exposure to arrest opportunities that could lead to deadly force that ranged from 0 to 94. The upper limit represents those officers who spent all seven years of the study period in the Central Patrol Division (or 7 x 13.4). A further complication is that for the period before 1976, the months were estimated from these officers" assignments in January of every year, since time did not permit a complete search for each of the 473 officers in all 48 monthly assignment rosters. Beginning in 1976, complete assignment information was easily accessible for each officer. It is the authors' impression, however, that transfers across patrol divisions were relatively infrequent, and that little more precision would be gained by examining every possible month for the entire period.
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LAWRENCE W. SHERMAN and MARK BLUMBERG
This solution may suffer on ecological fallacy, for even in a high crime area a passive officer may avoid many opportunities for arrests that others may seek out. Short of observation of the officers and the situations they encounter, however, these data provide the best control for the variations across officers in their legitimate opportunities to use deadly force. Finally, it should be noted that this research design does not, strictly speaking, allow one to test predictions about rates of shooting a m o n g officers with different educational levels. Because the rate of shooting in the sample is not representative of the rate of shooting in the population of Kansas City police officers, predicting from education to shooting is inappropriate (Hirschi and Selvin, 1967:235-255). Since the sample is representative of the educational levels of shooters and nonshooters (and of those who shoot at different rates), however, it is appropriate to compare those levels to see if they are descriptively, as distinct from predictively, related to differences in shooting.
FINDINGS Although the Kansas City Police Department is probably more educated than most, the sample drawn suffers from the same relative lack of variance in educational levels that other studies have found. While one-third (36 percent) of the combined sample of 473 shooting and comparison officers had at least one year of college at the time they joined the police department, only 6 percent had completed four years of college. By 1979, more than half of the 373 officers in the sample who were still in the department had completed at least one year of college, and one-quarter had completed four years of college,7 but this still leaves the sample highly skewed in the direction of non-college graduates. Less than one-third (29 percent) of the remaining officers in 1979 showed a measured increase in their educational level since appointment, leaving the sample skewed on that variable as well.
Nonetheless, the sample allowed enough cases in all categories (with some combining of categories) to conduct statistical tests. Table 1 displays the relationships of education at appointment, education in 1979, and change in education to whether the officer shot during the study period. Table 2 displays the same relationships controlling for arrest exposure levels, which are strongly related (y = .53, p = .00) to whether officers discharge their guns. None of the relationships is statistically significant. A more refined classification of arrest exposure level might conceivably show different results when controlling for that variable, since differences across educational levels may be more likely to emerge when the opportunities to use force are greater. The small number of cases above 50, however, necessitated splitting the arrest exposure categories at a relatively low level, equal to two years or more in the Central Division or ten years or more in the North or South Divisions. Almost no differences were found among educational levels of officers who shot their guns during the study period when compared to the kind of shooting incidents they were involved in. As Table 3 shows, almost two-thirds (60 percent) of the officers with three years of college at appointment, and more than half (56 percent) of the officers with one or two years of college fired their weapons in response to an assault, whereas less than half (43 percent) of the high school graduates shot under those circumstances. But the differences are insignificant, and the pattern reverses itself for educational levels in 1979. Change in education shows statistical significance, but of an internally inconsistent pattern that fails to support the second theoretical prediction. Officers who increase their education the most are nearly twice as likely as officers with no measured increase in education to have shot in response to citizens fleeing rather than for other reasons, but those shooting officers with one to three years increase in their educational level were the least likely of the three educational change groups to have shot at fleeing citizens and the most likely to have shot because of an assault.
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TABLE 4 EDUCATIONAL LEVELS OF OFFICERS INVOLVED IN SHOOTING INCIDENTS BY DEPARTMENTAL RULING ON JUSTIFICATION OF THE SHOOTING, KANSAS C|TY ( M o . ) POLICE DEPARTMENT,
1972-1978
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(141) (69) (16)
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L A W R E N C E W. S H E R M A N and MARK B L U M B E R G
entire sample had m o r e than ten years of service as of their entry into the sample. But only 8 percent of the college graduates had that much service. A similar distribution (data not displayed) exists for age and educational level. Consequently, the study could only control for age and length of service in three crude categories, neither set of which captures any differences there might be in shooting behavior a m o n g different educational levels for m o r e experienced officers. It was also impossible to control for arrest exposure levels, since they were so highly correlated with age and length of service. The control categories for age were 21 to 24, 25 to 30, and over 30; the control categories for length of service were less than one year, two to five years, and six or more years. In order to attain minimum cell sizes, all three education measures had to be dichotomized, losing any possibility of testing the proposition that college graduates behave differently when age or length of service are held constant. None of the relationships was significant. A meaningful control for father's occupational status was introduced, however, while controlling for arrest exposure level as well. Table 6 presents separate mean levels of college education for nonshooting and shooting officers, in both low and high arrest exposure categories, whose fathers had lower-class (e.g., factory worker) or lower-middle-class (e.g., clerk) occupations, and whose fathers had middle-class (e.g., police officer [Duncan Score = 40]) and upper-middle-class (e.g., factory or store manager) occupations. The use of a t-test with mean education violates our argument that education should not be treated as an interval level measure, but cross-tabulation produces too many problems with small cell sizes. For whatever the t-tests are worth, they show no significant differences at all. CONCLUSIONS These findings contain enormous uncertainty because of the m e a s u r e m e n t prob-
lems we have discussed, and any interpretations should be made with great caution. Two interpretations are likely to be drawn from these findings. One interpretation might stress the generally insignificant relationships, and chalk the findings up as still another "debunking" study showing that the police reformers were misguided in their expectations for higher education (assuming, of course, that the reformers would want officers to use deadly force less often). An alternative version of this interpretation might be that the findings support the third theoretical prediction noted above: that the education police officers have been receiving is so similar to police academy training that it makes no difference in their behavior. We prefer a more cautious interpretation, one that stresses the limitations of the available data and allows for speculation about what different kinds of data might show. It is still possible, for example, that the effects of youth and inexperience themselves counteract any effects of education. Given the growing evidence (reviewed in Sherman, 1980b) that less experienced ofricers are more aggressive in detection and arrest practices, with particularly marked changes after ten years of service, any restraining effects of education on the use of deadly force may be totally swamped by the stronger effects of youth and not emerge until officers have matured in their role. It may also be possible that graduates of different kinds of college programs have different rates of shooting. A small liberal arts college in which ethics is a required course may have a different impact on officer shooting behavior than a community college that includes technical instruction on firearms and range practice in its curriculum. In short, the present study is far from conclusive about higher education and the use of deadly force. It is even less conclusive about the value of higher education for improving "'police performance," the many components of which are not necessarily consistent for individual officers. There is some reason to believe that. as an extremely rare event, the use of deadly force
329
Higher Education and Police Use of Deadly Force
TABLE 6 E D U C A T I O N A L LEVELS OF SHOOTING AND NONSHOOTING OFFICERS BY ARREST EXPOSURE LEVEL AND FATHER'S OCCUPATION
Low Arrest Exposure (0-27)
Educational Level 1. When Father's Occupation ~< 39 a. Education at Appointment Nonshooters Shooters b. Education 1979 Nonshooters Shooters 2. When Father's Occupation /> 40 a. Education Appointment Nonshooters Shooters b. Education in 1979 Nonshooters Shooters
Mean Years College
High Arrest Exposure (28-94)
2- Tailed Mean t- Test years (N) Probability College
2- Tailed t- Test (N) Probability
.57 .75
(30) (32)
.53
.82 .84
(23) (62)
.97
1.71 1.60
(17) (20)
.86
1.52 1.51
(21) (53)
.98
.86 .92
(29) (13)
.90
.70 .81
(20) (36)
.74
1.56 1.55
(20) (11)
.99
1.19 1.39
(16) (33)
.68
may be unrelated to other aspects of police behavior. What can be concluded from this study is that at the present time there is probably an insufficient number of college graduates in most police departments to conduct meaningful multivariate analyses of the effects of higher education on police behavior. Since Kansas City's police department is probably better educated than most (Sherman and National Advisory Council, 1978:37), the limitations of the present sample will be even greater in studies conducted elsewhere. The recent increase in educational levels of police officers may mean that within the next decade such studies can be done. But until sufficient variation in both educational levels and other important ofricer characteristics is present, it is difficult to see how any study of higher education and police behavior can be conclusive.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This article is a revised version of a paper presented to the American Society of Criminology, Philadelphia. Pennsylvania, November 1979. This writing was supported in part by the National Institute of Mental Health, Center for Studies in Crime and Delinquency, Grant No. 1 R O I M H 31335-01 CD, "'Homicide by Police Officers,'" to the Criminal Justice Research Center, Albany, New York. The cooperation of Chief Norman Caron and the Kansas City, Missouri Police D e p a r t m e n t is gratefully acknowledged.
NOTES See, for example, the conclusion of one federal court in Ice et al. v. A r l i n g t o n Count)' et al., No. 7 4 - 6 4 5 - A (E-D. Va., August 1976). 2 Although it is often difficult to classify shooting situations after the fact, several studies have attempted to do so. Kobler's ( 1975:165) national study of news clippings found that 40 percent of the police killings in his sample were defense-of-life situations. A Boston Police D e p a r t m e n t (1974) study of shooting incidents in that department found that half of
330
L A W R E N C E W. S H E R M A N and M A R K B L U M B E R G
them were directed at fleeing felony suspects. A Philadelphia study (Jackson, 1979) found that half of the persons hit by police bullets in Philadelphia from 1970 to 1978 were fleeing at the time.
Carrington. F. E. (1979). Remarks, Proceedings of the National Symposium on Higher Education for Police Officers. Washington, DC: Police Foundation.
Inn and Wheeler's (1977) solution of examining only patrol and tactical officers who missed no more than 15 days of duty a year is unsatisfactory for several reasons. First, shooting-prone officers may be more likely to miss more than 15 days of duty. Second, other studies have found that 12 percent (Kobler, 1975:189) to 18 percent (Milton et al., 1977:27; Fyfe, 1978:160) of police shootings occur while officers are off duty. W h e t h e r assigned to a desk or a radio car, off duty all officers are allowed to carry guns and enforce the law.
Cascio, W. F. (1977). Formal education and police officer performance. J. of Police Sci. and Admin. 5, no. 1:89 96.
Hence the negative binomial and Poisson tests used by Inn and W h e e l e r (1977) may be inappropriate for police use of deadly force. Since those tests are very sensitive to the n u m b e r of officers who shoot two or three times, the fact that many officers may remove themselves (or be removed by their superior) from exposure to shootings after the first shooting may artificially suppress a distribution not fitting the chance distributions that would occur if all officers who shot once remained on the force and in operational assignments. Since the mean age at departure in this sample was lower for shooters (33.7 years) than for nonshooters (37.1 years), it would seem that shooting and further exposure to the risk of shooting are not independent.
Cohen, B., and Chaiken, J. M. (1972). Police background characteristics and performance: Summao,. New York: New York City Rand Institute. Duncan, O. D. (1961). A socioeconomic index for all occupations. In Occupations and social status, ed. A. J. Reiss, Jr. New York: Free Press. Pp. 109-138. Feldman, K. A., and Newcomb, T. M. (1969). The impact (~f college upon .students. San Francisco: Josscy-Bass. Finch, F. R., Jr. (1976). Deadly force to arrest: Triggering Constitutional review. Harvard ('ivil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Rev. 2:361. Fogelson, R. M. (1977). Big city police. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fyfe, J. (1978). Shots fired: An examination ~f New York City Police rirearms discharges. Ph.D. dissertation, School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany. A n n Arbor: University Microfilms.
5 Both of the m e a s u r e s were drawn from an incidentbased data file rather than an officer-based one and therefore have larger N sizes since some officers were repeat shooters.
Hale, C. D. and Wilson. W. R. (1974). Personal characteristics of assaulted and non-assaulted o~: ricers. Norman: Bureau of G o v e r n m e n t Research, University of Oklahoma.
This m e a s u r e has a built-in source of error. Derived from a list of all officers receiving incentive pay for holding a 2-year, 4-year, or master's degree, it omits those who went from 0 to I and 2 to 3 years of college education completed.
Hirschi, T, and Selvin, H. C. (1967). Principles of survQ' attalysis. New York: Free Press.
7 Of the 100 officers who dropped out of the sample, 62 were from the comparison group and 38 were from the shooting group. Since both education and shooting were strongly and inversely related to age, this differential dropout rate probably inflates the educational level of the comparison sample at time 2, since the less educated older officers may have comprised the bulk of the dropouts through retirement.
Inn. A. and Wheeler, A. C. (1977). Individual differences, situational constraints, and police shooting incidents. J. o[Appl. Soc. Psych. 7, no. 1:19-26. Jackson, A. J. (1979). Deadly ¢k~rce: Police use of firearms 1970-78. Philadelphia: Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia. Kobler, A. (1975). Figures (and perhaps some facts) on police killings of civilians in the United States, 1965-1969. J. o f Sot. Issues" 31:185-91. Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners (1979). Report on police use ~¢'deadly force and the shooting ~f" Eulia Love. Vol. 1: The shooting o f Eulia Love.
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Sherman, L. W., and Langworthy, R. (1979). Measuring homicide by police officers. J. of Crim. Law and Criminol. 70, no. 4:546-560.
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