John McCluskey · Craig D. Uchida · Yinthe Feys · Shellie E. Solomon
Systematic Social Observation of the Police in the 21st Century
SpringerBriefs in Criminology
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John McCluskey • Craig D. Uchida Yinthe Feys • Shellie E. Solomon
Systematic Social Observation of the Police
in the 21st Century
John McCluskey Department of Criminal Justice
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, NY, USA
Yinthe Feys
Faculty of Law and Criminology
Ghent University
Ghent, Belgium
ISSN 2192-8533
SpringerBriefs in Criminology
Craig D. Uchida Justice and Security Strategies, Inc.
Manhattan Beach, CA, USA
Shellie E. Solomon Justice and Security Strategies, Inc.
Hollywood, FL, USA
ISSN 2192-8541 (electronic)
ISBN 978-3-031-31481-0 ISBN 978-3-031-31482-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31482-7
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Preface
From February 3 to February 5, 2020, Dr. John McCluskey was invited to provide a three-day lecture on the application of systematic social observation (SSO) methodology in Ghent, Belgium. This course was co-organized by Dra. Yinthe Feys as there was a lack of observational courses in the doctoral training program. This course allowed Yinthe to receive proper training in SSOs and set up her own SSO project as part of her PhD.
In the academic literature, a comprehensive and clear overview of the SSO method was lacking at the time of the aforementioned SSO project. To fll this gap, Yinthe took the initiative to write an academic article on this matter, outlining the different steps to be taken in such a project. She then contacted Dr. McCluskey to collaborate on this, resulting in discussions on what to include in such an overview and which format to publish it in. Eventually, this resulted in a productive collaboration that expanded to include Drs. Craig Uchida and Shellie Solomon, also experts in SSO methodology. A SpringerBriefs book was considered the perfect outlet for our ideas and thoughts.
This book outlines the history of SSO, its advantages and disadvantages, and the type of research projects that ft with the method. A number of chapters focus on different modalities of SSO (i.e., in-person SSO and image or video-based SSO) and the application of SSO to place-based criminology. A compelling discussion regarding the future of SSO research and policing is provided at the end of this SpringerBriefs.
Throughout the book, tips and tricks concerning how to prepare for, perform, and report on SSO are provided. Overall, we believe this book adds value to the current literature as there is currently no overview offering a detailed and systematic overview of the current state-of-the-art on SSOs. This work offers clear guidance on the different steps to be taken when performing SSOs and reference from which
potential users may launch further inquiry into the details and commitments required for a successful SSO project.
Rochester, NY, USA
John McCluskey Manhattan Beach, CA, USA Craig D. Uchida Ghent, Belgium Yinthe Feys Hollywood, FL, USA Shellie E. Solomon
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been accomplished without the help of many different persons. Colleagues have offered help and insights which inform this book in several ways. In 2020, Drs. David Makin and Dale Willits provided insights into their ongoing work at Washington State University using body-camera footage as data and sparked our interest in codifying lessons learned for the larger feld. Drs. William Terrill and Logan Somers generously lent time to a structured conversation regarding their experiences in coding sequential use of force data from videos in a project at Arizona State University. Drs. Robert Worden and Sarah McLean, along with Hannah Cochran and Beau Holladay, offered insights from their experiences with data coded in a large-scale project studying supervision and procedural justice at the Finn Institute in Albany, NY. Drs. Oral “Nick” Robertson and Cynthia Perez McCluskey read drafts of chapters and offered editorial and substantive comment throughout the project. John McCluskey’s work on this project was supported in part by the RIT Paul A. and Francena L. Miller Research Fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts.
We wish to thank Prof. Dr. Antoinette Verhage (Ghent University), as Yinthe Fey’s supervisor, for supporting the application of the SSO method in her PhD and providing feedback on the how-to chapter of this book.
For Dr. Uchida, the in-person and video-based systematic social observations in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) were conducted with the unwavering support of Chief Charlie Beck, Chief Information Offcer Maggie Goodrich, and Deputy Chief Sean Malinowski (all retired at this time). We also thank our funders for this effort: The Bureau of Justice Assistance (Grant No. 2019-BC-BX-K001) awarded to the CNA Corporation with Justice & Security Strategies, Inc. (JSS) and Arizona State University (ASU) as sub-recipients and the National Institute of Justice (Grant No. 2014-R2-CX-0101). BJA and NIJ are components of the U.S. Department of Justice Offce of Justice Programs. Points of view or opinions contained herein do not necessarily represent the offcial position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
For Dr. Solomon, she would like to acknowledge the contributions of her dissertation advisors, Dr. Hans Nelen, Dr. Cathal O’Donoghue, Dr. Franziska Gassmann, and Dr. Mindel van de Laar from the United Nations University –Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology. Funding for the environment-based systematic social observations was provided by The Children’s Trust of Miami Dade County. Special thanks to Modesto Abety and Dr. K. Lori Hanson of The Children's Trust and Betty Alonso at ConnectFamilias.
Overview
This book focuses on systematic social observation (SSO) methodology by identifying the different steps to be undertaken when performing SSO (a how-to-guide), its benefts and disadvantages, challenges associated with using SSO, when to use it, etc. Discussions are provided on different aspects related to the method (e.g., access to the feld or footage), including ethical considerations. After outlining the history of SSO in police research and criminology, the general features of the method are discussed, outlining when SSOs can be a useful addition to other research methods. We then focus on three different modalities of SSO research: inperson SSO (IPSSO), video-based SSO (VBSSO), and environment-based SSO (EBSSO). Clear guidance is provided on the different steps to be taken in an SSO project, from preparing such a project to fnally reporting about it. Comparisons between IPSSO and VBSSO are provided. The concluding chapter sets forth a discussion of the future of SSO methodology in terms of technology and possible reach into new questions for criminal justice, criminology, and police managers.
The primary audience of this book are researchers and students interested in conducting SSO; however, we would argue that police departments, as learning organizations, could beneft from launching SSO projects to answer important questions aimed, for example, at understanding how offcers handle certain situations, or how training affects the handling of situations.
A detailed presentation of the method and the steps it involves is currently absent in the literature. This book flls this gap and aids researchers in understanding choices and tradeoffs when conducting SSOs. It will also assist researchers in outlining their research frame (e.g., research questions, in person SSO vs. VBSSO). Finally, given the burgeoning proliferation of body-worn cameras, the book introduces researchers to this new tool for launching inquiries in policing using SSOderived research techniques.
1 Introduction
1.1 The Current State of Policing and Police Research
1.1.1 What We Don’t Know About Policing
1.2.1 The SSO Method in Context
3.5 Collecting Data
3.5.1 Planning and Sampling
3.5.2 Taking Notes
3.5.3 Debriefng
3.5.4 Leaving the Field
3.6 Processing Data
3.6.1 Creating Narratives
4.7 Example of a General Data and Sampling Plan to Address a Research Question
4.7.1 The Context for a Multi-organization Study of De-escalation Using VBSSO
4.7.2 Enumerating Police–Citizen Contacts for Sampling Uses of Force
4.7.3 Enumerating Police–Citizen Contacts for Cases That Have a Likelihood of Force Usage.
4.7.4 Enumerating Police–Citizen Contacts for Cases with a Very Low Likelihood of
5.8 Final Data Collection Efforts
5.8.1 Debriefng
5.8.2 Processing
5.9 Summary
6.4
6.1.2
6.4.1
Abbreviations
AI Artifcial Intelligence
BOSS-D Belgian Observation and Systematic Study of Decisions
CV Computer Vision
EBSSO Environment-based SSO
FLETC Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
IPSSO In-person SSO
IRB Institutional Review Board
LAPD Los Angeles Police Department
LAPD-PJ Los Angeles Police Department Procedural Justice Study
ML Machine Learning
RMS Records Management System
RPD Rochester Police Department (New York)
SSO Systematic Social Observation
VDA Video Data Analysis
VBSSO Video-based Systematic Social Observation
Chapter 1 Introduction
Contemporary policing is in crisis in many countries, few more so than the United States, given civil disturbances experienced in many of its cities during the spring and summer of 2020. This comes on the heels of a large-scale effort to equip police with body-worn cameras (BWCs) with the aim of increasing accountability and transparency of what police do (White & Malm, 2020). That effort came about largely as response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in 2014. Ironically, the BWC as well as civilian cell phones have uncovered offcer misbehavior numerous times since widespread adoption and deployment, the most recent at this writing being the killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, TN.
1.1 The Current State of Policing and Police Research
1.1.1 What We Don’t Know About Policing
Sadly, we now too often see police killings of civilians in the United States, where this happens at least 1000 times per year, as a video presentation by a department releasing curated footage on YouTube, or in the case of Tyre Nichols’ homicide, on the VIMEO platform. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has released footage on more than 100 offcer-involved shootings and critical incidents on its YouTube channel since they were mandated to do so in 2018. What has changed? The public, politicians, and police managers have widespread access to police applications of lethal violence, with very few depictions of police work available that might document other aspects of work and behavior. With more than 53 million annual contacts estimated to occur between the police and members of the public aged 16 and older, we know very little about what happens in those cases (Tapp & Davis, 2022).
It is against this backdrop, which in some ways adds a very violent overlay on top of our general ignorance of what police do and how they do it, that we write this book. This state of affairs is concerning as the public conversation around deescalation, for example, has been one that is based on a sliver of information about what the police do (cf. Todak & James, 2018; Engel et al., 2022). Will a twenty-frst century research agenda allow us to learn more about what police do and how they do it? Can we develop a systematic knowledge-base to aid in improving policing? Will new insights be drawn from the deployment of expensive camera technology?
Our answer to these questions is yes. We can deploy a research agenda that allows for a more widely distributed knowledge-base that can offer the public, police, and policymakers some insights, and at least partially that agenda will be driven by data captured by BWC in the United States. Paradoxically, we will have to reach back to a police pioneer who eschewed ethnography and offcial police records for systematic observation (SSO) of the police and combined his insights with those of the BWC revolution. Further, though thus far we have focused on the United States, the research program suggested here is one that is ripe for comparative and international deployment. Observation of the police, early ethnography included, progressing to in-person SSO (IPSSO) and more recently to video-based SSO (VBSSO) has done much to enrich our understanding of policing, and this text is an attempt to move that research forward (Brunson & Miller, 2023).
1.1.2 Back to the Future
In 1971, The Police and the Public made its debut. This seminal work by Albert J. Reiss, Jr. was the frst book to describe how police offcers interacted with citizens based on independent observations by trained researchers using SSO. The method of SSO as designed and implemented by Reiss uncovered a whole new world for police research, one that used a qualitative approach but quantifed the behavior of police. Wilson (1968), Skolnick (1966), Muir (1977), and others described the nuances of policing (e.g., discretion, varieties of behavior, and citizen interactions). But they based their work on interviews, ethnographic techniques, and offcial police data that provided a partial picture of what the police did, but with substantial gaps. This is very much like the contemporary state of police research. Reiss, through SSO, was able to capture a fuller portrait of police work, de-bunk myths, and create new language about police and their work. Based on work in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston in the late 1960s, he demonstrated, for example, that police offcers rarely made arrests (one per shift) and that police demeanor was affected by the citizen’s attitude. He coined the word “proactive” to describe actions by police that were self-initiated – a term that is now commonly used not only by the police but is used in everyday language to describe behavior by individuals and organizations.
This technique of observing behavior in the natural setting is still being used by police researchers to understand how and whether the procedural justice of police
encounters changes with the introduction of police BWC (McCluskey et al., 2019). But technology is opening new fronts for the examination of police behavior, as departments like the LAPD now have vast libraries, estimated to be up to 400,000 h of footage from 2019 alone, of video recordings of police–citizen contacts (Uchida & Anderson, 2021). These new data sources raise questions that we address here: For what research questions and locations is IPSSO still a feasible approach to learning about what the police do and how they make decisions? What can be done with these BWC data? Can the felds of criminal justice, criminology, and sociology develop a new science around BWC as an emerging data source?
1.2 An Overview of the Text
1.2.1 The SSO Method in Context
The tradition of SSO has been carried on since the 1960s and has a longer history in social science outside of policing research (Brunson & Miller, 2023). Reiss’ (1971) method of creating predefned protocols for observation; training observers; sampling observable units, often in the form of police shifts; and coding characteristics of the police–citizen encounter are now familiar to many students of criminology, criminal justice, and policing. For those of us who had the good fortune to work with him (McCluskey and Uchida), we learned frsthand that taking notes during a ride-along and then writing a narrative afterward were critical parts of SSO. His proclivity for capturing the essence of mundane ride-alongs in simple prose brought life to his work and made for fascinating storytelling. Major follow-on studies by Ostrom et al. (1977) and Mastrofski et al. (2007), as well as dozens of smaller scale studies of policing (e.g., Worden & McLean, 2014), have contributed substantially to theoretical grist for academic theories and insights for police managers.
In the frst quarter of the twenty-frst century, there was a re-emergence of SSO, now often through the medium of recorded video, reducing the need for in-person observation to explore many questions beyond policing, such as how robbers approach convenience store robbery (Nassauer, 2018) and the sequencing of openair drug selling (Sytsma & Piza, 2018). This approach to the study of policing is especially feasible in the United States, where BWC are widely adopted, as of 2023, across a majority of police agencies. Further, state and federal offcials are actively engaging in funding, training, and technical assistance to increase the number of organizations adopting the technology (Uchida & Anderson, 2021). In the EU, however, access to such footage is less forthcoming due to privacy rules and limited usage, and perhaps the continued value of in-person SSO (IPSSO) of the police cannot be ignored under such restrictions on use and access.
Beyond the observation of the police and their activities, there is a nagging question regarding variations correlated with where police–citizen contact occurs (Smith, 1986; Reisig & Parks, 2000; Mastrofski et al., 2002). Linking characteristics of
places to encounters between the police and citizens, in the form of ecometrics (Raudenbush & Sampson, 1997), is amenable to in-person and visual-archive data that can provide a background for coding. Exploring and documenting variation across areal units, in our judgment, is an important area where SSO techniques can be harnessed to help inform the public and police managers of what the police do and where they do it.
1.2.2 The Logic and Flow of the Monograph
Because of the emerging use cases of SSO with respect to policing, we have written a short how-to manual as a starting point for interested researchers or police managers. In no way can we specify a complete project, but we aim to offer those curious and interested a comprehensive frst source that will link to important questions and decisions one might make in launching an SSO project. This will include outlining steps in planning, execution, consideration of technological choices that researchers may make, and reference to key research exemplars and protocols to offer a starting point. We forgo specifc suggestions regarding analytical approaches one may take, once data are assembled in machine-readable form, since that will be heavily dependent on theoretical frameworks, units of analysis, and measurement levels of variables and beyond the scope of this monograph. Where possible we refer back to our own or colleagues’ experiences as they have endured the diffculties of feld work, mistakes, false starts, and inevitable reworking of project materials.
Recommendations regarding planning and access to police organizations draw on insights derived from several research teams. Their work in the feld spans decades, as do the authors’ own experiences regarding the navigation of relationships with police organizations. Tradeoffs on the modality of police observation will be considered in two chapters focusing on in-person SSO and the conduct of videobased SSO.
Further, we might not restrict such an SSO to an academic approach to policing, but instead we would argue that, especially in larger police agencies, offcers could be trained to code colleagues’ video and provide a basis for the understanding of local or regional patterns in the delivery of service to the public. This would be especially benefcial if common instrumentation were to be developed. In at least one instance, a research team at Washington State University is beginning to deploy such an approach to capture a generalizable measure of “police professionalism.”
The reader is welcome to jump into any particular chapter of interest, but a review of the entire text should not be overly onerous and maps as follows. In Chap. 2, we consider SSO in its larger historical sweep. How did it originate? What new evidence was developed in policing that is unique to the method? Next, in Chap. 3, the practical application of in-person SSO is considered. What choices should a researcher prepare to confront in navigating access, developing codebooks, sampling units for observation, and conducting the feldwork? In Chap. 4, we discuss video-based SSO (VBSSO) and its rapid emergence in the United States. Here,
References
approaches to sampling video, the diffculties of working with video, and the contrast with IPSSO in terms of expense and assessable reliability are among the facets considered. This draws upon insights, suggestions, and cautions from structured conversations with research teams from the Finn Institute, led by Robert Worden, and Arizona State University, led by William Terrill, as well as previous conversations with David Makin and Dale Willits from the Washington State University Complex Social Interactions lab. Chapter 5 is an overview of environment-based SSO (EBSSO) as a methodology for enhancing policing in the twenty-frst century. Data collection via EBSSO offers utility as a possible outcome measure, such as change in neighborhood disorder subsequent to an intervention, as well as a contextual measure which could possibly condition police behavior. We present a brief history of the technique, then chart the logic of workfow and how researchers might answer questions about: the selection of sites, development of samples, creation of codes and codebooks, and hiring, training, and deploying observers. Exemplars from the authors’ extensive feld experience with EBSSOs are presented to offer insight into how decisions are made and the costs, benefts, and overall tradeoffs that accompany choices in EBSSO feld work. Finally, the role technology may play in the future of EBSSOs is considered.
We conclude with Chap. 6, outlining the future of SSO. Part of the uncertain future is how technology may shape the work and we offer some insights based on several projects. For those readers who consider one or more SSO technique to be feasible for addressing their research question, we offer opportunities for deeper dives into the literature. Consultation of prior users’ work is, in our view, a wise step in helping one navigate the feld. Sharing instruments and experiences as a community of social scientists has been the norm of our experience. We have reached out to colleagues for help in developing this text numerous times and have been met uniformly with helpful assistance and insights. To the extent possible, we have developed archives of instruments and links to research which should aid those willing to engage in any of the SSO research methods outlined.
References
Brunson, R. K., & Miller, A. (2023). Police observational research in the twenty-frst century. Annual Review of Criminology, 6(1), 205–218. https://doi.org/10.1146/ annurev-criminol-030421-034101
Engel, R. S., Corsaro, N., Isaza, G. T., & McManus, H. D. (2022). Assessing the impact of de-escalation training on police behavior: Reducing police use of force in the Louisville, KY Metro Police Department. Criminology & Public Policy, 21(2), 199–233. https://doi. org/10.1111/1745-9133.12574
Mastrofski, S. D., Reisig, M. D., & McCluskey, J. D. (2002). Police disrespect toward the public: An encounter-based analysis. Criminology, 40(3), 519–551. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17459125.2002.tb00965.x
Mastrofski, S. D., Parks, R. B., Worden, R. E., & Reiss, A. J. J. (2007). Project on policing neighborhoods in Indianapolis, Indiana, and St. Petersburg, Florida, 1996–1997. Inter-university
Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor]. https://doi.org/10.3886/ ICPSR03160.v2
McCluskey, J. D., Uchida, C. D., Solomon, S. E., Wooditch, A., Connor, C., & Revier, L. (2019). Assessing the effects of body-worn cameras on procedural justice in the Los Angeles Police Department. Criminology, 57(2), 208–236. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12201
Muir, W. K. (1977). Police: Streetcorner politicians. University of Chicago Press.
Nassauer, A. (2018). How robberies succeed or fail: Analyzing crime caught on CCTV. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 55(1), 125–154. https://doi. org/10.1177/0022427817715754
Ostrom, E., Parks, R. B., & Whitaker, G. (2006). Police Services Study, Phase II, 1977: Rochester, St. Louis, and St. Petersburg. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor]. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08605.v3
Raudenbush, S. W., & Sampson, R. J. (1997). Ecometrics: Toward a science of assessing ecological settings, with application to the systematic social observation of neighborhoods. Social Methodology, 29(1), 1–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/0081-1750.00059
Reisig, M. D., & Parks, R. B. (2000). Experience, quality of life, and neighborhood context: A hierarchical analysis of satisfaction with police. Justice Quarterly, 17(3), 607–630. https://doi. org/10.1080/07418820000094681
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Smith, D. A. (1986). The neighborhood context of police behavior. Crime and Justice, 8, 313–341. Sytsma, V. A., & Piza, E. L. (2018). Script analysis of open-air drug selling: A systematic social observation of CCTV footage. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 55(1), 78–102. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427817709502
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Chapter 2 The SSO Method in Police Research and Criminology
2.1
Introduction
In the summer of 1966, 36 observers rode along with patrol offcers in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. to watch, listen, and learn how police offcers interacted with people and how citizens behaved toward the police. After weeks of training and preparation with Dr. Albert J. Reiss, Jr. at the Center of Research on Social Organization, these research assistants and law students rode with offcers for seven days a week for seven weeks. During those 49 days, they recorded 3826 encounters in high-crime areas of the three cities.
So began the frst study of police that involved systematic social observations (SSO). In the years that followed, SSO has evolved to include multiple studies of police offcers in numerous departments; branched out to include studies of hot spots, collective effcacy, and community violence initiatives; and embraced technology through the review of body-worn camera (BWC) footage.
This chapter takes a sweeping view of SSO by placing the method into different contexts of police and criminological research. How did it originate? What new evidence was developed in policing that is unique to the method? By taking this approach, the chapter shows the importance of SSO, explains its advantages and disadvantages, and discusses the challenges faced by researchers under various circumstances.
2.2 Origins and Context for SSO
Research on the police was in its infancy in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the studies done during that period do not go into detail with their methodologies. As Manning and Van Maanen indicate in their review of published works, dissertations,
and works in progress, “Information on many of these studies is incomplete and sometimes quite imprecise. To wit, sites are often anonymous, the number of interviews conducted by the researcher is rarely available, and even the period of study is occasionally vague” (Manning & Van Maanen, 1978: 350, footnote 1).
Three types of methods dominated police research – case studies, ethnographies, and systematic observations. The case study approach generally included interviews, surveys, and anecdotal observations. Ethnographies involved researchers who followed, talked with, and observed police offcers over a specifc time period.
Among the case study approaches, Skolnick (1966), Chevigny (1969), and Wiley and Hudik (1974) are prominent. The classic case study, however, is that of James Q. Wilson in Varieties of Police Behavior. Like Skolnick, Wilson focused on “how the police patrolman behaves with respect to the more frequently applied laws,” that is, how does the patrolman enforce the law and maintain order? (Wilson, 1968: 4). Wilson’s methods to answer this question involved selecting eight cities,1 sending research teams of two people who “visited at least twice and usually three or four times for periods of no less than three weeks and in some cases for two months.” He makes no specifc mention of what was done at each site, though he refers to interviews and quotes from offcers, supervisors, and police administrators. Statistics were also gathered from the Uniform Crime Reports and on-site from the police agencies themselves. Importantly, Wilson’s work resulted in an explanation of police discretion, a description of three styles of policing (watchman, legalistic, and service), and a discussion of the interplay between policing and politics. While Wilson’s vision was to look closely at the police patrolman, his book lays out a typology for police organizations – one that serves as a basis for many future works (Maguire & Uchida, 2000).
Ethnographic studies like those of Van Maanen (1978), Rubinstein (1973), and Muir (1977) examined offcers working within the environments of specifc police departments. Van Maanen focused on “Union City,” where he observed and wrote about offcers and their knowledge of “persons, places, and settings within [their] assigned territory” (Manning & Van Maanen, 1978: 217). His article, “The Asshole,” speaks to how offcers used a label to represent a “distinct but familiar type of person” that they encounter (Van Maanen, 1978). For Rubinstein, his year on the streets of Philadelphia gave him insight into the working offcer and how his territory, encounters, knowledge of people, and his relationships with fellow offcers and his supervisor shaped his beliefs and ways of handling situations (Rubinstein, 1973).
Muir’s ethnography (1977) goes further than Van Maanen and Rubinstein in that he not only describes how 28 young police offcers worked within the “Laconia” Police Department, but he explains how a “good” police offcer is formed and developed. Over a 5-year research period, Muir developed a typology to determine the traits of a good offcer. He found that the good cop developed two virtues: intellectually, he could grasp the nature of human suffering; and morally, he could resolve the
1 Six of the eight cities were in New York State – Albany, Amsterdam, Brighton, Nassau, Newburgh, and Syracuse. The other two were Highland Park, IL and Oakland, CA.
contradiction of achieving just ends with coercive means. When these virtues were applied to different situations and people, the good offcer was born – he could handle people without using physical force and get them to do things they would not ordinarily do. Importantly, Muir showed that offcers were not alike, held different values, and behaved according to their individual ethics and beliefs (Snipes & Mastrofski, 1990).
These case studies and ethnographies provided early explanations for policing and for the work of offcers. But the methods themselves did not allow for replication of the studies or to generalize about police work and interactions with the public. Researchers did not include interview protocols or survey instruments, they did not discuss their note-taking during the ride-alongs, nor did they provide details about why departments and offcers were selected.
2.3 Defnition of SSO
It is within this context that the work of Reiss is most appreciated. He saw things differently and defned systematic social observation in the following way:
By systematic observation, I mean only that observation and recording are done according to explicit procedures which permit replication and that rules are followed which permit the use of the logic of scientifc inference. The means of observation and recording, whether a person or some form of technology, must be independent of that which is observed and the effects of observing and measuring must be measurable. By natural social phenomena, I mean that events and their consequences, including properties of organization, can be observed more or less as they occur (Reiss, 1971).
As part of his extensive study in Boston, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., Reiss created predefned protocols for observation, trained observers extensively, sampled observable units (often in the form of police shifts), and coded characteristics of the police–citizen encounter. His method could be and was replicated by a number of scholars over the next 50 years.
2.4 Major Studies Using SSO
Two major studies, the Police Services Study (PSS) and the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN), followed the Reiss SSO method. PSS examined policing in three Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas, Rochester, NY; St. Louis, MO; and Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL, in 1977 (Ostrom et al., 2006). Data collection involved 5688 encounters and was supplemented by 9021 interviews with random samples of residents in 59 neighborhoods (Smith & Uchida, 1988). POPN covered two cities, Indianapolis, IN and St. Petersburg, FL, involving 3125 encounters and 6125 surveys in 62 neighborhoods (Mastrofski et al., 1996; see also Reisig & Parks, 2003). As a result of these large SSO projects, a number of spin-off journal articles arose
that looked at different ways in which the police behave. For example, POPN data were used to examine the relationship between police culture and coercion (Terrill, 2003) and to determine the situational predictors of police coercion or their decision to use force (Terrill & Mastrofski, 2002).
Dozens of smaller-scale SSO have been conducted throughout the country covering important topics that are pertinent within the context of social justice. For example, Mastrofski et al. (1996) analyzed data from SSO in Richmond, VA to examine citizen compliance with police requests for them to exercise self-control, such as to “leave someone alone.” They measured predictors of citizen compliance, such as demonstrations of respectful police behavior, defned as fulflling citizen requests, comforting or reassuring, and providing assistance, which were noted in 9% of these encounters. In contrast, disrespectful police behaviors, defned as derogatory remarks, ignoring citizens, or refusing citizen requests without explanation, were noted in 41% of the encounters analyzed. More recently, in Los Angeles, researchers examined procedural justice during police–citizen encounters before and after the implementation of body-worn cameras and found that procedural justice increased after the cameras were used for more than 1 year (McCluskey et al., 2019).
Other studies used SSO to examine the exercise of police authority, police interactions with subsets of citizens (e.g., suspects), and police responses to particular kinds of incidents (e.g., disputes, domestic conficts, and traffc violations) (See Worden & McLean, 2014). In-person SSO has limits, and the literature suggests that the method may not be suitable to study phenomena that rarely occur, including police use of deadly force, mass panic situations, and natural disasters (Mastrofski et al., 2010; McCluskey et al., 2014; Nassauer & Legewie, 2021; Worden & McLean, 2014).
2.5 Trends in Police-Based SSO Research: Using Technology
Recently, technology in policing has made it possible to use SSO in reviewing videos from in-car, dash-mounted cameras and body-worn cameras (BWCs). In-car dash cameras have been used by police agencies since the mid-2000s but very few researchers have employed them for SSOs (Brunson & Miller, 2023). Two studies by Dixon et al. (2008) and Worden and McLean (2014) reviewed video from the Cincinnati and Schenectady, NY police departments, respectively. Dixon et al. randomly selected 313 videos for their examination of traffc stops. They found that Black drivers were more likely to experience extensive policing during the stop; that police communication with White drivers was, on average, more positive than that of the Black drivers; and that offcers’ communication behavior was more positive when the offcer and driver were of the same race (Dixon et al., 2008).
Since the adoption of body-worn cameras (BWCs) by policing agencies in 2014, researchers have included SSO in their assessments of the technology. McCluskey et al. (2019) were among the early researchers to use SSO for their evaluation of the Los Angeles Police Department’s implementation of BWCs. 2
Further, at least a dozen studies have employed video-based systematic social observations (VBSSO) to answer a variety of research questions about police behavior (McCluskey & Uchida, 2023). Procedural justice (Mell, 2016; Nawaz & Tankebe, 2018; and Dai, 2021), use of force (Willits & Makin, 2018; Sytsma et al., 2021; Terrill & Zimmerman, 2021; Schafer et al., 2022), discourtesy (Holladay & Makin, 2021) and communication patterns (Voigt et al., 2017; Makin et al., 2019) are among the research topics that have been covered to date.
Research using VBSSO holds much promise as it is less expensive than in-person SSO. However, as discussed more fully in Chap. 4, it is not without its drawbacks. Consideration must be given to issues of sampling, access to video footage, human subject concerns, and assessments of reliability among coders.
2.6 SSO of Neighborhoods and Places
In this section, we introduce Environmental-Based Systematic Social Observation (EBSSO) to describe the method used to measure physical conditions and social disorder that exist within places. This concept is based, in part, on how police, communities, and researchers conceive of neighborhood crime patterns, engage in hotspot policing, and explain theories of social disorganization and collective effcacy.
The early police researchers of the 1960s and 1970s saw that police offcers were infuenced in part by the environment and the specifc areas that they worked. Skolnick (1966), Rubinstein (1973), and Muir (1977) emphasized that offcer knowledge of their territory was important to how they interacted with citizens. The subtleties of what constitutes a neighborhood (e.g., apartments, single-family homes, types of businesses, and wide or narrow streets) shaped the way in which police treat people and view crime.
In the 1980s, SSO research began to branch out into neighborhoods and communities to assist in understanding why crime patterns were high in some neighborhoods and low in others. In particular, SSO instruments were used by Ralph Taylor and his colleagues to test the theory of social disorganization and to explain differences in neighborhoods and people’s perceptions of fear, trust, and cohesion. Knowing about traffc volume (high or low), nonresidential properties (businesses), the presence or absence of a park, or the rates of physical incivilities (graffti, trash, or abandoned housing) had effects on whether and how people interacted (Taylor et al., 1985). By understanding citizen interactions with each other or the lack thereof, researchers could now understand the depth of social disorganization. The traditional measures of social disorganization (surveys, census data, and demographics of a neighborhood) were now supported by the physical attributes and social activities of places.
The Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) followed Reiss’s notion that assessing the physical conditions and social interactions within neighborhood settings would give a deeper understanding of place. In
