Keywords

police, policing, violence, criminal events, social disorganization, crime analysis

Abstract

Violence against police officers is a major problem in America. Previous studies on violence and police officers have usually focused on violence by police officers, not violence against police officers. This study is the first of its kind as it examines violence against police officers from a comprehensive, criminal events perspective with detailed use of force/officer violence data collected by the Orlando Police Department. Individual officer characteristics, individual offender characteristics, situational variables, and geographical factors are considered. Logistic regression results indicate that use of force incidents are more likely to involve battery against one or more police officers when multiple officers are involved, when offenders are female, when offenders are of larger size (measured by weight), and when offenders are known to have recently consumed alcohol before the incident. Spatial analysis results indicate that there is significant clustering of batteries against police officers within the City of Orlando, and that the areas where police battery is predominant are very similar to areas where alcohol-related businesses are prevalent, and theoretically, more alcohol is consumed. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2010

Advisor

Corzine, Jay

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Sociology

Degree Program

Sociology

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0003200

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0003200

Language

English

Release Date

August 2010

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

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Included in

Sociology Commons

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