The Police As Victims: Evidence From The National Crime Victimization Survey, 1993 Through 2021

• In Event: Unpacking Police and Deadly Force

Abstract

We use the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to estimate the frequency of nonfatal criminal victimizations of police officers. In contrast to other available sources of data, the NCVS covers the entire United States and encompasses all serious nonfatal offenses. We examine the experiences of police officers who completed NCVS interviews between 1993 and 2021. The findings show that the police are frequent targets of assault, but that attacks have decreased more rapidly for them than for civilians. These general results have also appeared in other work, but the NCVS offers greater precision in its estimates and provides confidence intervals to bound their variation. Perhaps more important, we find that police officers often suffer repeated attacks. With these series crimes included, the police have dramatically higher victimization frequencies than previous studies have suggested. The extreme vulnerability to attacks that they face provides a context for understanding police violence against civilians.

Authors

• David McDowall, University at Albany

• Min Xie, University of Maryland, College Park

• Colin Loftin, University at Albany, SUNY