Attitudes and perceptions of police officers in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, DC, 1966
By: principal investigator, Albert J. Reiss, Jr
Series: ICPSR -- 9087; ICPSR (Series) -- 9087
Publisher: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor
Published: 1966
Place of publication: Ann Arbor, Mich
Language: und
Format: [computer file] /
Subjects: Police; Attitudes; Law enforcement; Police-community relations
Description: This survey was designed to explore perceptions and attitudes of police officers of three metropolitan areas toward their work and the organizations and publics with which they interact. Issues of interest include (1) the nature of police careers and police work and officers' satisfaction with their jobs, (2) officers' orientations toward policing tasks and their relationships with the public, and (3) officers' perceptions of organizations and systems that influence or change police work.
Notes: Holding archive: Criminal Justice Archive and Information Network.

ICPSR data class: Class IV.

Chronological coverage: 1966. Date of collection: June 1966.

Personal interviews.

Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C.

President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice.

LRECL data format. Several of the variables were coded as OSIRIS "multiple response" variables. When a program such as SPSS translates the OSIRIS dictionary, it converts the multiple response categories into variables, thus expanding the total number of variables in the dataset. The number of variables reported by SPSS is given below. These data are part of a larger study entitled "Field Surveys III: Studies in Crime and Law Enforcement in Major Metropolitan Areas." ICPSR distributes two related data collections: Survey of victimization and attitudes towards crime and law enforcement in Boston, and Chicago, 1966 (ICPSR 9085) and Patterns of behavior in police and citizen transactions: Boston, Chicago ans Washington, DC, 1966 (ICPSR 9086).

OSIRIS dictionary. Codebook available.

Part number: 1 ; file structure: rectangular ; case count: 203 ; variable count: 507 ; LRECL: 672 ; records per case: 1.

Three sample cities (Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC) were purposively selected to represent differences in the size, location, degree of control, and type of organization in police departments. Within each city, two police precincts (four in Washington, DC) with high crime rates were selected to represent areas with different race and class compositions. The selected sites were (1) Boston, MA: precincts Dorchester and Roxbury, (2) Chicago, IL: precincts Fillmore and Town Hall, and (3) Washington, DC: precincts 6, 10, 13, and 14. Simple random samples of approximately 25 police officers in each of the eight precincts were drawn from department rosters. The response rate was nearly 100%.

Universe: Police officers in major metropolitan areas of the United States.

Reiss, A.J., Jr. (ed.) "Studies in Crime and Law Enforcement in Major Metropolitan Areas." U.S. President's commission on law enforcement and the administration of justice field survey III, Vol. II, section II. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1967.