Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: Law enforcement officers in the U. S. are granted the legal authority to issue commands to citizens and to compel citizen compliance through legal sanction, arrest, and even physical force. This research examines compliance interactions between police officers and citizens to examine the factors that are influential in producing voluntary compliance from citizens to officer commands. Findings are based on content analyses of 250 officer/citizen interactions captured by police cruiser mounted video systems used by police departments in two North Carolina cities. The influence of 31 factors on citizen compliance, suggested primarily by the theories of Social Interactionism and Judgmental Heuristics, were analyzed using Ordinal Logistic Regression. Six factors were shown to have a significant effect upon citizen's degree of compliance, including: citizen emotionality, initiation of the interaction, officer use of threats, citizen initial compliance, officer respect for citizen, and department-type of the officer involved. The implications for further research are discussed, as well as the potential usefulness of "dash cam" footage from police cruiser mounted video systems for further sociological research.
Author: Nathan E. Triche
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1568871827