Title: Systematic Observation of Public Police: Applying Field Research
  Methods to Policy Issues.
  Series: Research Report
  Author(s): Stephen D. Mastrofski, Roger B. Parks, Albert J. Reiss, Jr.,
  Robert E. Worden, Christina DeJong, Jeffrey B. Snipes, William Terrill
  Published: National Institute of Justice, December 1998
  Subject(s): Police planning and management, police personnel
  46 pages
 118,000 bytes
  
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  -------------------------------
  
  U.S. Department of Justice
  Office of Justice Programs
  National Institute of Justice
  
  Research Report
  
  Systematic Observation of Public Police: Applying Field Research
  Methods to Policy Issues
  
  ---------------------------
  
  U.S. Department of Justice
  Office of Justice Programs
  810 Seventh Street N.W.
  Washington, DC 20531
  
  Janet Reno
  Attorney General
  
  Raymond C. Fisher
  Associate Attorney General
  
  Laurie Robinson
  Assistant Attorney General
  
  Nol Brennan
  Deputy Assistant Attorney General
  
  Jeremy Travis
  Director, National Institute of Justice
  
  Office of Justice Programs
  World Wide Web Site
  http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov
  
  National Institute of Justice
  World Wide Web Site
  http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij
  
  ---------------------------
  
  Systematic Observation of Public Police: Applying Field Research
  Methods to Policy Issues
  
  Stephen D. Mastrofski, Roger B. Parks, Albert J. Reiss, Jr., Robert E.
  Worden, Christina DeJong, Jeffrey B. Snipes, and William Terrill
  
  December 1998
  
  NCJ 172859
  
  ---------------------------
  
  NIJ
  
  Jeremy Travis
  Director
  
  Steven Edwards
  Program Monitor
  
  ---------------------------
  
  Stephen D. Mastrofski is with Michigan State University; Roger B. Parks
  is with Indiana University; Albert J. Reiss, Jr., is with Yale University;
  Robert E. Worden is with State University of New York at Albany;
  Christina DeJong is with Michigan State University; Jeffrey B. Snipes is
  with Florida State University; and William Terrill is with Rutgers
  University.
  
  ---------------------------
  
  This project was supported under award number 95-IJ-CX-0071 by the
  National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department
  of Justice.Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do
  not necessarily represent the official position of policies of the U.S.
  Department of Justice.
  
  ---------------------------
  
  The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice
  Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the
  Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
  Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime.
  
  ---------------------------
  
  Preface
  
  This report outlines a social science method called systematic social
  observation (SSO). Elements of SSO, as a practice of a group of
  researchers, can be traced to England in the 1930s and the United States in
  the 1950s. But Albert J. Reiss, Jr. (1968) was the one who identified it as a
  valid method for sociologists, detailed its advantages and limitations, and
  alerted researchers to the requisites of its successful employment. This
  preface provides some background on Reiss' development of this
  methodology and its application to the study of social phenomena and to
  the police.
  
  Reiss began with the premise that "[o]bservation is an integral part of any
  science" and argued the value of precision in recognizing and recording
  that which is observed. Only by requiring precise rules for recognizing and
  recording could we begin to measure the error introduced by observation--
  whether the observation is done by the individual investigator, by a team
  of trained observers, or by research subjects who report their observations
  to interviewers as in the common social survey.
  
  A key insight offered by Reiss was the linking of observational and survey
  research. A recording instrument much like that of a survey could be used
  to systematize recording of events by observers, affording them memory
  prompts in the same manner that survey items prompt a respondent. This
  insight is important because it forces attention to what observers can
  reasonably recognize, recall, and record accurately. Construction of
  observation "items" must be done as carefully as any survey "item," and
  with much the same reasoning.
  
  Reiss' insight led him to the important elements of systematic observation-
  -elements paralleling those in systematic social surveys. It is as important
  to sample units of observation as it is to sample respondents. Our ability to
  generalize from observation or survey--to estimate parameters for a larger
  population and assess the error distribution for these parameters--depends
  on the sample design. Just as one worries about reactivity of particular
  survey items and of interviewer-respondent interactions, so too are these
  important concerns for systematic observation. Training of observers is
  key to their reliable and valid recording of events, just as it is for
  interviewers. Close supervision is needed for observers and for
  interviewers. Careful analysis of "observer effects" is made possible by
  employing multiple observers, just as "interviewer effects" can be detected
  across multiple interviewers.
  
  These issues and others that we have pursued further in our research using
  SSO are discussed at greater length in the report that follows. We cite
  them here to acknowledge Reiss' groundbreaking work and our own debt
  to him. When Roger B. Parks was a not-so-young graduate student
  struggling to develop credible methods to study police officer behavior for
  the Police Services Study, he had one of those treasured "Aha!" moments
  when reading Reiss' "Stuff and Nonsense about Social Surveys and
  Observation" and "Systematic Observation of Natural Social Phenomena."
  Parks still had a lot of work to do, but after reading these articles, he knew
  how to do it well.
  
  When drafting the section of this volume entitled "How Systematic Social
  Observation Is Done," we could easily have acquitted that obligation by
  writing, "See Reiss." For the reader's convenience, we have summarized
  his published work on SSO and drawn from additional insights he offered
  in subsequent projects, including this one. This piece showcases SSO and
  its applicability to questions of interest to policymakers and practitioners,
  as well as researchers. We have thought it advantageous to summarize
  Reiss' insights in what follows, but readers are here placed on notice that it
  cannot be said better than it was the first time.
  
  Stephen D. Mastrofski
  Roger B. Parks
  Robert E. Worden
  
  -------------------------------
  
  CONTENTS
  
  Preface
  
  Executive Summary
  
  Introduction
  
  What Is Systematic Social Observation?
  
  How Systematic Social Observation Is Done
  --The basics of SSO
  --Selecting who, where, when, and what to observe
  --Reliability
  --Personnel, logistics, project management, and quality control
  
  Some Policy Applications of Systematic 
  --Social Observation
  --Time accounting
  --Officer mobilizations
  --Using police authority
  --Street-level supervision
  --Patterns of policing at the beat level
  
  Conclusion
  
  -------------------------------
  
  Executive Summary
  
  Introduction
  
  This report describes systematic social observation (SSO), a field research
  method used to study police. This method has shown promise in
  answering many of the questions regarding how police work is conducted
  today. It was developed originally to guide field research on policing in
  the 1960s and 1970s. Most recently, SSO was employed by the Project on
  Policing Neighborhoods (POPN) to study police behavior in Indianapolis,
  Indiana, and St. Petersburg, Florida, and other research projects use it as
  well. The report describes the method and explores SSO's potential as a
  field research tool in a variety of venues. 
  
  What is systematic social observation?
  
  SSO systematizes field methods for teams of researchers who observe the
  object of study (in this case, the police) in its natural setting. Researchers
  record events as they see and hear them and do not rely upon others to
  describe or interpret events. The researchers follow well-specified
  procedures that can be duplicated. For example, researchers who wish to
  record whether officers are respectful to complainants must define
  "respectful" and "complainant" in such a manner that other researchers
  record these terms in the same way when observing the same and similar
  situations. This makes it possible for many researchers to conduct
  observations, rather than relying on the observations of just one.
  Furthermore, the observation is conducted independent of the object of
  observation--the researcher does not rely on the officer's report as to
  whether he or she treated a complainant with respect; the researcher makes
  that observation and judgment. 
  
  How systematic social observation is done
  
  Albert J. Reiss, Jr., developed the methods of SSO applied to the study of
  police. According to Reiss, the important considerations in conducting
  SSO include: (1) selection of problems for investigation, (2) preliminary
  investigation by direct observation, (3) definition of the universe to be
  observed, (4) sampling for observation, (5) development of instruments to
  collect and record observations systematically, (6) provision for measuring
  error, (7) pretesting instruments, (8) organization for direct field
  observations, (9) processing observations, and (10) quantitative analysis. 
  
  The basics of SSO. In SSO of patrol work, trained observers accompany
  police officers in their cars, on foot, or on bicycle to observe everything
  they do during a typical tour of duty. To help them later reconstruct what
  they have seen and heard, observers take brief handwritten notes on small
  notepads. Officers are allowed, and even encouraged, to read the notes
  made by their observers. The only stipulation is that the notes cannot be
  shown or discussed with any other officer or supervisor or anyone outside
  the research team. On some occasions, observers will interview officers on
  their perspectives and decisionmaking rationale regarding particular
  events.
  
  SSO observers are trained carefully in what to look for, how to note it in
  the field, and how to record it for data analysis. Following each
  observation session, field researchers complete extensive, semistructured
  narratives of the ride and events that occurred (narratives often run 15 to
  20 single-spaced pages) and respond to a highly structured, computerized
  questionnaire about what they observed. Field supervisors compare the
  narratives and coded data from the questionnaire and work with observers
  to correct discrepancies and clarify information in their reports. 
  
  Selecting who, where, when, and what to observe. Because the purpose,
  opportunities, and constraints differ from one research project to the next,
  the shape and design--the questions of who, where, when, and what that
  are asked--differ from one SSO project to the next. In the recent
  NIJ/COPS-funded POPN:
  
  --The "where" was a set of geographically defined study areas: police
  beats. 
  
  --The "when" were specific shifts or tours of duty.
  
  --The "what" were police and citizen behaviors in activities and 
  encounters.
  
  --The "who" were the officers serving the selected beats and times, and the
  citizens with whom they interacted.
  
  In this project, where (police beats) and when (specific shifts) decisions
  determined the who (officers and residents) and what (activities and
  encounters) of the project.
  
  Reliability. Before they are assigned to the field, potential observers are
  shown a prerecorded video of incidents and then are asked to complete
  relevant portions of a narrative and electronic questionnaire of what they
  have just seen and heard. The research team compares the observations of
  several observers to estimate the reliability of each potential observer. The
  researchers also scrutinize each observation for the observer's internal
  coding logic. Those observers who demonstrate reliable coding are
  selected for field work.
  
  Further reliability checks are made in the field. Where police data systems
  allow, supervisors compare observers' records of sequence and timing of
  events with police department records of the event. When multiple
  observers record the same event, field supervisors compare the
  information recorded by each observer. In some projects, citizen
  participants in events are interviewed and their perceptions of the actions
  are compared with the observers' recorded information. Observers are
  interviewed about their attitudes and perceptions at the beginning and end
  of their employment to uncover possible bias that could affect their work.
  
  Experience has shown that the more discrete and limited the decisions an
  observer must make, the easier it is to achieve reliable results.
  Nevertheless, observers often must weigh multiple and sometimes
  conflicting social cues (for instance, did one party show disrespect to
  another?) that may vary widely among individuals and cultures. Coding
  criteria must be as explicit as possible, and observers practice using them
  repeatedly during training. 
  
  Personnel, logistics, project management, and quality control. Because
  SSO is resource intensive, it takes time to recruit and train observers and
  demands advance planning and intensive supervision, monitoring, and
  coordination while data are collected. Experience has shown there are a
  number of considerations.
  
  Recruiting and selecting observers. Desirable skills and traits include
  curiosity about the project, attentiveness to detail, good social skills, good
  reporting skills, self awareness, word-processing ability, and familiarity
  with the community being studied. University undergraduate, graduate,
  and law students are commonly used as SSO field researchers. They are
  relatively inexpensive to hire and can often be trained in controlled
  classroom settings before deployment with officers.
  
  Staffing. The number of observers required depends upon the scope of the
  work. Sampling standards can also affect staffing requirements. The more
  elaborate the data-entry protocols, the greater the need to monitor coding
  while in the field. The cost of SSO can vary tremendously depending on
  staff size, the number of observations to be made, and other incidental
  expenses (travel, housing, equipment, supplies, and so forth).
  
  Data-entry computer software. Data entry software, called Codit, has been
  developed specifically for police SSO. The researcher creates coding
  protocols using a standard word-processing program. The protocols
  include the questions asked of the observers about their observations and
  all of the code response options. Codit allows the researcher to enter coded
  data at several levels of analysis and to move easily among those levels
  with a menu. Narrative accounts of field observations are entered
  separately using standard word-processing programs and can be analyzed
  using commercial qualitative data-analysis programs.
  
  Training. Observers must have sufficient training to become comfortable
  with police officers and to learn the data-entry protocols. The latter usually
  takes longer than the former. Most observers take between three and five
  training rides to be able to produce usable data. In addition to training
  rides, observers receive classroom instruction on the SSO methodology
  and substantive issues of the research.
  
  Onsite supervision. Data managers scan the disks submitted by observers
  to catch logical inconsistencies in the coding and suspicious or unusual
  coding patterns. Field supervisors review the data managers' and field
  researchers' reports, clarify coding rules, and debrief observers. 
  
  Liaison with the police department. SSO requires close coordination with
  the police department. Top managers must know what the project will
  require and how the agency will be asked to depart from its routines. Close
  working relationships with district commanders and shift and first-line 
  supervisors are essential during data collection.
  
  Confidentiality of observations. All parties to the research endeavor must
  have a clear and common understanding of the rules of confidentiality that
  will apply. The U.S. Department of Justice has established confidentiality
  guidelines for the research it funds, as have most universities and research
  institutes. Persons not on the research team are denied access to the data
  derived from tours of duty with observed officers. 
  
  Reactivity. While officer reaction to an observer is a concern, experience
  has shown it is easier to estimate and manage in SSO than when relying on
  data found in survey and archival research. Officers usually acclimate
  quickly to trained observers, and observers can note signs of reactivity in
  the officer's behavior in their notes. Observers' adherence to strict
  confidentiality guarantees in most cases will put the officer at ease. 
  
  Some policy applications of systematic social observation
  
  Researchers have used SSO to improve our understanding of police work
  and to account for variations in the way it is conducted. SSO can also
  provide more precise knowledge of how policies are actually carried out
  and can reveal the biases and limitations of other forms of data. Although
  the practical applications of SSO have been limited to date, this report
  shows how it may be used to determine how officers spend their time, how
  they mobilize to deal with the public, how they use their authority with the
  public, the nature and extent of on-scene supervision, and how policing
  styles vary in different beats. 
  
  SSO can provide police departments with information to determine how
  best to deploy personnel and resources, to develop a more complete
  picture of how officer interactions with the public are instigated (for
  instance, dispatcher, supervisor, another officer, citizen on the scene,
  telephone reports, and the observed officer), to discover how officers
  report--or fail to report--their use of authority (for instance, detaining,
  questioning, and searching citizens) and enforce laws short of arrest, to
  determine how police supervisors interact with officers in the field, and to
  discover whether the socioeconomic characteristics of an area or the local
  precinct's policies play a more influential role in police intervention levels. 
  
  Conclusion
  
  SSO offers many advantages for gathering and analyzing information on
  police at work. It can be designed to suit very specific information needs
  and does not rely upon the recordkeeping accuracy, candor, or recall of
  those who are being observed. It offers a scope and depth of data seldom
  available through official records and survey questionnaires.
  
  SSO is not without its limitations. It is costly, time-consuming, and
  dependent upon the cooperation of the police. Special effort must be made
  to address the reactivity of research subjects to observers and the
  reliability of observers in recording events. Training, supervision, and
  quality control in the field are the best ways to manage these problems, but
  they take planning, time, and money. Given these constraints, SSO seems
  less feasible as a mechanism for routinely monitoring police practice and
  better suited to special studies.
  
  -------------------------------
  
  Introduction
  
  American police[1] are entering a period of experimentation and self-
  examination that may surpass any other during this century. Police are
  showing great openness to researchers--both to obtain rigorous evaluations
  of their work and to demonstrate accountability to constituents. The news
  is filled with anecdotal accounts of police successes and failures, but
  policymakers and the public need systematic evidence about what police
  do and accomplish. They want to know the advantages and disadvantages
  of traditional methods and how new approaches affect the quality of
  service delivery. Most importantly, people want to know what is really
  going on between the police and the public. This report describes
  systematic social observation, a field research method well-suited to
  answer many of the questions posed about policing today. The following
  text describes the method and illustrates its potential as a policy analysis
  tool.
  
  What Is Systematic Social Observation?
  
  Observation is fundamental to all forms of data collection. The forms
  differ primarily in how techniques of investigation are organized, how
  observations are made and recorded, and in their own validity and
  reliability.[2]
  
  Systematic observation of natural social phenomena (systematic social
  observation or SSO) has the following features.[3] First, researchers
  observe the object of study in its "natural" setting. For example, the
  researcher observes directly how an officer responds to a citizen's request
  for service by being present as the officer interacts with the citizen. SSO
  requires that the researcher see and hear the event directly without relying
  upon others to describe it. Second, researchers make and record their
  observations according to procedures that can be duplicated. These
  procedures are made explicit before observation and can be followed by
  other researchers to produce the same results, should they observe the
  same thing. For example, if the researcher wants to know whether the
  officer was respectful to a complainant, the researcher must define
  "respectful" and "complainant" in such a way that if other researchers were
  to follow these rules observing the same situation, they would use the
  same criteria. This makes it possible for many researchers to conduct
  observations, rather than relying only upon the observations of a single
  researcher. Third, these rules are constructed so that researchers can use
  them to make scientific inferences. For example, suppose one wishes to
  measure the amount of public disturbance observed by police serving a
  given patrol beat. The unit of observation--what is being observed (e.g., a
  public disturbance)--must be defined in such a way that it can be
  distinguished from other kinds of events (i.e., citizens engaged in activities
  that are not public disturbances). Once the unit of observation is defined
  and distinguished from the stream of other citizen behaviors that might be
  observed, the researcher may begin to make decisions about how to obtain
  a representative sample. Finally, the method of observation does not rely
  upon that which is being observed but rather is independent of it, thereby
  making it possible to assess the effects of the method of observation. For
  example, the researcher does not rely upon the officer's report as to
  whether he or she treated the complainant with respect; the researcher
  makes that observation and judgment.
  
  SSO has a number of benefits for the study of public policing. Because
  researchers observe policing in natural settings, they need not rely upon
  the accounts of others to learn what happened. In addition to their
  observations of the police, SSO researchers may draw from observations
  made by the police of events and even of the researcher accompanying
  them. Obtained at the scene, these "fresh" observations by police are
  difficult to document in any other way. Official reports often fail to give
  researchers the kind of information they need, and sometimes the official
  records are suspect because those who record the data make intentional or
  unintentional misrepresentations of what happened. Citizens whom
  researchers question with surveys may also misrepresent what actually
  happened. A disinterested researcher whose sole job is objective
  observation and accurate recording of those observations is likely to
  produce the needed information. When a participant or interested party is
  the sole source, biases are more likely to color observations.
  
  SSO draws from a tradition in police research that relies upon direct 
  observation "in the field." It is like the work of anthropologists who
  observe people from a distinctive tribe or culture by being with them. This
  form of field research is sometimes called an "ethnography" and has been
  used in some of the classic studies of policing in the 1960s and 1970s.
  Ethnographers strive to describe not only what their research subjects do,
  but how they do things and how they feel about their experiences.
  Ethnographies are used frequently to understand the motivations and
  rationales of the people studied. Ethnographers do not systematize their
  field research methods before they go into the field. They assume that their
  experiences in the field dictate whom and what they study and how they
  conduct research. They derive data structure from their field experiences
  and systematize to some extent after their field work. This approach is
  especially useful when researchers are doing exploratory research on a
  topic to generate hypotheses, but it is harder to use ethnographic data for
  hypothesis testing and establishing the internal and external validity of
  findings.
  
  The methods of SSO were developed and applied to the study of police 
  by Reiss, but it has applications across a much broader array of social
  phenomena.[4] Others have used SSO to study the pace of life in large
  U.S. cities,[5] the presence of social incivilities on residential blocks,[6]
  the style of management in various organizations,[7] and many other
  phenomena. This report addresses SSO of police.
  
  How Systematic Social Observation Is Done
  
  The main procedures for SSO
  
  . . . include selection of problems for investigation, preliminary
  investigation by direct observation (optional), definition of the universe to
  be observed, sampling for observation, development of instruments to
  collect and record observations systematically, provision for measuring
  error, pretesting instruments, organization for direct field observations,
  processing observations, and quantitative analysis.[8]
  
  This section describes these procedures, concentrating on methods that we
  have used in our research. However, there are many ways to do SSO, so
  we will sometimes describe alternatives as well.
  
  The basics of SSO
  
  SSO of police patrol work is accomplished by trained observers who
  accompany police officers at work in their cars, on foot, or even on
  bicycles. The expectation is that an observer accompanies the assigned
  officer everywhere that officer goes. Officers are told that they may direct
  their observer not to accompany them if they believe that safety is at issue.
  In our experience, such instances occur rarely and officers quickly
  acclimate to the observer's presence throughout the shift.
  
  While accompanying their assigned officer, observers may make field
  notes to help them reconstruct what they observe. These are written on 
  a small notepad that is easily carried in a pocket or purse.[9] Observers
  quickly develop their own shorthand for recording information that will
  assist their recall of the who-when-where-how of what happened. Officers
  are allowed, even encouraged, to read the notes made by their observer,
  but these notes may not be shown to or discussed with those outside 
  the research team. Because the observed officer may ask to read the
  observer's notes at any time, observers are careful not to record anything
  the officer may find objectionable. While some might think that observer
  notetaking is too obtrusive, perhaps making observed officers nervous or
  self conscious, others find that when done judiciously it can enhance
  rapport. Observers simply explain it as a part of their job, likening it to the
  reports that officers are required to complete. Most officers readily
  understand and accept this.
  
  In recent studies we have added postevent interviewing to the field
  researchers' responsibilities. After some events, researchers debrief the 
  observed officer to get the officer's perspective on what just happened and
  to get the officer to reconstruct the rationale behind his or her
  decisions.[10] Our debriefings are informal. There is no questionnaire
  because the range of events we wish to capture is too great for one set of
  questions to apply. Also, we want to make the field worker's questions
  seem as natural as possible, coming from him or her as an individual,
  rather than some remote scientist. Other research purposes might make a
  structured debriefing more desirable (with predetermined questions and
  even listed response options). Some SSO studies have the observer debrief
  one or more of the citizen participants at the scene after the police-citizen
  interaction is completed.[11]
  
  Following each observation session, field researchers begin entering
  observations in formats amenable to data analysis. First, observers
  complete extensive, semistructured narrative descriptions of the ride and
  of events that occurred--often 15-20 single-spaced pages. Second, they
  enter data in a highly structured format, using computer software that
  administers a questionnaire to them about what they observed. Observers
  must complete data entry for a given ride or shift before conducting
  another observation session. Finally, the narratives and coded data are
  checked carefully by field supervisors, who are assisted by data-checking
  software. Corrections and clarifications are made quickly before memory
  fades and events become confused.
  
  Selecting who, where, when, and what to observe
  
  Regardless of the method used, researchers are highly selective about what
  to include in their records. Such selections should facilitate a clear
  understanding of the meaning and limitations of the results. A systematic
  approach to observation entails a consideration of all the basic elements of
  research design: defining the study's purpose, establishing one or more
  units of analysis, identifying the important variables, defining the
  population and sampling frame, designing data-collection instruments, and
  assessing the reliability and validity of the data.[12] There is no single best
  way to design SSO, because the purposes of research can vary greatly, not
  to mention practical opportunities and constraints that differ from project
  to project. How one answers one set of questions (who or what to observe)
  often determines how other questions will be answered (where and when
  to observe). So the priority given to these questions will shape the design
  of the SSO project. The only straightforward "rules" are that the priority of
  the questions should reflect the purposes and constraints of the project.
  
  Who and where: police beats. In our research we have answered the who-
  and where-to-observe questions by selecting a set of geographically
  defined study areas, typically police beats. Our study designs have
  required variation in conditions thought to affect the way the police and
  public behave toward each other. We have used several socioeconomic
  indicators of the residents of the police beat (e.g., race, wealth,
  unemployment, and family characteristics).[13] Alternatively, one might
  use crime or calls-for-service levels, land use, or histories of police-citizen
  relations. We observe the patrol officers who are assigned to those areas,
  so whom we observe is determined in our design by where we observe.
  However, other designs might replace territorial organization with a
  different sampling criterion. A study of police use of force might
  oversample officers with a history of complaints. If researchers were
  evaluating a domestic violence training program for patrol officers, the
  sampling problem for SSO would be identifying otherwise comparable
  samples of officers who had and had not received the training. Researchers
  seeking to understand the difference between average and extraordinary
  officers might begin by asking officers to nominate the peers they consider
  to be excellent, then oversampling from those so identified.[14]
  
  When: shifts. We answer the "when to observe" question with a sampling
  plan that selects specific shifts or tours of duty.[15] We selected shifts to 
  obtain variation in anticipated calls-for-service demand because we
  believe the level of demand to be an important influence on behavior. We
  ordinarily observe for a full shift at a time for efficiency and to allow
  enough time for officers and observers to become acclimated to each
  other. Observation usually begins with roll call. Beginning and ending a
  shift together creates more of a "partner" relationship between the observer
  and the observed.
  
  Researchers with different questions would answer the where and 
  when questions differently. If the question were how citizens are treated
  postarrest, the locus of observation might be the county jail and
  observations could be scheduled for specific high-arrest periods. In-
  custody interrogations could be videotaped. If researchers wished to assess
  the impact of police presence at a particular set of "hotspots," observers or
  videotape recorders could be located there to record police presence and
  activities.
  
  We have found that defining the where and when of observation in the
  systematic fashion we employ in our police patrol research is important to
  maintaining integrity of an SSO project in the field. Some officers are
  more willing than others to accommodate "ridealongs," especially with
  researchers who are studying their department. Given the chance to do so,
  some officers would refuse to take an observer. In the absence of strict
  rules about where and when our observer must work, shift supervisors
  might accommodate officer preferences or put an observer with the officer
  least likely to discredit the unit. A few officers may suspect that the
  observers are spying for the chief or the sponsoring agency. So it is
  important at the outset to describe and justify the sampling plan to the
  entire department. Field researchers can then explain to potentially
  recalcitrant officers that the design targets place and time, not individual
  officers, and that researchers must observe police work as it would
  normally be done at preselected places and times.
  
  All of our SSO of police has required their explicit cooperation because
  our field research is a form of participant observation. However, SSO can
  be done in other ways. Observation of police can be unobtrusive, as when
  researchers watch an address or street corner to see how it is policed.
  Participant observation of police can also place the researcher in the role
  of suspect or client (or someone accompanying likely suspects or clients)
  to observe how police treat them. Some researchers have attempted to
  estimate the likelihood that police would stop ethnic minorities driving in
  predominantly white neighborhoods. The passenger in the car is a
  researcher who observes the interaction between the officer and his or her
  colleague, the driver.
  
  What: encounters and activities. "What to observe" is defined first by the
  research questions, and then by the amenability of direct observation to
  those questions. When ethnographers go into the field, what they observe,
  at least initially, takes the form of largely undifferentiated strings of
  activities, situations, decisions, and events. SSO requires that this stream
  of events be broken up systematically. One way to do this is to divide
  observations into units of time and then note what occurs during a given
  time unit. We opted for a different approach--to treat time as a variable
  and to define events so that observers could determine when these events
  begin and end. Because of our special interest in police-citizen
  relationships, we distinguish police-citizen encounters from all other
  situations.[16] Such encounters begin when the observed officer has some
  significant face-to-face communication with a citizen. We operationalize
  this as requiring some significant verbal communication that takes at least
  1 minute or involves three verbal exchanges between the officer and the
  citizen, or that there be some physical contact (e.g., striking someone or
  shaking someone's hand). Any time that is not spent in such encounters is
  considered to be a different kind of event or "activity." We have a set of
  rules to distinguish one type of activity from another (e.g., general patrol,
  traffic surveillance, en route to a location, paperwork, and personal
  breaks).
  
  There are some common data elements for both encounters and activities
  (e.g., amount of time spent, location, the presence of other police,
  communication with supervisors, and nature of the problem), but
  otherwise what we ask observers to track differs greatly between
  encounters and activities. We have modified the definition of events to suit
  particular research purposes. For example, when observing first-line
  supervisors, we have expanded the definition of an "encounter" to include
  the observed supervisors' face-to-face interactions with other officers as
  well as with the public. Doing so enables us to capture more detail on this
  important aspect of their work as intermediaries between the rank and file
  and the rest of the organization's hierarchy. We note that researchers might
  easily develop entirely different ways of structuring their observations.
  Observation of police officers who do case work (detectives, internal
  affairs agents) might best be organized around the case or suspect.
  Observation of officers whose work is primarily problem-oriented policing
  might be structured best on the problem or address where the problem
  occurs. Systematic observation of police managers might be structured
  around goals, issues, decisions, or projects rather than the encounters and
  activities defined for street-level officers.
  
  The presence or absence of civility in police-citizen encounters has been a
  recurring theme in our work so we have focused on circumstances and
  actions that might be related to civility. Among these are the nature of an
  incident as initially presented to the observed officer; the number,
  characteristics, and roles of citizens present during an encounter; citizens'
  demeanor toward the police and other citizens; citizen and police requests
  of one another; how those requests are acted upon; and indicators of how
  an observed incident is resolved. A second theme has been the
  specification of how officers spend their time and understanding the extent
  and use of time not directed by dispatch or superiors. Our observers record
  extensive time-place-occurrence data on each shift.
  
  Reliability
  
  Reliability in SSO is enhanced by its systematic nature. Observers are
  trained extensively in what to look for, how to note it in the field, and how
  to record it for data analysis. Our instruments are designed to lead the
  observer through the sequence of events on a shift and during particular
  events recalling sequences.[17] Observers begin data recording by
  completing a worksheet drawn from their field notes. A worksheet
  structures a sequential accounting of events from the start to the end of the
  observation period (i.e., a shift or a ride), time and location of events, and
  a listing of participants in those events. Observers next write a narrative
  account of the ride and of each event in its order of occurrence. Observers
  are instructed to describe each event as if they were writing a scene for the
  director of a dramatic production, describing the setting, the participants,
  their behavior and demeanor, and anything that the officer said that might
  help others understand what occurred. Observers detail the sequence of
  actions within a given event. Finally, they respond to an extensive
  computer questionnaire to record quantitative data about the ride, events
  during the ride, and citizens with whom the observed officer
  interacted.[18]
  
  After an observer completes a narrative account of an observation period
  and records observation data using our quantitative instrument, field
  supervisors run computerized quality control programs to check the coded
  data. Supervisors also compare the observer's narrative account with the
  quantitative data, identify any inconsistencies or unclear events and
  sequences, and then work with the observer to resolve them.
  
  We test reliability in several ways. We show prerecorded videos of
  incidents to all observers, who then complete relevant portions of the
  recording instrument. We compare these coded observations across
  observers to develop reliability estimates. We look for internal coding
  logic. For example, someone who is interrogated by police should be
  coded as a suspect at some point during the encounter. We also sample the
  more difficult items, comparing what the observer described in the
  narrative to what the observer coded. Where police data systems allow, we
  compare the sequence and timing of events recorded by our observers to
  the sequence and timing reported in the police department's records. In one
  project we compared the actions recorded by our observers to actions
  reported by citizen participants who were interviewed independently a few
  days after the encounter.[19] Where multiple researchers observe the same
  event, we compare the information recorded by each. During and after
  field work we perform data checks for observer effect, testing, for
  example, whether particular observers recorded data seemingly at odds
  with that produced by others working in similar circumstances. We also
  collect data on the attitudes and perceptions of our field researchers at the
  beginning and end of their employment. We look for possible coding
  patterns that would reflect biases introduced by the kinds of views
  revealed in these surveys.[20] As a result of these various checks, we are
  able to estimate the reliability of the data.
  
  We have found that certain items create greater reliability challenges than
  others. The more discrete and limited the decisions an observer must
  make, the easier it is to achieve sufficient reliability. Fewer judgments
  must be made in answering the question, "Did the police handcuff the
  citizen?" than, "Were the police justified in handcuffing the citizen?" Our 
  instruments emphasize questions of the first type. Despite this, we have
  some items that present challenges to achieving reliability, such as
  establishing whether one party showed disrespect to another (criteria can
  vary among individuals as well as cultures), the age of the citizen, the
  wealth of the citizen, and the display of emotions. Each of these requires
  observers to consider and weigh multiple and sometimes conflicting cues
  (e.g., determining the wealth of a person from a low-income area who
  wears a lot of expensive clothes and jewelry but drives a dilapidated
  automobile). With items such as these, we provide coding criteria that are
  as explicit as possible and practice using them during training.
  
  Personnel, logistics, project management, and quality control
  
  SSO is resource intensive. It takes time to recruit and train observers. It
  demands advance planning and intensive supervision, monitoring, and 
  coordination while data are collected. Researchers who want to use it on a
  large scale should first gain experience with it on a small scale. Here are
  some guidelines we can offer based on our experiences.
  
  Recruiting and selecting observers. Getting the right people to do SSO is
  perhaps the most important task for ensuring quality data. We have relied
  mostly on university undergraduates and graduate and law students, but
  we have also used police or people with prior police experience.[21] We
  have found students to be a relatively inexpensive source of capable and
  willing employees for short-term projects. One of the advantages of using
  students is that they naturally avoid the problem of appearing to be an
  authority on policing. Students can credibly decline to offer opinions about
  what they observe by indicating that they lack the training and experience
  to make such judgments. They are in the field to watch, listen, and learn
  from the officer. Their role as "student" legitimizes their queries about
  events just observed. This may reduce officers' sensitivity about being
  judged by a knowledgeable person. It may reduce officer defensiveness or
  anticipation of critical judgment, but it may also increase other forms of
  reactivity, such as looking harder for opportunities to show the naive
  observer certain aspects of the job or anticipating that the observer may
  not be able to "understand" certain events and thus avoid them.[22]
  Whatever the role "frame" that observers use (e.g., student versus seasoned
  professional), they and those who analyze the data should be sensitive to
  cues about what the officer makes of that role.
  
  Regardless of the occupational background of observer candidates, we
  have found certain skills and traits especially valuable. Among these are
  curiosity about the topic of study, attentiveness to detail, good social
  skills, good reporting skills, self-awareness,[23] word-processing ability,
  and familiarity with the community being studied. It is possible to get a
  good estimate of some of these traits from a written application, grade
  transcript, writing sample, and interview. However, we have found it
  optimal to screen student observers during a lengthy training period, as
  long as a semester. Such training gives students an opportunity to examine
  notions about police that are often based on highly publicized accounts of
  police work. During training, students demonstrate their capacity to grow
  in the job and show how well they can deal with the complexities and
  frustrations of the work. Knowledge of policing is desirable but not
  essential. Unlike ethnographic research, which relies heavily upon the
  field researcher to make choices about what to observe and how to
  interpret it, the observer using SSO is guided by the instruments designed
  by presumably experienced and knowledgeable police researchers.
  
  Staffing. The number of observers required depends on the scope of the
  work. Our most recent study, the Project on Policing Neighborhoods
  (POPN), requires observers to conduct full 8-hour observation sessions, 
  followed by a full day or more of data entry. (See "The Project on Policing
  Neighborhoods.") Given the demands of data entry, we have found that
  observers working full time can handle 2 to 2.5 observation sessions per
  week. We have found that a full-time observer can readily manage 20 rides
  over the course of 9 or 10 weeks, and some observers can handle more.
  Such loads for student observers suggest their use during summer break
  periods--introducing a concern for seasonal effects that should be checked
  by reference to longer term data sequences of service calls and crime
  reports from the police department. Using student observers who are
  taking a full course load during their academic year will mean a much
  reduced rate of output, perhaps one observation session with data
  recording completed every 2 weeks. If researchers conduct SSO with
  many fewer demands placed on what the observers must look for and
  record, data entry and quality control time can be reduced accordingly.
  
  Sampling standards can also affect staffing requirements. If the project's
  data-collection timeframe is short, one would be wise to staff for a sample
  size that exceeds the target as a safety margin. Unexpected staff attrition
  can make it difficult to make up those sessions. Also, observers
  occasionally err in selecting the correct officer to accompany, or the
  department errs in assigning them--requiring that these observations be
  conducted again.
  
  The more elaborate the data-entry protocols, the greater the need to
  monitor coding while in the field. Our most recent SSO study, the Project
  on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN), used three field supervisors and a
  data manager to check the work of the observers and assist them in making
  corrections. This quality control staffing level can readily handle 22 full-
  time observers in our experience, and perhaps a few more.
  
  The cost of SSO can vary tremendously. We have conducted small studies
  on "shoestring" budgets, using students enrolled in courses and a graduate
  teaching assistant to conduct coding quality control. We have generated as
  many as 100 observation sessions in a semester with students enrolled in a
  course on SSO.[24] At the other extreme, on POPN we estimate that the
  1996 salary cost per ride (based only on the salary of observers,
  supervisors, and data manager) is $280 (or $35 per hour).[25] This does
  not count the time of the other staff who design and coordinate the project,
  nor does it include time spent on data editing, cleaning, and file creation at
  the conclusion of field work. Other costs, such as travel, equipment,
  housing, and supplies, are not included either. The above cost of $35 per
  hour of observation time may be increased or decreased by the sampling
  requirements and the time demands of the instruments used. When more
  funding has been available, we have invested in paid--and presumably
  more focused and motivated--observers, more elaborate instruments, more
  training, and much more supervision and quality control.
  
  Data-entry computer software. A number of our projects used handwritten
  coding forms, but since 1992 our observers have entered their data on
  personal computers using Codit, a software package developed
  specifically for SSO of police.[26] The researcher creates coding protocols
  using a standard word-processing program. The researcher configures
  Codit to accept the DOS ASCII text form of the word-processing output.
  The researcher can specify minimum and maximum values acceptable for
  each data item and can also program item skips when certain subsequent
  items are not applicable. The result is a program that allows the researcher
  to enter data at several levels of analysis (e.g., ride, activity, encounter,
  and citizen characteristics), moving easily between them with a menu.
  Data can be viewed and edited, and there are a few internal logic checks
  that observers can do themselves. An early version of Codit is currently
  available from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), as are copies of the
  instruments used in the Richmond Study of Community Policing.[27] A
  new version of Codit will soon be available.
  
  Narrative accounts of observation sessions are entered according to a
  special protocol with a standard word-processing program and saved in
  text form. These can be analyzed by any of a number of qualitative data
  analysis programs available at commercial outlets, but Qualitative Data
  Analyst software has been developed specifically for these SSO police
  data. It is currently undergoing testing.
  
  Training. Ideally observers should have enough training to become
  comfortable with police officers and to learn the data-entry protocols. The 
  latter usually takes more time than the former. Qualitative data are often 
  usable by the third ride. The elaborate POPN protocols for quantitative
  data require four or five rides for most observers to master. POPN
  observers conduct five training rides during the semester before field work
  and then an orientation ride at the site before collecting data. In addition to
  training rides, the students receive classroom instruction on the SSO
  methodology and substantive issues of the research. Class time is also
  spent on instruction and reliability checks using videotapes of police at
  work. A portion of each class is devoted to debriefing field work
  experiences to clarify coding protocols.
  
  Onsite supervision. We strongly recommend onsite supervision during
  data collection. Observers submit their field notes, observation worksheet
  (a handwritten document used to organize field notes into discrete events),
  and diskettes with the data they have entered. Using a special quality
  control computer program, the data manager scans the data on the diskette
  to catch logical inconsistencies in the coding and suspicious or unusual
  coding patterns. The data manager places the printed output from this
  computer scan in the package with the observer's materials and passes it to
  one of the field supervisors. The field supervisors use these materials to
  assist in their review. They use the observer's narrative account of events
  to double-check coded material. If necessary, they discuss questionable
  items with the observer before noting which items require correction. Field
  supervisors are also available to answer observers' questions about coding
  data and to make recommendations to the data manager about issuing
  clarifications or modifications to coding rules. The field supervisors also
  spend time debriefing observers and giving them an opportunity to express
  their personal views about memorable events. Observers are encouraged to
  discuss their experiences with each other and their supervisors. They are
  forbidden to communicate with anyone about their work outside the
  project, but the events they observe can have profound effects on them.
  Field supervisors are alert for signs that observers may substantially alter
  their outlook on police and police work.
  
  Liaison with the police department. SSO requires close coordination with
  the police department. Top managers need to know what the project will
  require and how the agency will be asked to depart from its routines.[28]
  The department may request some basic information on field researchers
  (e.g., name, date of birth, and social security number) to conduct a limited
  background investigation on them. The chief will often assign one middle
  manager responsibility for working with the project. A good working
  relationship with this person is essential, and that means keeping him or
  her posted well in advance on the details of the operation. However,
  researchers should not restrict their contact to the assigned liaison person.
  Shift commanders and first-line supervisors must also be apprised of the
  project's purpose and what they will be asked to do to accommodate it.
  Although working through the agency's chain of command to
  communicate with these people is important, we have found it
  advantageous to commit considerable effort--before data collection
  begins--to speak individually to each shift commander and supervisor
  whose cooperation will be required. The police department often issues a
  brief description of the upcoming project to the rank-and-file officers
  several weeks before data collection will begin. We also send a researcher
  to each shift's roll call to make a brief presentation about the upcoming
  project and answer questions. We recommend that senior research staff
  spend time conducting at least one practice observation session in each
  work unit so that officers can learn informally what these "ridealongs"
  entail. On our larger projects we assign these tasks to a full-time site
  director.
  
  Maintaining close contact with district commanders and shift and first-line
  supervisors is essential during data collection. Observation schedules are
  submitted in advance, but many unforeseen events require their
  modification. Recalcitrant supervisors need additional attention and
  encouragement to follow the sampling protocol or allow observers to
  accompany officers in all but dangerous situations. Frequent visits to the
  police station by the site director or other senior researchers make it easy
  for department staff to discuss their concerns on a regular basis.
  
  Confidentiality of observations. All parties to the research endeavor must
  have a clear and common understanding of the rules of confidentiality that
  will apply. The U.S. Department of Justice sets forth guidelines for
  research it funds, and universities and other research institutions also have
  their own rules for the protection of human subjects. The specifics may
  vary, depending upon who is sponsoring and conducting the research. For
  ethical reasons and to reduce conscious reactivity among officer research
  subjects, we have opted for the maximum degree of confidentiality
  allowable. Data are archived and reported in publications in such a way
  that an observed officer's anonymity is ensured. This means that a
  supervisor or chief who wants to know what our researcher observed on a
  given ride will be politely refused this information.
  
  Occasionally, observed officers list our researchers as witnesses in legal
  proceedings. When this occurs, we attempt to get legal decisionmakers not
  to call upon our observers. We have never had an observer subpoenaed to
  testify, but researchers should be prepared to deal with that contingency.
  Top police officials and prosecutors once pressured one of us to reveal
  observations of police misconduct. These officials were persuaded not to
  pursue their request with a subpoena by pointing out that it was not a
  researcher's function to ferret out misconduct to bring to legal proceedings.
  When conducting research funded by NIJ, researchers enjoy a form of
  limited protection from legal process[29] based on Federal statute 42
  USCS 3789g. However, its applicability to State courts has not been
  tested, so all parties should be aware of its potential limits.
  
  Regardless of the confidentiality agreement reached before the study
  begins, situations can arise when an observer is pressured by a department
  supervisor or administrator to reveal field observations. Observers should
  be instructed to summon the site director immediately when this occurs
  and decline to say anything. The site director then serves as the person
  with whom the department must deal regarding this matter, creating a
  buffer between those desiring information and the observer.
  
  Reactivity. Officer reactivity to observers is commonly thought to be a
  significant threat to SSO of police patrol work. We agree that reactivity is
  a concern, but one that is in many respects easier to estimate and manage
  than that found in survey and archival research, in which accuracy of data
  provided by interested parties (either police or public) is quite difficult to
  determine.[30] Officers usually acclimate quickly to trained observers.
  Although officers vary in degree of reactivity, researchers can look for
  signs of reactivity in the officer's behavior and note them.[31] Our
  observers are prompted to record circumstances in which they suspect
  officer reactivity to have been a problem in their coded data[32] and to
  describe the circumstances in their narrative accounts of observations.
  
  Officer reactivity is reduced, we believe, by our confidentiality safeguards.
  All observed officers are made aware of these safeguards before fieldwork
  begins, and each observed officer is reminded of it by his or her observer
  at the start of each ride. Even these guarantees will not prevent some
  officers from altering their behavior, especially avoiding egregious
  misbehavior. However, the central purpose of our research is not to study
  misconduct. Further, in our previous studies officers made candid,
  potentially embarrassing comments and engaged in misconduct (both
  minor and serious) in the presence of observers with sufficient frequency
  to lead us to conclude that they usually felt at ease in the observer's
  presence. Forms of reactivity that fall within the bounds of appropriate
  conduct (e.g., legal stops and arrests) are likely to be more frequent,
  leading to an overestimation of actual frequency.[33] We expect that as
  officers become acclimated to observer presence this tendency will
  dissipate. Distortions due to officer reactivity seem within acceptable
  limits, given the biases of alternative data-collection methods.
  
  Rigid adherence to confidentiality guarantees can incur some costs that
  tend to refresh the officer's sensitivity to the outsider status of the
  observer. We instruct our observers not to discuss observations made
  while accompanying one research subject with another research subject.
  Often, in the routine course of conversation during a ridealong, officers
  will ask about previous ridealongs the observer has conducted: "How did
  things go at that big pileup the other night? I saw you were with Officer
  Smith when I drove by." These are often casual queries, made to carry on
  social conversation. Sometimes the officer really wants the information,
  and occasionally the officer will test the observer to see if the
  confidentiality guarantee will be honored. To such queries we encourage a
  vague response without substantive comment, but if pushed, we instruct
  observers to remind the officer that as a matter of routine we simply do not
  discuss our observations of other officers so that we can fulfill our
  confidentiality commitment. Because officers have been forewarned of
  this, most accept it without further ado.
  
  Fielding a small, focused SSO project. Police departments often need
  research on a specific, narrowly focused issue, and they have limited
  resources and pressing time constraints for getting answers to their
  questions. For example, a department wishes to learn the impact of a new
  "preferred arrest" procedure on handling domestic violence incidents. A
  department wants details on how community policing officers conduct
  meetings with neighborhood organizations. Or a department wants to
  know more about the aggressive order-maintenance interactions between
  officers and juveniles in a troubled area of town.
  
  One of us has fielded a general-purpose SSO research project for a
  consortium of municipal governments on a budget of less than $5,000,
  using student observers who received academic credit for the training they
  received using SSO.[34] It took several months to prepare the data-
  collection instruments and a semester and summer to collect the data.
  However, that timeframe may be too long for police agencies under some
  circumstances. The greatest challenge in fielding a project on shorter
  notice is the availability of trained field observers. Many universities have
  survey research operations capable of fielding telephone or in-person
  surveys on very short notice, but none to our knowledge maintains a cadre
  of researchers experienced in SSO of police. Police agencies and local
  universities can work together to foster a group of experienced SSO
  researchers by engaging in a series of projects that benefit both
  institutions. University researchers obtain access to a police field
  environment for teaching and research, while police departments obtain
  access to SSO-based studies that address issues that most concern them.
  With modest expenditures, such an operation can reduce the startup time
  required to initiate SSO projects from "scratch."
  
  When SSO researchers focus a project on a single issue or narrow range of
  issues, this reduces the amount of resources that must be expended to
  obtain information. Research instruments can be much shorter, and
  sampling can be more efficiently fitted to a more restricted purpose.
  However, this does create greater challenges for overcoming officer
  reactivity. General-purpose field observation has the advantage of not
  singling out any particular set of officers or issues for attention.
  Consequently, officers are not especially sensitized to the observer's
  interest in them or in a narrow range of incidents or activities. Under these
  circumstances, researchers will find it especially important to guarantee
  the confidentiality of individual research subjects and to convince them
  that the researchers warrant their confidence.
  
  Some Policy Applications of Systematic Social Observation
  
  Researchers have used SSO to improve a general understanding of
  policing and to account for variations in the way it is done.[35] Its utility
  extends into policy domains as well. It can provide more precise
  knowledge of how policies are actually carried out and can reveal the
  biases and limitations of other forms of data. Practical applications of SSO
  have been limited thus far. Here we offer some examples of SSO's
  practical applications from data we have collected. The examples cover
  matters of frequent concern to police managers and the public: how
  officers spend their time, how they mobilize to deal with the public, how
  they use their authority with the public, the nature and extent of on-scene
  supervision, and how police style varies in different beats. We draw from
  data from a number of departments we have studied over the years. Except
  where indicated, readers should not assume that the data presented in one
  table refer to the same department as another table. Because we are not
  presenting a substantive report on these issues, we do not identify the
  departments. Data elements have been selected for illustrative purposes
  only and are not necessarily representative of the departments studied or of
  policing in general. We do not report statistical significance or other
  technical details that would normally accompany a substantive report.
  Readers are therefore cautioned not to draw substantive inferences from
  the exhibits that follow, but simply to consider them as illustrative of the
  kinds of analysis that can be performed on SSO data.
  
  Time accounting
  
  Officer salaries and benefits constitute the largest portion of police
  department budgets, yet most managers are unable to obtain detailed,
  reliable data on how their officers use their time. SSO can provide such
  data. Police work involves an assortment of activities, many of which go
  undocumented or which are grouped into uninformative, general
  categories. Officers frequently fail to provide an accurate accounting of
  this time, often because they regard the task as unimportant and
  occasionally because they wish to misrepresent events. SSO can provide
  great detail on police use of time and is generally more accurate than
  department records.
  
  Exhibit 1 shows on average how officers with different job assignments
  spent their time in two agencies. Department A had two basic patrol
  assignments: beat officers and community policing specialists. Beat
  officers were responsible for handling calls for service and encouraged to
  do special community policing activities during their unassigned time,
  although this was not required.[36] Community policing officers were
  freed from responding to calls for service so they could devote more time
  to working with the community and problem solving. In Department B,
  there were also community policing specialists freed from calls for
  service, but most of the rest of the patrol officers were generalists,
  responsible both for answering calls for service and expected to engage in
  community policing activities. Department B's managers placed greater
  pressure on its generalists to do community policing than did A's
  managers on its beat officers.
  
  The two departments show similar patterns of time allocation. Officers
  with calls-for-service responsibility spent more time dealing with the
  public in encounters and on general patrol (the latter difference being
  especially large in Department A). In both departments community
  policing specialists spent more time on personal business than did officers
  with calls-for-service responsibility, but the difference is more pronounced
  in Department B. The most striking difference between the two
  departments is the time allocations for administrative activities (e.g.,
  writing reports, processing evidence, meeting with court officials, or
  researching a problem). Department A community policing officers spent
  much more time on administrative activities than did beat officers, but
  Department B's community policing officers spent slightly less time on
  administrative activities.
  
  Many police departments are moving to one or the other of the models of
  division of labor characterized by these two departments. SSO can help
  police obtain a better understanding of the implications of different
  organizational arrangements for how officers spend their time. Such
  analyses need not be constrained by the general categories of police
  activity listed in exhibit 1. For example, time spent on encounters can be
  broken down by type of problem, and time spent on other activities can be
  broken down into much finer detail. We use 200 problem codes for
  encounters and nearly 70 activity codes for all other events.
  
  SSO data can be particularly enlightening when linked to other kinds of
  data. Exhibit 2 shows how data on officer attitudes can be linked to
  systematic observations of officers' time use. This particular example
  shows more similarities than differences among officers who like, dislike,
  or are neutral/ambivalent about community policing. However, those who
  disliked community policing tended to spend less time in encounters with
  the public. The difference was even more pronounced for community
  policing training. Those who received community policing training (about
  a day or more) spent much more time on encounters with the public: 24
  percent as opposed to about 16 percent for those with less than a day (no
  exhibit shown).
  
  One should exercise care in interpreting a particular time allocation as
  desirable. Some community policing advocates suggest that spending
  more time with the public is something that patrol officers need to do to
  establish better relations. Spending more time may mean that officers are 
  taking greater care or doing a more thorough job. It may also mean that
  officers are getting into more complicated situations that require more
  contact time with the public. Or it may mean that officers who take more
  time are simply less efficient than those who take less time with citizens.
  Sorting out these possibilities would require a detailed analysis of
  individual encounters, something that is possible from SSO data but not 
  presented here.
  
  Another way to characterize officers' time allocation is whether it is spent
  on tasks assigned by some higher authority (dispatcher or supervisor) or
  whether it is spent on self-directed tasks initiated without input from
  supervisors. Exhibit 3 shows how much self-directed time officers had on
  each of three shifts. Self-directed time is free from tasks given by the
  dispatchers or supervisors--time that is used at the officers' discretion.[37]
  Most of the time accounted for in this sample was self-directed.
  Community policing officers did have more self-directed time than regular
  beat officers, but not as much as one might expect, given that they were
  freed from the obligation to respond to calls for service.[38]
  
  Self-directed time periods vary in length, from a few minutes to several
  hours. Police are particularly interested in the availability of blocks of self-
  directed time that are long enough to allow officers to engage in problem-
  or project-oriented work. SSO can provide detailed information on blocks
  of self-directed time of varying lengths. Exhibit 4 shows the distribution of
  self-directed time that occurred in blocks of 60 minutes or more. Overall, a
  substantial portion of self-directed time is available in blocks of at least 60
  minutes (almost half), but it varies across work shifts. An important point,
  however, is that for most hours of the day, the probability that a given
  officer in this sample experienced a 60-minute block of self-directed time
  is relatively low (below 1 in 4--figures not in exhibit). "Split-force" plans
  attempt to deal with this uncertainty by having some officers handle as
  many assigned calls as possible, freeing other officers to work on other
  activities uninterrupted.
  
  Officer mobilizations 
  
  Patrol work is often characterized in terms of "mobilizations"--instances in
  which the police are ordered, are requested, or decide on their own to
  undertake some specific task. This might be responding to a call for
  service, helping a citizen who waves down an officer, investigating a
  suspicious situation uncovered by the officer, or working on a project.
  Police records document many of these mobilizations but can never
  capture all of them. Recording brief mobilizations that require no official
  documentation would be unwieldy and time consuming. However, SSO
  provides a comprehensive picture of patrol mobilizations.
  
  Exhibit 5 shows the different sources that can mobilize the police to
  engage the public (dispatcher, other officer, citizen on the scene, direct
  telephone calls, and observed officer). Perhaps surprising to those who
  believe that police work is mostly reactive, the most frequent initiation
  source in this department was the observed officer, not the dispatcher.
  Almost half of these mobilizations resulted in encounters with the public
  that were less than a minute or were casual (no obvious police business);
  the remainder were "full" (noncasual encounters lasting a minute or more).
  About one-third of all encounters (regardless of mobilization source) were
  brief or casual (not "full"), showing that in this sample, police deal with
  large numbers of the public in situations in which their contact is fleeting
  or not focused on what is commonly considered "police business." The
  exhibit also shows the proportion of each type of mobilization that is
  documented and, therefore, visible to and reviewed by others in the
  department after the fact. We assume for the purposes of this exhibit that
  all dispatcher-initiated mobilizations are documented.[39] All other
  mobilizations are considered recorded only if there was some indication to
  the observer that the police documented or planned to document them.
  Less than half of all mobilizations resulting in contact with the public were
  documented. Only about 1 in 10 mobilizations initiated by the observed
  police officer or the citizen on the scene was documented. Work that is not
  initiated by dispatch is not visible to anyone who was not present at the 
  scene.
  
  Exhibit 5 shows a department where officers were more proactive than
  reactive in initiating encounters. Exhibit 6 shows how risky it is to
  generalize about police departments regarding the reactivity and
  proactivity of patrol work. It shows the ratio of dispatcher-initiated
  encounters to observed officer-initiated encounters for several police
  departments (measurements taken at different times, spanning two
  decades). Two departments are very reactive, having more than three times
  the number of dispatch-initiated encounters as officer-initiated ones. The
  other four, however, have substantially lower reactivity ratios, three being
  very close to 1.0 (parity between dispatch- and officer-initiated
  encounters).[40] All of these departments employed more than 450 sworn
  officers.
  
  An important concern about mobilizations is not only how they are begun,
  but how many officers are present. The more officers at the scene, the
  greater the commitment of police resources. This is something about
  which police records are notoriously incomplete, since officers frequently
  do not report their presence as backups. Exhibit 7 shows the distribution of
  officer mobilizations at the scene of police-citizen encounters according to
  the maximum number of officers present at any given time.[41] The
  distributions for two departments are shown. There were many multiple-
  officer mobilizations in both departments. Department A used more
  multiple-officer units, but Department B had a larger proportion of
  multiple-officer encounters.
  
  Using police authority
  
  Police have a wide range of authority, from making casual inquiries to
  using deadly force. Police departments try hardest to track the use of
  authority when it will have legal consequences, such as when their actions
  are reviewed in court. But many citizens are detained, questioned, and
  searched (sometimes in a manner that technically constitutes an "arrest"),
  without any formal record. A police department concerned about officers
  using their authority appropriately and effectively may desire a
  comprehensive accounting from time to time to get a complete picture of
  work on the street and to see what, if anything, the reporting system is
  missing.
  
  One NIJ-sponsored study used arrest reports as the means by which the
  use of force and overt coercion were monitored.[42] One of the most
  comprehensive such studies to date, its reliance solely on arrest reports
  meant that it still missed many occasions when officers used force or
  threats of force. SSO allows researchers to capture situations in which
  force or threat of force is used but no arrest occurs. Exhibit 8 shows the
  ways officers used physical force in the presence of SSO researchers.[43]
  The most frequent was searching, which occurred at a rate 20 times that of
  the least frequent applications of force: pain compliance (the application of
  force that causes pain to ensure compliance), impact methods (striking the 
  citizen), and firearms. The likelihood that the rare pain compliance or
  impact methods would be reported was nearly certain, but fewer than half
  of the searches and the firearms uses resulted in officer reports (no citizen
  was fired upon). Even if every report offered a detailed account of the
  force used by the police, more than half of such instances would not have
  been documented, including one-quarter of the handcuffed citizens and
  more than half of the citizens on whom a firearm had been drawn.
  
  Police records generally do a poor job of documenting when and how
  officers maintain order and enforce laws without invoking the criminal or
  civil process. Yet these informal efforts outnumber those occasions when
  police resort to arrest, citation, or protective custody. For most minor
  offenses, using the legal process is an option of last resort. In one
  jurisdiction, police averaged about one arrest per 8-hour period, but in
  another, the rate was only about 0.6 per 8 hours. Exhibit 9 shows the
  frequency with which officers in the high-arrest department used informal
  methods of control by explicitly suggesting, requesting, or demanding that
  the citizen behave in a certain way.[44]
  
  A number of questions about the quality of police work arise from these
  mostly undocumented actions. How did police attempt to obtain citizen
  compliance? Exhibit 9 shows that authoritative police actions (commands
  or threats) were rare except with those citizens who were themselves a
  problem to others. Were attempts at achieving citizen compliance
  successful immediately? The exhibit shows that citizen compliance rates
  on scene ranged between 66 and 97 percent.[45] Highest rates were
  achieved in getting citizens to control or help others; lowest rates were
  obtained when officers attempted to get citizens to help themselves. For
  minor offenses, compliance rates may prove a far more useful measure of
  police effectiveness than arrest and citation rates.
  
  Police authority is used not only to control citizens, but also to assist them.
  Yet police agencies rarely account in any systematic detail for the wide
  range of services rendered to the public, except perhaps to tally the
  number of calls for service answered. This is remarkably uninformative,
  because such a tally tells us nothing about what the police actually did
  when they responded. Exhibit 10 shows the rate at which citizens asked
  officers at the scene explicitly for a variety of actions and the rate at which
  the police complied. The most commonly requested police services were
  information related--either providing it directly to the citizen or
  documenting the event by filing an official report. Physical assistance 
  requests and requests to control other citizens by various means were also
  frequent. Police were most likely to fulfill requests that did not require that
  they control other citizens for the requester.[46]
  
  From the perspective of those who must do the work on the street and
  from those who experience the consequences, a valuable measure of the
  state of police-community relations would be the level of mutual
  cooperation between the police and the public. Based on the data from the
  two previous exhibits, we found that overall the police complied with all
  citizens' requests in 71 percent of the contacts. Citizens complied with all
  police requests in 84 percent of the contacts.
  
  Street-level supervision 
  
  First-line supervisors are responsible for the direct guidance and oversight
  of patrol officers. They are also an important source by which the
  organization obtains assessments of officer work performance. In one
  department, a supervisor was present at 7 percent of encounters between
  observed officers and the public.[47] However, for certain kinds of
  situations, it was much higher: when a citizen assaults an officer (75
  percent), when the officer requests supervisor input (71 percent), and when
  officers arrest two or more citizens (34 percent). Based on the overall rate
  of supervisor field contacts observed, on average an officer in an 8-person
  squad in this department could expect to have a supervisor present at about
  11 public encounters per 20 work days. However, in this department any
  of a number of on-duty supervisors could show up at the scene, since
  several sergeants and a lieutenant were usually on duty at a given time.
  Thus, any one supervisor would probably observe a specific officer at a
  substantially lower rate. Most of these occasions (87 percent) were at the
  supervisor's initiative, not the subordinate's. The probability of supervisor
  presence was inversely related to how busy the shift was. The shift with
  the lightest calls demand had supervisors on scene at twice the rate of the
  shift with the heaviest demand (5 and 10 percent, respectively).
  
  What did supervisors do when they showed up at the scene? For 40
  percent of the encounters at which supervisors were present, they did not
  discuss the encounter with the officer at any time during the work shift. 
  During these occasions they merely observed or discussed other matters
  unrelated to the situation at hand. When supervisors did discuss an event
  with the observed officer, they were seldom directive, and in the 28
  percent of cases when they were, their input nearly always took the form
  of a suggestion, not an order.[48]
  
  How do street supervisors spend their time? Exhibit 11 gives a breakdown
  for three shifts. What is most striking about these figures is how much
  time street supervisors spent on general patrol. The large portion of time
  devoted to this activity may have been the product of supervisors' desire to
  be readily available to go rapidly to the scene of situations where their
  presence was expected by management. Or perhaps it was their reluctance
  to intrude on subordinates' work unless there was a specific, compelling
  reason. Or perhaps, as some managers in this department felt, many
  supervisors lacked the initiative and creativity to find better ways of
  spending their time than "just driving around." If these observation data
  were linked to data from interviews with each supervisor (conducted
  separately), the validity of each of these possibilities could be tested.
  
  Patterns of policing at the beat level 
  
  Community problems vary among geographic areas. Styles of policing
  may cluster accordingly, especially if a department embraces a
  decentralized approach to problem solving. Exhibit 12 shows several
  indicators of policing style in three pairs of patrol beats in two precincts
  (X and Y).[49] The beats are matched across precincts according to the
  level of socioeconomic distress (low, medium, and high) of residents in
  the beat, indicated in column 1.[50] Officers in this sample included both
  those who were assigned exclusively to the indicated beat and those whose
  geographic assignments covered larger areas that included the indicated
  beat.
  
  Many researchers and practitioners expect that greater socioeconomic
  distress will generate higher levels of crime and disorder, and thus higher
  levels of police intervention. The exhibit offers a comparison of officer
  activities within and between precincts, each precinct headed by a
  commander with discretion to tailor service delivery to the needs of
  residents in his or her precinct. Given this kind of latitude at the precinct
  level, it is interesting to see whether police practices are patterned more by
  the beat's socioeconomic characteristics or the precinct's identity.[51] The
  pattern of these police practices may help us determine which is more
  influential, the beat's character or the precinct commander's policies.
  
  Column 2 shows what portion of observed officers' time was spent on or
  within the boundaries of each beat studied. Most conceptualizations of
  community policing seek to maximize the amount of time officers spend
  in an assigned geographic area. Approximately half of the officers' time
  was spent in each of the indicated beats. Whether it would be wise or 
  feasible for the department to seek a higher rate of in-assigned-beat time 
  depends on many considerations. Such deliberations would benefit from
  an analysis of how officers spent their time both in and outside the beats
  studied. Both types of data are available, but for illustrative purposes the
  remainder of the exhibit focuses on police activity conducted on or within
  beat boundaries.
  
  Columns 3-5 show what proportion of observed time in the beat was spent
  on three types of activities: watching and waiting (e.g., general automotive
  patrol, foot patrol, and traffic patrol--without a particular target or focus);
  policing of disorder in public places; and casual contacts with the public
  (encounters in which there was no specific problem, but merely an
  opportunity for a social chat).[52] These indicators highlight the actual
  priorities of street-level policing by showing the allocation of police time
  to different tasks and problems. The department's community policing
  program had placed a strong emphasis on policing public disorders and a
  lower priority on developing positive community relations through "public
  relations" activities such as casual conversations.
  
  The data do not show striking differences across the six beats in how
  officers allocate their time to these three activities. Despite substantial 
  differences in degree of socioeconomic distress, these beats showed a
  remarkable consistency in the proportion of work time officers spent
  watching and waiting (31-35 percent). This may be due to the department's 
  effort to equalize workload across patrol units. There was more variation
  across beats in the proportion of time officers committed to policing
  disorder in public places (7-14 percent), but in all cases it was relatively
  low. The policing of disorders shows no clear pattern across levels of
  socioeconomic distress or precincts. There was some variation among
  beats in the amount of time spent on casual contacts (1-6 percent),
  although there is no consistent relationship shown to degree of
  socioeconomic distress or precinct. The SSO data show much consistency
  in the pattern of general street-level police activities, regardless of
  socioeconomic distress and precinct command policies. Police officers
  spent much more time in the beats watching and waiting to mobilize than
  they did actually intervening to deal with public disorders or have casual
  interactions with the public. Far more resources were devoted to the
  potential to intervene than actual interventions of the sort indicated.
  
  Columns 3-5 show the amount of time committed to general tasks or
  problems, but these variables do not indicate how officers dealt with them
  specifically. Columns 6-9 show the rate at which some specific activities
  were undertaken: stopping suspects, making arrests, engaging in
  encounters initiated by citizens (via the dispatcher, in the field, or by
  telephone directly to the officer), and engaging in encounters initiated by
  the police (without a specific request for police mobilization). These
  indicators reveal greater variation in policing style and show some
  interesting differences across the beats.
  
  Two indicators show levels of aggressive order maintenance and formal
  law enforcement: the rates of suspect stops and arrest, respectively.
  Suspect stops are officer-initiated encounters with citizens who were
  treated by police as suspects. Some ended in arrest, but most did not.
  Figures in the arrest column represent citizens who were taken into
  custody and charged with a misdemeanor or felony. These encounters
  were both citizen and officer initiated. Precinct X beats show much higher
  suspect stop rates across all levels of socioeconomic distress than Precinct
  Y beats. This mirrors the more aggressive order-maintenance policies of
  the Precinct X commander. The differences of suspect stop rates are much
  greater between precincts than between socioeconomic distress levels of
  the beats. Thus, even though the decision to initiate any given suspect stop
  is really at the individual officer's discretion in nearly all cases, these data
  suggest that management can make a big difference.
  
  Arrest rates varied much less across beats, and the pattern was quite
  different from that of suspect stops. Precinct X had higher arrest rates for
  the low and high levels of economic distress, but Precinct Y had a higher
  arrest rate for medium socioeconomic distress. Neither precinct nor level
  of socioeconomic distress was a good predictor of arrest rate. Although
  arrests are easier for management to monitor, and would thus seem more
  susceptible to command influence, the officer's discretion is constrained
  more by situation-specific factors that are probably not strongly related to
  command policy or the socioeconomic character of the beat: the nature of
  the observed offense, the evidence available, and the preference of the
  complainant.
  
  The rate of police contact with the public is another way to characterize
  policing style in a beat. Columns 8 and 9 show two rates of police-public
  encounters: police-initiated encounters and citizen-initiated encounters
  (via the dispatcher, citizens on-scene, and telephone calls direct to the
  officer). Police-initiated encounters reflect the degree of proactive
  policing; citizen-initiated encounters show the degree of reactive policing.
  Exhibit 12 shows that in four of the six beats, the level of police encounter
  proactivity is greater than or equal to the level of reactively initiated
  encounters, contrary to the widely held assumption that patrol encounters
  with the public in urban neighborhoods are overwhelmingly citizen
  initiated. One important reason for this difference is that SSO enables
  researchers to record many encounters (often only a minute or two) that
  are seldom documented officially. The greatest differences between beats
  tend to be between precincts, not levels of socioeconomic distress. Police
  proactivity is consistently much higher in Precinct X than Precinct Y, the
  same pattern observed in suspect stops. That is also the case for citizen-
  initiated encounters in low- and high-distress beats, medium-distress beats
  being the exception. In Precinct X, the level of police proactivity did not
  vary much according to the level of socioeconomic distress. It varied more
  in Precinct Y, and in the opposite direction, decreasing as the level of
  distress increased. Finally, most police believe that the level of police
  proactivity is determined largely by the amount of citizen-initiated work in
  a given geographic area: the more citizen-initiated work, the less time to
  do proactive policing. These data show, however, a positive, not negative,
  relationship between the level of reactive and proactive encounters. Where
  citizen-initiated encounters are high, police-initiated encounters are too.
  
  One of the ways to use data from exhibit 12 is to characterize different
  styles of policing. For example, suspect stop rates and arrest rates
  represent different forms of police intrusion, each having different
  implications for those who frequent the neighborhood. When police stop a
  suspect, they interfere with whatever that person was doing, but unless
  they arrest, the encounter is usually transitory. These stops represent the
  occasions when police interventions are the least welcomed by the citizens
  involved[53] and most likely to generate citizen complaints. Especially
  when police fail to make an arrest, these stops are more readily interpreted
  as harassment by those stopped and bystanders. But from a "broken-
  windows" perspective, an arrest is an entirely secondary concern, since
  any suspect stop is valuable as a means of controlling suspicious or
  disorderly behavior, whether or not it produces an arrest.[54] Such stops
  presumably prevent disorders and legal violations, signaling to
  troublemakers and bystanders that they are in a space that is heavily and
  aggressively policed. Broken-windows advocates recommend this
  approach in part because it is more efficient than selecting only those
  suspects for whom an arrest is legally justifiable. Indeed, arrests are quite
  time-consuming, often taking patrol officers off the beat for a considerable
  length of time while booking a suspect. Arrests represent the mobilization
  of a potentially far more punitive police intervention resulting in possible
  bail and attorney costs, a criminal record, fines, or incarceration. Yet many
  arrests are made at the request of another citizen and have behind them the
  legitimizing features of formal legal action (with the possibility that the
  arrestee can hold the police accountable in court for their actions). Suspect
  stops are less intrusive, but often less legitimate to those stopped; arrests
  are more intrusive, but legitimized by the officer's invocation of the law,
  which is enhanced when there is someone present who requested police
  involvement.[55]
  
  The indicators of police practice shown in exhibit 12 by no means exhaust
  the possible measures available from SSO data. One might develop
  measures of the attentiveness of police to crime victims, time spent on
  problem analysis, use of informal enforcement measures, and so on. The
  exhibit shows how SSO data might be used to present a more
  comprehensive picture of police practice and service delivery across
  different geographic units. Given enough observations, it would also be
  possible to break these down further according to work shift (e.g., day, 
  evening, and midnight).
  
  Conclusion
  
  SSO offers many advantages for gathering and analyzing information on
  police at work. It can be designed to suit very specific information needs
  and does not rely upon the recordkeeping accuracy, candor, or recall of
  those who are observed. It offers a scope and depth of data seldom
  available through official records and survey questionnaires. It can
  generate rich data sets for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The
  largesse from the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of
  1994 has supported thousands of police departments' programs to change
  practices at the street level. This legislation has also supported many
  evaluations of these efforts. Police departments and those who evaluate
  their efforts now, more than ever, need rigorous social science tools to
  measure what matters. SSO can be a valuable tool for those who can
  commit to its demands.
  
  Of course, SSO is not without its limitations. It is costly, time consuming,
  and, the way we do it, dependent upon the cooperation of the police. It is
  not free of various threats to data quality. Special efforts must be taken to
  deal with two threats in particular: the reactivity of research subjects to the
  observers and the reliability of those observers in recording what occurred.
  Training, supervision, and quality control in the field are the best ways to
  manage these problems, but they take planning, time, and money. Given
  these constraints, SSO seems less feasible as a mechanism for routinely
  monitoring police practice and better suited to special studies. In addition
  to the wide range of scholarly questions that can be pursued using SSO, it
  can also provide information with a high degree of validity on
  organizational needs assessment, process evaluation, and assessment of
  immediate outcomes. SSO is an especially powerful addition to a project
  when linked with other forms of data collection (e.g., officer interviews,
  neighborhood resident surveys, followup surveys of participants, and
  official records). When used as part of a multimethod project, systematic
  field observation can be focused with greater cost efficiency to supplement
  what is available through other methods.
  
  To conclude, we encourage police researchers to use SSO and police
  practitioners to support its use. We are gratified that NIJ and other
  government agencies have supported SSO's development over the past
  three decades and are encouraged by several such projects that are
  currently ongoing in addition to our own.[56] There are many uses for this
  research method and many ways that it can be implemented. We have
  discussed a few, but our hope is that others will pursue its possibilities
  with creativity and rigor.
  
  -------------------------------
  
  Notes
  
  1. This report focuses on policing done by people who work in public, not
  private, police organizations. Unless otherwise stated, references to police
  refer to public police only.
  
  2. Reiss, Albert J., Jr., "Systematic Observation of Natural Social
  Phenomena," in Sociological Methodology, ed. Herbert L. Costner, San
  Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1971: 3-33.
  
  3. Ibid. 
  
  4. Reiss, Albert J., Jr., "Stuff and Nonsense about Social Surveys and 
  Observation," in Institutions and the Person: Papers Presented to C.
  Everett Hughes, eds. Howard S. Becker, Blanche Greer, David Riesman,
  and Robert S. Weiss, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968: 351-
  367.
  
  5. Levine, Robert, A Geography of Time, New York: Basic Books, 1997. 
  
  6. Taylor, Ralph B., "Social Order and Disorder of Street Blocks and
  Neighborhoods: Ecology, Microecology, and the Systemic Model of
  Social Disorganization," Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency,
  34 (February 1997): 113-155.
  
  7. Luthans, Fred, and Diane Lockwood, "Toward an Observation System
  for Measuring Leader Behavior in Natural Settings," in Leaders and
  Managers: International Perspective of Managerial Behavior and
  Leadership, eds. J. Hunt, D. Hosking, C. Schriesheim, and R. Steward,
  New York: Pergamon Press, 1984: 117-141; Mintzberg, H., The Nature of
  Managerial Work, New York: Harper Collins, 1972. 
  
  8. Reiss, "Systematic Observation of Natural Social Phenomena," 3-33.
  
  9. Sykes, Richard E., and Edward E. Brent, Policing: A Social Behaviorist
  Perspective, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1983.
  Sykes and Brent note that one SSO project used a handheld data-entry
  machine that enabled researchers to record their observations in the field at
  the time events occurred. This may be useful for studies that take an
  interactionist perspective and wish to break down observations to the level
  of each statement or action by parties to an event. It is difficult for
  observers to remember accurately each such "utterance" by the police and
  the public. Our studies have not sought that level of detail. Moreover, we
  find that notetaking by pen and paper is less obtrusive and enables the
  observer in the field to concentrate more on observing and less on
  recording events. And it is also difficult to enter data on a large number of
  items if the field researcher's data entry must keep pace with events as they
  transpire.
  
  10. Mastrofski, Stephen D., and Roger B. Parks, "Improving
  Observational Studies of Police," Criminology, 28 (August 1990): 475-
  496.
  
  11. Hersch, Rebekah, and Royer F. Cook, "Citizen Responses to
  Community Policing," National Institute of Justice, draft Report, NIJ
  Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation Conference, 1997. 
  
  12. Reiss, "Systematic Observation of Natural Social Phenomena," 3-33.
  
  13. We create a summative index (percent unemployed, percent very poor,
  and percent of families with children headed by a single female). This is
  thought to be related inversely to the capacity for informal social control.
  See Sampson, Robert J., Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls,
  "Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective
  Efficacy," Science, 277 (1997): 918-924.
  
  14. Bayley, David H., and James Garofalo, "The Management of Violence
  by Police Patrol Officers, Criminology, 27 (February 1989): 1-27.
  
  15. A broader "when" question concerns time of the year. We have
  concentrated our observations principally during summer months because
  of our reliance on college students as observers (see discussion under
  "Personnel, logistics, project management, and quality control"). Such a
  design prevents us from testing the effects of seasonality, because summer
  months may differ substantially from other seasons in the nature of the
  police workload. See Frank, James, "Street Level Policing in Cincinnati:
  The Content of Community and Traditional Policing and the Perceptions
  of Policing Audiences," National Institute of Justice, Research Proposal,
  grant number 96-IJ-CX-0075, 1996, for an SSO study that covers all four
  seasons.
  
  16. Our construction of the police-citizen encounter relies heavily on
  Goffman, Erving, Encounters, Indianapolis: Dobbs-Merrill, 1961. 
  
  17. Reiss, "Systematic Observation of Natural Social Phenomena," 3-33.
  
  18. The following is an excerpt of questions posed to the observer about
  each citizen involved in an encounter with the observed officer:
  
  (17.) Did this citizen show any signs of physical injury or illness requiring
  immediate medical attention?
  
  1 no
  
  2 yes, minor injury or illness
  
  3 yes, serious injury or illness
  
  (18.) Did this citizen have a weapon in his/her possession or within "jump
  and reach"?
  
  SELECT HIGHEST NUMBER APPLICABLE.
  
  1 no weapon evident [GO TO Q-20]
  
  2 incapacitating device (mace, pepper spray)
  
  3 blunt/martial arts instrument
  
  4 knife/stabbing/cutting instrument
  
  5 other weapon
  
  6 firearm
  
  (19.) Was this weapon concealed from the police at any time during the 
  encounter?
  
  1 no
  
  2 yes, on citizen's person
  
  3 yes, not on citizen's person
  
  (20.) Did the citizen threaten to assault the police?
  
  1 no
  
  2 yes, before the police attempted to arrest or physically control citizen
  
  3 yes, during or after police attempted to arrest or physically control 
  
    citizen
  
  4 yes, both 2 and 3 above
  
  (21.) Did the citizen physically assault the police?
  
  1 no
  
  2 yes, before the police attempted to arrest or physically control citizen
  
  3 yes, during or after police attempted to arrest or physically control 
  citizen
  
  4 yes, both 2 and 3 above
  
  19. Parks, Roger B., "Comparing Citizen and Observer Perceptions of
  Police-Citizen Encounters," in Understanding Police Agency Performance,
  ed. Gordon P. Whitaker, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
  Office, 1984: 121-135.
  
  20. Mastrofski, Stephen D., Jeffrey B. Snipes, and Ann Supina,
  "Compliance on Demand: The Public's Response to Specific Police
  Requests, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 33 (August
  1996): 269-305; Reiss, "Systematic Observation of Natural Social
  Phenomena," 3-33.
  
  21. Reiss, "Systematic Observation of Natural Social Phenomena," 3-33.
  
  22. Mastrofski and Parks, "Improving Observational Studies of Police," 
  475-496.
  
  23. By self-awareness we mean the capacity to monitor one's own
  perceptions and feelings and how these may influence one's observations
  and judgments.
  
  24. However, only about 60 of these rides are usable, because students do
  not learn the entire protocol until they conduct the third ride.
  
  25. The compensation rate is attractive to many students, who seek only
  summer employment, but for most, the opportunity to observe police and
  to use the data in their own research are at least equally strong motivators.
  Using nontemporary employees would require substantially higher salaries
  and benefits to attract persons of comparable skill and motivation.
  
  26. These forms and the data will be available at the Inter-University
  Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of
  Michigan, the data archivist for NIJ.
  
  27. Snipes, Jeffrey B., and R. Richard Ritti, Codit User's Manual: A Guide
  for Qualitative Data Entry, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State
  University, 1993. 
  
  28. For example, our protocols require observers to be present during roll
  call, but some departments do not allow civilian ridealongs to attend, so
  we seek an exception. Some departments do not conduct roll call. Their
  officers check onto duty when they drive their "take-home" car onto the
  assigned beat. These officers need to pick up the observer before checking
  onto duty. We ask the department to alter its check-on procedures to
  accommodate the project's needs. A department might issue earphones for
  its officers' portable radios. Radio messages provide important information
  to observers, so we ask the department to issue observers radios and
  earphones too.
  
  29. Boruch, Robert A., Albert J. Reiss, Jr., Joel Garner, K. Larntz, and S.
  Freels, "Data Sharing and Privacy in Criminal and Civil Justice Research:
  The Spouse Assault Replication Program," in Sharing Social Science
  Data: Advantages and Challenges, ed. J.E. Sieber, Beverly Hills, CA:
  Sage, 1991.
  
  30. Reiss, "Stuff and Nonsense about Social Surveys and Observation,"
  351-367; Reiss, "Systematic Observation of Natural Social Phenomena,"
  3-33.
  
  31. In Richmond, only 6 of the 451 encounters with suspects yielded an
  observer's assessment that the officer seemed influenced by the observer's 
  presence.
  
  32. The coding sequence for reactivity in an encounter between the
  observed officer and one or more citizens is:
  
  (52.) Did the police change their behavior because of your or other 
  observer presence?
  
  1 no significant change [GO TO Q-55]
  
  2 yes, a little change
  
  3 yes, a substantial change
  
  (53.) In what way did the police change their behavior during this
  encounter because of observer presence?
  
  SELECT HIGHEST APPLICABLE NUMBER
  
  1 police more inclined to get involved
  
  2 police less inclined to get involved
  
  3 police more inclined to arrest or cite
  
  4 police less inclined to arrest or cite
  
  5 police more inclined to use force
  
  6 police less inclined to use force
  
  7 other
  
  (54.) What is the basis of your judgment that police changed their 
  behavior because of observer presence?
  
  1 police stated that their behavior changed
  
  2 observer inferred it from behavior or manner of police
  
  3 other
  
  33. Mastrofski and Parks, "Improving Observational Studies of Police," 
  475-496.
  
  34. Mastrofski, Stephen D., Policing the Centre Region: An Assessment of
  Current Arrangements and Alternatives, A Report of the Cooperative
  Police Services Study to the Centre Region Council of Governments,
  University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 1984. 
  
  35. Riksheim, Eric C., and Steven M. Chermak, "Causes of Police
  Behavior Revisited," Journal of Criminal Justice, 21 (4) (1993): 353-382.
  
  36. For this illustration only officers working in the same precinct and
  serving the same geographic areas on the same work shift were compared.
  
  37. Self-directed time is not necessarily time uncommitted to a focused
  task. During self-directed time, an officer may choose to initiate contact
  with the public or to respond when someone waves him down. Or the
  officer may choose to engage in other problem-focused activities, such as
  traffic surveillance, business security checks, or doing paperwork. Thus,
  an officer with a great deal of self-directed time may nonetheless be a busy
  officer, albeit at his or her own choosing.
  
  38. Community policing officers frequently volunteered to take calls in or
  near their assigned areas because they wanted to show their colleagues that
  they were carrying their share of the workload, or because they found this
  a useful way to get to know a wide variety of people in the area.
  
  39. Some dispatched assignments may not be recorded for a variety of
  reasons, but ridealong observers would be unable to determine when this
  occurs.
  
  40. Excluded from consideration are the brief and casual encounters that
  were included in exhibit 5 to make measures comparable over different
  projects. These brief and casual encounters were not recorded in some of
  the jurisdictions studied.
  
  41. Nearly all of the observations were conducted with one-officer units,
  so the presence of multiple officers means other units or supervisors were
  present.
  
  42. Garner, Joel, John Buchanan, Tom Schade, and John Hepburn,
  Understanding the Use of Force by and Against the Police, Research in
  Brief, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of
  Justice, November 1996, NCJ 158614.
  
  43. Police can coerce in many other ways besides using or threatening
  physical force: gathering in number around a citizen, being especially
  close to a citizen, or using commanding language or threats of nonphysical
  punishment (e.g., reporting a juvenile's misbehavior to a parent). These too
  were recorded by observers but are not included in this exhibit.
  
  44. The second column of exhibit 9 indicates the total number of citizens,
  regardless of how the police expressed their request. The third column
  indicates what percentage of those citizens were the object of authoritative
  police expressions (commands or threats). The fourth column indicates
  what percentage of all citizens complied, regardless of the mode of police
  expression.
  
  45. Citizens were considered to have complied if they did what the police
  wanted in the officer's presence or if they explicitly promised to comply in
  the future.
  
  46. Police were considered to have complied if they fulfilled the request in
  the citizen's presence or promised to do so at a later time.
  
  47. This may vary considerably among departments. In another
  department, supervisors were present in only about 3 percent of the
  encounters.
  
  48. Of course, a suggestion from one's superior may be interpreted as
  tantamount to a directive, even if it was not expressed in that fashion.
  
  49. We use the term "precinct" generically to refer to a police
  administrative unit that is comprised of several patrol areas or "beats."
  Some departments refer to these areas as districts.
  
  50. This is an index composed of the sum of three percentages: percentage
  of labor force unemployed, percentage of residents living in extreme
  poverty, and percentage of households headed by single females. Scores in
  the low-distress beats were in the mid-20s; they were in the low- to mid-
  40s for medium-distress beats; they were in the mid-50s for high-distress
  beats.
  
  51. Klinger, David A., "Negotiating Order in Patrol Work: An Ecological
  Theory of Police Response to Deviance," Criminology, 35 (May 1997):
  277-306. 
  
  52. Casual conversations engaged in while the officer was on personal
  business (e.g., meals and snacks) are not included in these figures. The
  accounting of officer time in this exhibit is not comprehensive, so the
  sums of columns 3-5 will not be 100 for any beat.
  
  53. Reiss, Albert, J., Jr., The Police and the Public, New Haven, CT: Yale 
  University Press, 1971: 111. 
  
  54. Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling, "The Police and
  Neighborhood Safety: Broken Windows," Atlantic Monthly, 127 (March
  1982): 29-38.
  
  55. Reiss, The Police and the Public, 1971: 57-62. 
  
  56. Frank, "Street-Level Policing in Cincinnati: The Content of
  Community and Traditional Policing and the Perceptions of Policing
  Audiences," 1996; Hersch and Cook, "Citizen Responses to Community
  Policing," 1997.
  
  -------------------------------
  
  About the National Institute of Justice
  
  The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), a component of the Office of
  Justice Programs, is the research agency of the U.S. Department of Justice.
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