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2
Criminal Justice Research on Police
T he research evaluated in this report was generated during a relatively
short but extraordinarily productive period of intellectual effort. Be-
fore publication of the report of the President's Commission on Law
Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in
a Free Society (Black and Reiss, 1967a), there was hardly any scientific
research on the police. Today there is so much that scholars and police find
it difficult to keep up, let alone to evaluate its qualitative merits and practi-
cal utility.
This chapter describes the scientific enterprise of police research that
has developed since 1967--its scale, substantive coverage, methods, and
the auspices under which it has been conducted. Special attention is paid to
the body of research funded by the 1994 crime act in the final section. It is
not an intellectual history of the field or a detailed portrait of its develop-
ment, but rather a description of its scale and scope.1
The research described here does not exhaust all that has been written
about the police. We focused on studies that follow the scientific method,
were subjected to peer review, and were publicly disseminated. Our assess-
1Important examples of this kind of intellectual history include L.W. Sherman (1973) "Soci-
ology and Social Reform of the American Police 1950-1973" in Journal of Police Science and
Administration; Bittner and Rumbaut (1979) "Changing Conceptions of the Police Role-A
Sociological Review" in Crime and Justice: An Annual Review,Volume 1, edited by M. Tonry
and N. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); R. Reiner (1994) "Policing and the
Police" in M. Maguire, R. Morgan, and R. Reiner (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Criminol-
ogy. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 705-772.
20
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH ON POLICE 21
ment does not include studies done by police departments for in-house pur-
poses, by management consultants on contract, by investigating commis-
sions, or by experts involved in civil and criminal proceedings.
SCALE OF POLICE RESEARCH
The publication of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement
and the Administration of Justice was a watershed in the development of
research on the police. Before 1967 only a handful of scholarly books had
been published, notably American Police Systems by Raymond Fosdick
(1920), Police Systems in the United States by Bruce Smith (1949), and
Violence and the Police by William Westley (1953).2 Today, one of the
most complete collections of books on the police in the United States, North-
western University's Transportation Library, lists 2,934 books on the po-
lice published since 1967. In the history of Dissertation Abstracts Interna-
tional, which lists Ph.D. dissertations going back to 1861, over 1,300 with
the word "police" in the title have been written: 69 before 1967 and just
over 1,250 after 1967.
Today the National Criminal Justice Reference Service of the U.S. De-
partment of Justice lists approximately 31,000 references under the heading
"police and law enforcement." These documents, which constitute 20 per-
cent of its total holdings, include federal, state, and local government re-
ports, books, journal articles, and published and unpublished research re-
ports.
The cascade of peer-reviewed research on the police since 1967 has
been part of the development of criminal justice studies generally. Of the 12
most highly regarded journals in criminology and police studies published
today, only 3 existed before 1967.3 Altogether these journals have pub-
lished over 6,900 articles dealing with the police and law enforcement, the
larger part after 1967.4 Sociological Abstracts, which covers 2,500 journals
and periodicals, lists 6,929 citations to material published between 1963
and 2001.
2Westley's book was originally entitled The Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom,
and Morality. It was republished by M.I.T. Press as Violence and the Police in 1970.
3These are Crime and Delinquency (1960), Criminology (1963, known before 1970 as
Criminologica), and the Journal of Research on Crime and Delinquency (1964). Those pub-
lished after 1967 are Criminal Justice History (1980), the Journal of Crime and Justice (1981),
the Journal of Criminal Justice (1973), Justice Quarterly (1984), the Journal of Quantitative
Criminology (1985), the Journal of Police Science and Administration (1973-1990), Police
and Society (1990), Police Studies (1978), and the American Journal of Police (1981).
4The figure is actually somewhat larger because indexes of titles available for a keyword
search are not available for all the journals for the entire post-1967 period.
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22 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
Police research is now published overwhelmingly in specialty criminal
justice journals rather than the mainline social science journals. For ex-
ample, in the 33 years before 1967, the American Sociological Review, the
American Journal of Sociology, and the American Political Science Review
published 12 articles having to do with "police." In the 33 years following,
they published 18. During their entire publishing histories, these journals
have published only 33 articles with "police" in the title.
In addition to criminal justice journals, police research is also reported
in three periodicals intended for police professionals: the FBI Law Enforce-
ment Bulletin, Police Chief Magazine, and Law Enforcement News. All but
the latter predate the creation of the academic journals. Their articles fre-
quently summarize reports of peer-reviewed research.
Assuming that most of the people who do scientific research on the
police probably belong to either the American Society of Criminology or the
Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, they are estimated to number some-
where between 300 and 400. In 2000, 307 members of the American Society
of Criminology (11 percent of the membership) belonged to its special-
interest police section, while 187 members of the Academy of Criminal
Justice Sciences identified themselves as police researchers (5 percent of the
membership) (personal communications with these associations). Although
the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences is generally regarded as the more
practitioner-oriented of the two, a larger proportion of members of the
American Society of Criminology identified themselves as police researchers.
In sum, police research has become a substantial industry in 35 years,
with a dedicated core of scholars, a large body of published work, several
specialized journals, many publicly accessible data sets, and regular profes-
sional meetings.
SUBJECT MATTER OF POLICE RESEARCH
The scientific study of the police in the United States arose out of con-
cern with the fairness of police actions, especially discriminatory treatment
of black Americans. It reflected growing sensitivity to the unequal treat-
ment of minorities generally, whether formally through discriminatory
laws--voting, education, employment, and housing--or informally through
the pervasive exercise of prejudice, especially by government officials.
Beginning in the late 1950s, the American Bar Foundation undertook a
series of studies designed to describe the way in which the institutions of
criminal justice actually worked, going beyond the traditional descriptions
of their formal organization or legal empowerment. The key discovery was
that officials, among them the police, possessed enormous discretion in the
way they applied the law (LaFave, 1965; Davis, 1969). Two classic studies
confirmed this insight: Justice Without Trial by Jerome Skolnick (1966),
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH ON POLICE 23
about criminal investigations, and The Functions of the Police in Modern
Society by Egon Bittner (1970), about police patrolling. This discovery also
led to the first attempt to describe police behavior through systematic ob-
servation of police encounters with the public (Reiss, 1971). The data, which
were collected in Boston, MA; Washington, DC; and Chicago, IL, were
used to explore several hypotheses about factors shaping police actions.
Systematic observation was extended by the Police Services Study in 1976
to Rochester, NY; St. Louis, MO; St. Petersburg and Dade County, FL.
Research on police behavior and its determinants declined after the
1970s. With the exception of two smaller scale studies in Denver and New
York, writing about the determinants of police behavior relied on informa-
tion collected in the 1960s and 1970s (Bayley and Bittner, 1984; Bayley and
Garofalo, 1989). This situation persisted until the early 1990s, when the
National Institute of Justice (NIJ) sponsored a major new effort at system-
atic observation in Indianapolis, IN, and St. Petersburg, FL (the Policing
Neighborhoods Project).
The 1960s also saw the beginning of scientific surveys of public as well
as police opinion about police matters (Biderman et al., 1967; Bayley and
Mendelson, 1969; Kerner Commission, 1968; Jacob, 1971; Smith and
Hawkins, 1973). These studies have remained a staple of police research
ever since. They also provided a tool for broadening the criteria used to
judge police performance, from a narrow focus on crime and arrest rates to
consideration of public satisfaction, respect, legitimacy, and perceptions of
bias. These criteria are now explicitly included in lists of police perfor-
mance indicators.
Neglecting the precedent set by Skolnick, studies of the exercise of po-
lice discretion have focused almost exclusively on patrol. Only a handful of
scholars have studied criminal investigation, and most of that has been, like
the work on patrol, during the 1970s (Greenwood et al., 1977; Wilson,
1977; Manning, 1977; Eck, 1983). Another precedent of the 1960s that has
been neglected was James Q. Wilson's attempt to account for variations in
police behavior at the organizational level (1968). In Varieties of Police
Behavior, he described three styles of police interaction with communities
and explored their contextual determinants. Although scholars continually
deplore the absence of research about the behavior of police agencies as a
whole, most analysis continues to focus on the behavior of individual police
officers.
In addition to discretion and its determinants, police research focused
initially on evaluating the effectiveness of the standard strategies of polic-
ing, notably motorized and foot patrolling and rapid response to calls for
service (Kelling et al., 1974; Trojanowicz, 1986). In general, this research
found that police were not getting the results expected in terms of crime
prevention and public satisfaction. Curiously, although these evaluations
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24 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
cast serious doubt on the efficacy of contemporary police practices and
were, as a result, hotly contested by the police, very few replications were
undertaken. The research findings were accepted as true, despite method-
ological criticisms by other scholars, and became the basis for a profound
rethinking of the police role in crime control and prevention in the 1980s.
The new strategy of policing that emerged in the 1980s is called com-
munity-oriented policing. Very closely related to it is problem-oriented po-
licing. Although there are important philosophical differences between the
two, their operational practices tend to overlap. The lesson that the propo-
nents of community-oriented policing drew from the research on the effi-
cacy of customary police practices was that the police were unable to con-
trol crime on their own without the cooperation and support of the public.
This could involve reporting crime, identifying criminal suspects, calling
attention to conditions that breed disorder and crime, and taking self-pro-
tecting actions. The other major intellectual inputs to the reform movement
were Herman Goldstein's (1979) insight that police needed to involve com-
munities in cooperative problem solving and James Q. Wilson's and George
Kelling's (1982) proposal, captured in the metaphor of broken windows,
that police should help communities create a crime-deterrent environment
by minimizing public disorder.
With the advent of community policing in the 1980s, police scholarship
underwent a dramatic change and became explicitly prescriptive. Scholars
became advocates as well as analysts. In the 1960s, by contrast, police schol-
ars undertook research on police behavior, notably the exercise of discre-
tion, in order to serve the implicit agenda of providing information about
its fairness, but they were reluctant to prescribe programs of remedy. Fur-
thermore, the advocacy of the 1980s focused on issues of community safety,
not on the exercise of police powers in individual encounters with the pub-
lic. A vast literature grew up that outlined, elaborated, and encouraged the
philosophy of community policing. Training seminars were held and in-
structional manuals prepared. Although a few pilot projects were under-
taken, only a few systematic attempts were made to test the efficacy of
community policing. Indeed, police as well as scholars lamented through-
out the 1990s that both the extent and the effectiveness of community po-
licing remained largely unknown (Rosenbaum, 1994; Roth et al., 2000).
The community policing movement reflected not only the willingness
of scholars to work with, rather than simply on, the police, but also the
acceptance by police of the value of such collaboration. Viewed with in-
tense suspicion and often outright rejection in the 1960s, research by pro-
fessional scholars was now viewed as a tool of progressive management and
innovation.
Along with efforts to reform the core strategies of policing in the 1980s,
empirical research continued but was more narrowly focused than previ-
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH ON POLICE 25
ously. Descriptive studies of the use of deadly force, reminiscent of research
about police discretion in the 1960s, prompted police agencies to adopt
general policies about its use. Research showed that police behavior could
successfully be changed through this mechanism. Larry Sherman and his
colleagues undertook a series of studies that evaluated the deterrent effect
of arrest on men accused of spouse assault (Sherman, 1992). The findings
of the Minneapolis Spouse Assault Project, which was the initial study,
were almost immediately incorporated into legislation and police practice.
Although its findings were significantly modified by later research, the Min-
neapolis Spouse Assault Project is probably the single most influential re-
search undertaken since 1967.
During the 1990s, evaluations of the impact of police strategies on
community safety expanded without a dominant focus--drug crackdowns,
community crime prevention, DARE, beat patrols, crime prevention edu-
cation, and coordinated interagency crime prevention. While community
policing dominated the headlines, due largely to the federal government's
investment of $8.8 billion in the Community Oriented Policing Program in
1994, researchers pursued a more diverse agenda. The record suggests, in
fact, that during the 1990s researchers recognized that in order to be evalu-
ated successfully, police strategies, including community-oriented policing,
had to be disaggregated, broken down into specific crime and disorder
programs.
By the end of the decade, the evaluation literature about crime control
and prevention was so extensive, as well as contradictory, that the Univer-
sity of Maryland, supported by the National Institute of Justice, attempted
to summarize what research evidence had shown to work, not to work, and
to have promise (Sherman et al., 1997). In the process, the Maryland team
developed a scale for judging the scientific rigor of evaluation research based
on the control of variables, measurement error, and statistical power.
Although the range and sophistication of evaluative research increased
during the 1990s, the contribution of the police to the decade's remarkable
decline in crime was undetermined and controversial. This may have been
due to the unexpectedness of the decline, which prevented data about police
activities, as well as contextual social correlates, from being collected early
enough so that a connection could be explored. Also during the 1990s, a
research theme from the 1960s emerged with renewed force--the unequal
and sometimes abusive treatment of blacks at the hands of the police. It
began with concern about police brutality (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993; Toch
and Geller, 1996) and grew to encompass racial profiling by the police
(Fridell et al., 2001). Although interest in police misbehavior had never
entirely died out, the events of the 1990s rekindled interest in police ac-
countability and discipline (Walker, 2001).
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26 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
Taking the period as a whole (1967 to 2000), the 10 most important
topics that police researchers studied were:
1. Organization and management.
2. Crime.
3. Strategies, including community-oriented policing.
4. Drugs.
5. Women.
6. Discrimination.
7. Evaluation.
8. Ethics/accountability/discipline.
9. International/comparative policing.
10. Patrol.
This finding is based on a keyword search of four citation indexes: Criminal
Justice Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, the 12 leading criminology/crimi-
nal justice journals (listed earlier), and the three professional police periodi-
cals (mentioned above). The 10 topics were most frequently coupled with
the words "police," "policing," and "law enforcement" in the titles, identi-
fiers, or abstracts of articles that appeared in the serials covered by these
indexes. Details about this study and its methodology appear in the chapter
appendix.
There was remarkable agreement across the three social science indexes
with respect to these topics, even to the rank order. At the same time, the
popularity of the topics, indicated by the frequency of their citation, varied
enormously from the top to the bottom of the list. For example, articles
about organization and management, depending on the index, were from 8
to 18 times more likely to be written about than patrol.
The most popular topics selected for discussion in the three police-
oriented journals also appeared at the top of the social science lists: crime,
organization and management, drugs, and strategies, including commu-
nity-oriented policing. Only two topics were unique to the practitioner list:
traffic and criminal investigation. Interestingly, practitioners were as inter-
ested in ethics/accountability/discipline as scholars. And international/com-
parative articles about police occurred more frequently in the practitioner
journals.
From negligible beginnings, scientific research on the police has become
a large and diverse enterprise by the beginning of the 21st century. It has
sought both to explain police activity--the social science perspective--and
to evaluate its effects--the public policy perspective. Although the topics
studied have varied in popularity over time, no intellectual thread disap-
pears entirely in any period. Police research has consistently described po-
lice behavior, analyzed its determinants, evaluated its efficacy, and judged
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH ON POLICE 27
its rectitude. Police research is more diverse than any particular set of sub-
stantive fashions.
POLICE RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES
The early police researchers studied the police by "walking around"
(Bittner, 1970). Their research was qualitative and ethnographic, providing
subtle understanding of the working life of police officers (Skolnick, 1966;
Van Maanen, 1974; Manning, 1977; Muir, 1977; Brown, 1981). Descrip-
tive research by scholars working alone remained fashionable through the
1970s, but it tended to die out during the 1980s and 1990s.
Qualitative research by individuals was quickly overtaken by controlled
observations by multiple observers recording the behavior of large samples
of police officers. Both sorts of studies focused almost exclusively on the
behavior of patrol officers. Selective and often impressionistic observation
by one person is referred to as participant observation; observation by many
people using a predesigned protocol is called systematic social observation
(Skolnick, 1965; Reiss, 1979). Participant observation is somewhat of a
misnomer. On one hand, participant-observers are carefully instructed not
to become actively involved in what they witness--indeed, not to partici-
pate. On the other hand, ethnographic observers participate in the same
sense as participant-observers, in that they accompany police officers at
work. It is not participation that distinguishes the two observational meth-
odologies, but the systematization of observations, which reflects differ-
ences in the scale of research.
Systematic social observation is costly and requires considerable orga-
nizational skill, and for these reasons it has been rare: Black and Reiss
(1967a, b), Bayley and Garofalo (1987), and Mastrofski et al., 1998). The
data collected by these efforts have been analyzed and reanalyzed as schol-
ars explore hypotheses about the determinants of police behavior (Sherman,
1983; Chermak and Riksheim, 1993).
Descriptive studies of the police have also utilized two sorts of surveys:
(1) surveys of the attitudes and behaviors of individual police officers, often
stratified by rank, and of the public (Flanagan and Longmire, 1996; Bureau
of Justice Statistics, 1998; Weisburd, 2000) and (2) "establishment sur-
veys" of police organizations to determine structures and practices (Law
Enforcement Management and Administrative Survey or LEMAS).
With respect to evaluation studies that assess the social consequences of
police activity, especially their contribution to public safety, the major meth-
odological distinction is between experiments and quasi-experiments. Both,
it should be noted, may employ ethnographic as well as systemic observa-
tion. In the well-known Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (Kelling
et al., 1974), for example, researchers varied the strength of patrol deploy-
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28 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
ment in demographically similar areas. Despite the difficulties in control-
ling police behavior and the reluctance of police forces to adhere to experi-
mental requirements, this methodology has been employed extensively: in
Newark, NJ, to study foot patrol (Brown, 1981); in Flint, MI, for commu-
nity policing (Trojanowicz, 1986); in Oakland, CA, for "beat health"
(Green-Mazerolle, 1999); in Jersey City, NJ, for drug market interdiction
(Weisburd and Green, 1995); and in Detroit, MI, for drug crackdowns
(Bynum and Worden, 1996).
In a quasi-experimental research design, the researchers monitor natu-
rally occurring changes in police practices and the social factors that they
are assumed to affect. Little is required of the police beyond supplying in-
formation. The problem with such designs is that it is extraordinarily diffi-
cult to infer causal impact due to the multiplicity of variables that generally
need to be controlled. For this reason, studies undertaken to determine so
fundamental a matter as whether increasing or decreasing the number of
police hired or deployed affects crime, while of enduring interest, continue
to be problematic and controversial (Loftin and McDowall, 1982; Levitt,
1997; Marvel and Moody, 1996).
The emphasis on careful evaluation of the impact of police strategies
led to the making of a theoretical distinction with important methodologi-
cal consequences. In order to judge the effectiveness of any police practice,
it is critical to describe accurately the practice itself, especially its quality
and quantity. In the parlance of research, evaluation of social outcomes
from police activity requires careful delineation of the outputs that consti-
tute that activity. Evaluation requires the study of both process and result.
This distinction has informed the recent movement in policing to develop
performance indicators to measure what police do. Police find it easier to
report outputs than outcomes, while people outside the police want evalua-
tion of outcomes. Both, it turns out, are essential to sound evaluation. And
both are essential to public accountability.
Although ethnographic research is probably less popular today than it
was in the 1960s and 1970s, the methodologies adopted by police research-
ers have been relatively stable over time. More attention is given today to
random assignment in experiments, as well as to problems of displacement.
Understanding of the difficulties of causal inference from statistical correla-
tions has also increased. As a result, the requirements of statistical analysis
have become more demanding. These developments represent changes in
the sophistication with which methods are used and not the development of
new methods. Police research has profited from the fact that it has devel-
oped along with the social sciences. It has not had to invent new methods,
but rather has been able to employ appropriate research practices from all
the social sciences.
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH ON POLICE 29
At the same time, it would be naive to expect that all police research,
even all research that is responsive to the canons of scientific method, has
produced equally valid and conclusive results. The scientific quality of re-
search varies widely. The University Maryland team developed a scale for
rating the scientific merit of research studies evaluating the effectiveness of
crime prevention initiatives, including many undertaken by police (Sherman
et al., 1997). The scale takes into consideration the control of other vari-
ables, measurement error, and statistical power (Sherman et al., 1998). The
average score on a 5-point scale was 3.0, with 5 being the highest score.
Only 13.4 percent of the studies could be considered to have no serious
threats to internal validity. The rest had some defect, mostly commonly
failing to control for causal direction and context.
AUSPICES OF POLICE RESEARCH
Scientific, peer-reviewed research on the police in the United States is
currently carried out by and large by people who are not employed by
either the police or the government. They are professional researchers work-
ing in colleges and universities, nonprofit think tanks, or nongovernmental
organizations.5 The police themselves do very little genuine scientific re-
search, although since 1967 they have become more accessible to it and
more understanding of it. The research and development units of most po-
lice agencies serve instead as all-purpose staff for senior executives.
Although few people who do scientific research on the police are gov-
ernment employees, the bulk of funding for police research comes from
government. This was not always so. The American Bar Foundation's pio-
neering descriptions of criminal justice practices in the late 1950s and early
1960s were supported by private foundations. So, too, was the Reiss and
Black systematic observation of patrol behavior for the President's Com-
mission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967). In
1970 the Ford Foundation created the Police Foundation with a grant of
$30 million for the purpose of inducing progressive change through the
scientific description and analysis of police activities (Lewis and Kelling,
1979). The Police Foundation later created the Police Executive Research
Forum, whose purpose was to study policy issues important to the country's
largest municipal police departments.
Despite the precedent set by Ford and a handful of other foundations,
the dominant source of financial support for research on the police has been
5Scholars working for state universities are technically government employees, but the stan-
dards of academic freedom with respect to research are so well developed that they should be
considered independent of government.
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30 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
government. Moreover, government funding has also become increasingly
concentrated. First, the federal government substantially outspends state
and local governments for peer-reviewed research--by the Law Enforce-
ment Assistance Administration from the late 1960s to 1978 and by the
National Institute of Justice after 1978. Second, the U.S. Department of
Justice accounts for most of the federal government's investment in scien-
tific police research, through the National Institute of Justice, the Office of
Justice Programs, and the Office of Community Oriented Police Services.
Over the past two decades, other federal research agencies, for example the
National Science Foundation, have increasingly deferred to the Department
of Justice with respect to criminal justice research.
It is very difficult to estimate changes in financial support for police
research since the 1967 crime commission, even the proportion of invest-
ment coming from the federal government. The federal government does
not maintain a central register of the cost of programs supporting criminal
justice, nor is it possible to isolate the research component of such invest-
ments without examining each program separately. The report of the Uni-
versity of Maryland team concluded that federal investment across the board
for crime prevention was small, in the range of $8 million in 1996, and
probably had not changed much since the beginning of federal funding for
this purpose in 1969 (Sherman et al., 1997). This impression is supported
by figures from the National Research Council (1993) that showed that in
the early 1990s, the U.S. government spent approximately $800 per year of
potential life lost to cancer, almost $700 per life from AIDS, $40 per life
from heart, lung, and blood diseases, but only $31 for potential lives lost
due to interpersonal violence (cited in Travis, 1995). Paradoxically, then,
police research in the United States today is independent of government in
its practice but dependent on it for funding.
RESEARCH IMPACT OF THE 1994 CRIME ACT
The committee is well aware of a federally funded body of research that
resulted from the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994,
which mandated evaluation of existing police programs as well as new ones
funded directly by the act itself. The Department of Justice implemented
this mandate by transferring money internally from the Community Ori-
ented Policing Services (COPS) Office to the National Institute of Justice.
The COPS-funded research allocation to the National Institute of Justice
totaled $46,639,165, the largest single investment in police research under-
taken by this, or any other, government (Figure 2-1 shows yearly expendi-
tures).
In managing this enormous investment in police research, the National
Institute of Justice set as its overarching goal: "to explore practices that will
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36 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
APPENDIX 2A: METHODOLOGY OF KEYWORD SEARCH
The data used to document the popularity of topics that have been
studied by police researchers since 1967 are based on a keyword search of
the following four bibliographic indexes:
1. Sociological Abstracts, covering 2,500 periodicals.
2. Criminal Justice Abstracts, covering 549 periodicals.
3. Twelve criminal justice journals:
American Journal of Police (1981)
Crime and Delinquency (1960)
Criminal Justice History (1980)
Criminology (1963)
Journal of Crime and Justice (1981)
Journal of Criminal Justice (1973)
Journal of Quantitative Criminology (1985)
Journal of Research on Crime and Delinquency (1964)
Justice Quarterly (1984)
Police and Society (1990)
Police Science and Administration (1973)
Police Studies (1978).
4. Three professional police journals:
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin
Police Chief Magazine
Law Enforcement News.
The titles, abstracts, and delimiters were searched to determine how
frequently the keywords listed below were found with "police," "polic-
ing," and "law enforcement." The search determines the number of sepa-
rate citations in which words are associated and not the number of times
these associations appear in titles, abstracts, and delimiters. Because the
indexes do not cover the life of all the journals indexed, the number of
citations for particular keywords found understates slightly the number
actually published.
A total of 68 keywords were searched for their association with "po-
lice," "policing," and "law enforcement." Tables 2A-1 through 2A-6 dis-
play the results.
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH ON POLICE 37
Accountability Drug(s) Police community
Affirmative action Effectiveness relations
Battered women Ethics Prejudice
Broken windows Evaluation Problem-oriented
Brutality Fear of crime policing
Budget(s) Firearm(s) Public opinion
Civil rights Gender Quality of life
Community policing Gender bias Race
Comparative Grievance Rank(s)
Corruption Homosexuality Recruitment
Cost(s) Human rights Riot(s)
Crime Inequality Road safety
Crime prevention Information technology Spouse abuse
Criminal investigation Integrity Spouse assault
Criminal justice International Strategy
Criminal proceedings Leadership Structure
Crowd control Management Supervision
Deadly force Morale Tactic(s)
Discipline Narcotics Technology
Discretion Order maintenance Traffic
Discrimination Organization Training
Disorder Patrol Victimology
Diversity Penology Women
Domestic violence
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38 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
TABLE 2A-1 Keyword Frequency by Index
Sociology Criminal Justice
Abstracts Abstracts 12 Research 3 Professional
Keyword Data Base Data Base Journals Journals
Accountability 102 396 21 6
Affirmative action 25 57 7 9
Battered women 129 92 8 3
Broken windows 3 17 1 2
Brutality 52 163 24 178
Budget or budgets 34 152 6 38
Civil rights 98 138 27 110
Community policing 177 570 68 75
Comparative 149 356 86 11
Corruption 124 463 70 192
Cost or costs 157 821 80 77
Crime 1,503 5,998 1,384 1,790
Crime prevention 101 1,133 182 677
Criminal investigation 29 80 61 375
Criminal justice 512 2,588 695 639
Criminal proceedings 55 45 7 0
Crowd control 7 22 10 45
Deadly force 17 170 19 54
Discipline 119 398 60 124
Discretion 107 468 96 42
Discrimination 169 353 100 296
Disorder 87 300 35 4
Diversity 54 119 10 8
Domestic violence 163 440 81 82
Drug(s) 409 1,433 254 726
Effectiveness 217 925 85 32
Ethics 63 283 82 106
Evaluation 234 1,055 221 207
Fear of crime 80 321 43 18
Firearm(s) 56 367 29 248
Gender 230 257 133 1
Gender bias 5 8 8 0
Grievance 29 79 10 2
Homosexuality 53 73 6 31
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH ON POLICE 39
TABLE 2A-1 Continued
Sociology Criminal Justice
Abstracts Abstracts 12 Research 3 Professional
Keyword Data Base Data Base Journals Journals
Human rights 74 111 5 5
Inequality 94 78 46 3
Information technology 30 21 1 6
Integrity 16 108 13 18
International 167 593 35 556
Leadership 91 282 23 45
Management 213 1,146 118 351
Morale 20 104 6 19
Narcotics 40 349 65 597
Order maintenance 31 64 8 0
Organization 850 2,091 236 134
Patrol 138 1,449 108 550
Penology 15 27 34 9
Police community relations 455 600 282 890
Prejudice 49 108 13 4
Problem-oriented policing 10 76 6 4
Public opinion 85 208 115 46
Quality of life 24 87 6 4
Race 371 651 151 19
Rank or ranks 84 336 13 19
Recruitment 79 338 15 18
Riot(s) 142 266 28 60
Road safety 1 8 3 0
Highway safety 2 14 0 22
Traffic safety 7 25 2 124
Spouse abuse 23 77 13 14
Spouse assault 4 16 3 0
Strategy 159 440 53 23
Structure 670 1,343 137 13
Supervision 54 377 66 25
Tactic(s) 98 379 15 89
Technology 92 283 24 321
Traffic 73 497 28 468
Training 294 2,053 190 959
Victimology 8 34 11 5
Women or woman 505 1,003 244 149
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40 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
TABLE 2A-2 Citation Frequency by Topics
Sociology Criminal Justice
Abstracts Abstracts 12 Research 3 Professional
Topic Data Base Data Base Journals Journals
Crime 1,503 5,998 1,384 1,790
Disorder 87 300 35 4
Broken windows 3 17 1 6
Fear of crime 80 321 43 18
1,673 6,636 1,463 1,808
(If drugs, domestic violence, and crime prevention are added the totals are as follow)
(2,519) (10,099) (2,056) (3,239)
Drugs 409 1,433 254 732
Narcotics 40 349 65 597
449 1,782 319 1,379
Domestic violence 163 440 81 82
Spouse assault 4 16 3 0
Battered women 129 92 8 3
296 548 92 85
Women 505 1,003 244 149
Gender 230 257 133 1
735 1,260 377 150
Police community relations 455 600 282 890
Public opinion 85 208 115 46
540 808 397 936
Evaluation 234 1,055 221 207
Effectiveness 217 925 85 32
451 1,980 306 239
Organization 850 2,091 236 134
Structure 670 1,343 137 13
Management 213 1,146 118 351
Leadership 91 282 23 35
Supervision 54 377 66 25
Budget(s) 34 152 6 38
Cost(s) 157 821 80 77
Grievance 29 79 10 2
Morale 20 104 6 19
Rank(s) 84 336 13 19
Recruitment 79 338 15 18
Training 294 2,053 190 959
2,383 11,505 690 1,709
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH ON POLICE 41
TABLE 2A-2 Continued
Sociology Criminal Justice
Abstracts Abstracts 12 Research 3 Professional
Topic Data Base Data Base Journals Journals
(If accountability/discipline are added, then)
(2,605) (12,299) (771) (1,839)
International 167 593 35 556
Comparative 149 356 86 11
316 628 121 566
Community policing 177 570 68 75
POP 10 76 6 4
Order maintenance 31 64 8 0
Quality of life 24 87 6 4
242 797 88 83
(If police-community relations are added, then)
(782) (1,605) (485) (973)
Patrol 138 1,449 108 550
Discrimination 169 353 100 296
Prejudice 49 108 13 4
Race 371 651 151 19
Diversity 54 119 10 8
Gender bias 5 8 9 0
Inequality 94 78 46 3
Homosexuality 53 73 6 31
Affirmative action 25 57 7 9
820 1,447 342 370
Strategy 159 440 53 23
Tactics 98 379 15 89
257 819 68 112
Traffic 73 497 28 468
Road safety 1 8 3 0
Highway safety 2 14 0 22
Traffic safety 7 25 2 124
83 544 33 614
Technology 92 283 24 321
Information 30 21 1 6
technology 122 304 25 327
continued
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42 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
TABLE 2A-2 Continued
Sociology Criminal Justice
Abstracts Abstracts 12 Research 3 Professional
Keyword Data Base Data Base Journals Journals
Crime prevention 101 1,133 182 677
Disorder 87 300 35 4
Broken Windows 3 17 1 2
90 317 36 6
Ethics 63 283 82 102
Integrity 16 108 13 18
Corruption 124 463 70 192
Brutality 52 163 24 178
255 1,017 189 490
Human rights 74 111 5 5
Civil rights 98 138 27 110
172 249 33 115
Riot 142 266 28 60
Crowd control 7 22 10 45
149 288 38 105
Accountability 102 396 21 6
Discipline 119 398 60 124
221 794 81 130
Discretion 107 468 96 42
Firearms 56 367 29 248
Deadly force 17 170 19 54
73 537 48 302
Criminal investigation 29 80 61 375
NOTE: Keywords have been grouped into topics--subject matter that involves more than one
keyword.
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH ON POLICE 43
TABLE 2A-3 Topics Rank-Ordered in Sociology Abstracts
Topics Citations
1 Organization 2,383
(with accountability/discipline) (2,605)
2 Crime 1,673
(with drugs, domestic (2,519)
violence, and crime prevention)
2a See strategies (1,382)
3 Discrimination 820
4 Women 735
5 Police community relations 540
6 Strategies, including COP 499
(with COP at 242
COP with c-p rels 782
Crime prevention 101) (1,382)
6a See ethics/acct/discipline (477)
7 Evaluation 451
8 Narcotics 449
9 International/comparative 316
10 Domestic violence 296
11 Ethics 255
12 Accountability/discipline 222
(with ethics) (477)
13 Human rights 172
14 Riots 149
15 Patrol 138
16 Technology 122
17 Discretion 107
18 Crime prevention 101
19 Disorder 90
20 Traffic 83
21 Firearms 73
22 Criminal investigation 29
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44 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
TABLE 2A-4 Topics Rank-Ordered in Criminal Justice Abstracts
Topics Citations
1 Organization 11,505
(with accountability/discipline) (12,299)
2 Crime 6,636
(with drugs, domestic (10,099)
violence, and crime prevention)
3 Evaluation 1,980
4 Drugs 1,782
4a Strategy with COP (1,616)
4b COP with community relations (1,605)
5 Patrol 1,449
6 Discrimination 1,447
7 Women 1,260
8 Crime prevention 1,133
9 Ethics 1,017
(with acct/discipline) (1,239)
10 Strategy 819
11 Police-community relations 808
12 COP 797
13 Accountability/discipline 794
14 International/comparative 628
15 Domestic violence 548
16 Traffic 544
17 Firearms 537
18 Discretion 468
19 Technology 304
20 Riots 288
21 Human rights 249
22 Criminal investigation 80
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH ON POLICE 45
TABLE 2A-5 Topics Rank-Ordered in 12 Criminal Justice Journals
Topics Citations
1 Crime 1,463
(with drugs, domestic (2,056)
violence, and crime prevention)
2 Organization 690
(with accountability/discipline) (771)
2a COP with police-community relations (485)
3 Police community relations 397
4 Women 377
5 Discrimination 342
6 Drugs 319
7 Evaluation 306
8 Ethics 189
9 Crime prevention 182
(with strategy and COP) (156)
10 International/comparative 121
11 Patrol 108
12 Discretion 96
13 Domestic violence 82
14 COP 88
15 Accountability/discipline 81
16 Strategy 68
17 Criminal investigation 61
18 Firearms 48
19 Riots 38
20 Traffic 33
21 Human rights 33
22 Technology 25
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46 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING
TABLE 2A-6 Topics Rank-Ordered in Three Professional Police Journals
Topics Citations
1 Crime 1,808
(With drugs, domestic (3,239)
violence, and crime prevention
2 Organization 1,709
(With accountability/discipline) (1,839)
3 Drugs 1,379
(3a Community policing
with police-community relations 973)
4 Police community relations 936
5 Crime prevention 677
6 Traffic 614
7 International/comparative 566
8 Patrol 550
9 Ethics 490
10 Criminal investigation 375
11 Discrimination 370
12 Technology 327
13 Firearms 302
14 Evaluation 239
15 Women 150
16 Accountability/discipline 130
17 Human rights 115
18 Strategy 112
19 Riots 105
20 Domestic violence 85
21 Community policing 83
22 Discretion 42
Representative terms from entire chapter:
police research
