Keeping the peace
Subtitle: police discretion and the mentally disordered in Chicago, 1980-1981
By: principal investigator, Linda A. Tepin
Series: ICPSR -- 8438; ICPSR (Series) -- 8438
Publisher: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor
Published: 1980
Place of publication: Ann Arbor, Mich
Language: und
Format: [computer file] :
Subjects: Police discretion; Mentally ill; Care
Description: Data on police-citizen encounters were collected to explore the peacekeeping functions of the police and their handling of encounters with mentally ill persons. The data were gathered through observations by researchers riding in police cars in two Chicago police districts during a 14-month period in 1980-1981. There are two parts to this dataset. First, information was collected once per shift on the general level of activity during the shift and the observer's perceptions of emotions/attitudes displayed by the police officers he/she observed. Also, information is included for each of the 270 shifts about the personal characteristics, work history, and working relationships of the police officers observed. The second part of the dataset contains detailed information on each police-citizen encounter including its nature, location, police actions and/or responses, citizens involved, and their characteristics and behavior. A unique and consistent shift identification number is attached to each encounter so that information about police officer characteristics from the first ("shift-level") part of the dataset may be matched with the second ("encounter-level") part. Missing data were recoded to 9's by the Principal Investigator and can mean either actual missing data or unknown or inapplicable data.
Notes: Holding archive: Criminal Justice Archive and Information Network.

ICPSR data class: Class IV.

Data collected: 1980-1981.

Chicago.

There are 1,382 police-citizen encounters involving 2,555 citizens in this collection. There are three cards per case in the Shift Level Data File and sixteen cards per case in the Encounter Level Data File. The logical record length of both files is 80 characters.