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How do police officers intervene in conflicts between citizens? A video based study
Thu, September 4, 1:00 to 2:15pm, Communications Building (CN), CN 2106Abstract
For police officers, handling conflicts is part of the job. The current research focuses on conflicts between citizens, in which a police officer, or multiple, are present and possibly intervenes. The questions that will be answered are: how do police officers intervene in conflicts between citizens, to what extent are interventions related to observable characteristics of the situation, and to what extent are the interventions related to the (de-)escalation of the conflict? Knowledge about this is important for training and guidelines in the police organization regarding de-escalation.
This study uses CCTV footage to study how police officers intervene in conflicts between citizens. The footage was provided by the municipality of Amsterdam in collaboration with the police department in Amsterdam in the first half of 2017. Thirty-three conflicts were studied, in which the police was present. Using an ethogram, behavior of the situation, citizen, and police officer were coded in SPSS and Boris (software for behavioral observation). For the analysis we used SPSS version 27 and R.
Based on the video footage we could distinguish between non-verbal, verbal and physical interventions. The interventions that occurred most often in the sample were watching the citizens actively (non-verbal) and talking to the citizens (verbalIn the study we found multiple characteristics to be related to how police officers intervened. For example, in entertainment locations, police officers watched citizens longer and more often moved towards the citizens, compared to non-entertainment areas. More and longer watching, moving and talking to citizens took place in case of more citizens were involved in the conflict. The conflict level almost always stayed the same of de-escalated after intervention of police officers.