Police strategies often develop from custom and practice without guidance from empirical research. Police officers often make their decisions based upon information and tactics with which they are the most familiar and comfortable. Choosing between available strategies and other alternatives can be improved through research and evaluation. One area of policing in which this is especially true is pursuit driving, which may be the deadliest weapon in a police officer's arsenal. Using the analogy between improper use of firearms and improper pursuit driving, Alpert and Dunham analyze the police car as a potentially dangerous weapon. The book is based upon information gathered over several years in Dade County (Miami), Florida. Included are the details of deaths, injuries, and property damage. Also reported are the arrests and apprehensions of felony suspects. The data are presented not to scare citizens, but to assist them, members of the law enforcement community, and politicians to understand more clearly the role of pursuit in policing and crime control. Pursuit needs to be discussed as a deterrent and crime-fighting strategy, and felony arrests resulting from successful pursuit must be included to compute a cost-benefit analysis. By offering a view of police pursuit that has been heretofore unavailable, the authors hope their empirical data will replace unsupported opinion and media sensationalism as information on which to create or modify pursuit policies and legal standards.

A fascinating and well-written book by an established researcher in the field. Alpert treats problems faced by police in rapidly changing multiethnic communities such as Miami-Dade County, the locus of the study. The focus on the relationship of informal and formal social control systems provides more insight into the vicissitudes of ethnic neighborhoods and their support of the police than might ever be gained from hours of Miami Vice. The book offers sociohistorical background material, conceptual and analytical frameworks, methods, data, analysis, and data interpretation. Alpert finds that neither police nor members of black communities perceived the degree of congruence in these areas with policing reported for Cuban and Anglo communities. Residence in specific neighborhoods was more significant than ethnicity or gender in perceptions of policing. . . . Excellent bibliography. Upper-division undergraduates and above. Choice In the past twenty-five years, the Miami metropolitan area has undergone a dramatic ethnic transformation that has brought with it complex challenges to the existing social order. The study grew out of an attempt to find workable and effective solutions to the problems faced by the area's police force in the wake of serious rioting and conflict between the populace and police. Alpert and Dunham argue that only by understanding the various ethnic groups' attitudes toward police and policing can beneficial means of maintaining order and controlling crime be planned and implemented. In developing their argument, the authors introduce the concepts of neighborhood as a conceptual and analytical unit, and they construct an interaction model that focuses on the interplay between the informal system of social control within the neighborhoods and the formal system of social control of the police.

Whenever police officers come into contact with citizens there is a chance that the encounter will digress to one in which force is used on a suspect. Fortunately, most police activities do not involve the use of force. But those that do reflect important patterns of interaction between the officer and the citizen. This book examines those patterns. It begins with a brief survey of prior research, and then goes on to present data and findings. Among the data are the force factor applied - that is, the level of force used relative to suspect resistance - and data on the sequential order of incidents of force. The authors also examine police use of force from the suspect's perspective. In analyzing this data they put forward a conceptual framework, the Authority Maintenance Theory, for examining and assessing police use of force.

Whenever police officers come into contact with citizens there is a chance that the encounter will digress to one in which force is used on a suspect. Fortunately, most police activities do not involve the use of force. But those that do reflect important patterns of interaction between the officer and the citizen. This book examines those patterns. It begins with a brief survey of prior research, and then goes on to present data and findings. Among the data are the force factor applied - that is, the level of force used relative to suspect resistance - and data on the sequential order of incidents of force. The authors also examine police use of force from the suspect's perspective. In analyzing this data they put forward a conceptual framework, the Authority Maintenance Theory, for examining and assessing police use of force.