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Officer Networks and Firearm Behaviors: Assessing the Social Transmission of Weapon-Use

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Abstract

Objectives

We reconstruct the networks of officers co-involved in force incidents to test whether interactions with weapon-prone peers impact firearm use.

Methods

We draw from a statewide dataset of force incidents across law enforcement agencies in New Jersey, and employ conditional likelihood models to estimate whether exposure to peers with histories of firearm use is associated with an officer’s own likelihood of firearm use net of other contextual confounders.

Results

We find preliminary evidence that officer firearm behaviors, including drawing, pointing, and discharging a firearm, is influenced by an officer’s peers. Greater exposure to colleagues with histories of firearm use is associated with a lower risk of using a firearm. We also find that officer features, including experience and race/ethnicity, are associated with the risk of firearm use.

Conclusions

Our study suggests officers’ peers structure the risk of firearm use. Our data allow us to look at time order and rule out situational confounders pertaining to firearm use; however, do not allow us to infer causality. We discuss the study’s implications for understanding firearm behaviors and the role of network science in moving policing research forward.

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Notes

  1. For instance, in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, only 16% of all police shootings resulted in a fatality (Klinger et al. 2016; also see Shjarback 2019; White 2006 for similar results).

  2. https://force.nj.com/ (Accessed June 29, 2021).

  3. While NJ Advance Media hired a third-party, Invensis, to audit and validate the force data (McCarthy and Stirling 2020); we conducted further data quality checks for the coding of firearm use, as data are nuanced and vulnerable to errors (Nix 2020). All cases in which a firearm was noted or a firearm was recorded as a variable were cross-validated for accuracy with the narrative of the incident and other firearm relevant variables, such as the type of force used on the subject, the number of “shots fired,” as well as the “nature of force,” a variable indicating whether a force incident involved a firearm.

  4. On the one hand, it has been found that younger and less experienced officers are more likely to use force (Paoline and Terrill 2007; Terrill and Mastrofski 2002), arguing for the benefits of repeated exposure to the policing occupation in managing conflict with citizens. For instance, Paoline and Terrill (2007) find that likelihood of using force tends to diminish with each year of experience gained by the officer. On the other hand, others have found that experience was unrelated to an officer’s propensity to use any type of force (also see Lawton 2007; McCluskey et al. 2005; Sun and Payne 2004).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Georgia State University, 55 Park Place NE, Atlanta, GA, 30303, USA

    Marie Ouellet

  2. School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska Omaha, Omaha, USA

    Sadaf Hashimi

  3. Division of Epidemiology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

    George G. Vega Yon

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  1. Marie Ouellet
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Correspondence to Marie Ouellet.

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Ouellet, M., Hashimi, S. & Vega Yon, G.G. Officer Networks and Firearm Behaviors: Assessing the Social Transmission of Weapon-Use. J Quant Criminol 39, 679–703 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-022-09546-9

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