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The Committee to Review Research on Police Policyand Practices' Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing:The Evidenceprovides a review of research on thecauses of street-level police behavior, but the reportoffers little insight into how to control that discretioneffectively. This is not due to deficiencies in the reportbut rather to limitations of the available research. Thisarticle discusses four problems with that research:underdeveloped theory, weak research designs,insufficient generalizability of findings, and inattention to thekinds of police discretion that really matter to policymakers, practitioners, and the public. The article givesspecial attention to the last problem and makesrecommendations for improving the quality of research tobetter inform choices about how to control policestreetlevel discretion.

The Committee to Review Research on Police Policy & Practices' Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence provides a review of research on the causes of street-level police behavior, but the report offers little insight into how to control that discretion effectively. This is not due to deficiencies in the report hut rather to limitations of the available research. This article discusses four problems with that research: underdeveloped theory, weak research designs, insufficient generalizability of findings, & inattention to the kinds of police discretion that really matter to policymakers, practitioners, & the pubic. The article gives special attention to the last problem & makes recommendations for improving the quality of research to better inform choices about how to control police street-level discretion. 54 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2004.]

Many respondents to opinion surveys say that the citizen's race influences how police officers treat the public, yet recent expert social‐science panels have declared that research findings are too contradictory to form a conclusion on whether American police are biased against racial minorities. We perform a meta‐analysis of quantitative research that estimates the effect of race on the police decision to arrest. Screening nearly 4,500 potential sources, we analyze the results based on 27 independent data sets that generated 40 research reports (both published and unpublished) that permitted an estimate of the effect size of the suspect's race on the probability of arrest. The meta‐analysis shows with strong consistency that minority suspects are more likely to be arrested than White suspects. Depending on the method of estimation, the effect size of race varied between 1.32 and 1.52. Converting the race effect size to probabilities shows that compared with the average probability in these studies of a White being arrested (.20), the average probability for a non‐White was calculated at .26. The significant race effect persists when taking into account the studies' variations in research methods and the nature of explanatory models used in the studies. Implications for future research are presented.

We use observations of police encounters with 3,130 suspects in Indianapolis and St. Petersburg to estimate three influences on police disrespect: how suspects behave, their personal characteristics, and the location of the encounter. Logistic regression models show that suspects' behaviors were the most powerful predictors, but the suspect's sex, age, income, and degree of neighborhood disadvantage were also significant. Minority suspects experienced disrespect less often than whites (statistically significant in the hierarchical analysis controlling for degree of neighborhood disadvantage). These effects are concentrated in St. Petersburg, where the chief had made the suppression of police abuses a visible priority. The findings offer partial confirmation of Donald Black's theory of law.

Community policing creates the expectation that oficers will become more selective in making arrests and that those decisions will be influenced more by extralegal considerations and less by legal ones. Data on 451 nontraffic police‐suspect encounters were drawn from ridealong observations in Richmond, Virginia, where the police department was implementing community policing. The arrest/no arrest decision is regressed on variables representing legal and extralegal characteristics of the situation. Legal variables show much stronger effects than extralegal ones, but that depends upon the officer's attitude toward community policing. Supporters of community policing are, as predicted, more selective in making arrests and much less influenced by legal variables than are officers with negative views. However, pro‐community‐policing officers are like negative officers in the extent of influence exerted by extralegal factors. There are some differences between the two groups of officers on the strength and direction of effects of predictor variables taken individually, but only 1 of 17 is significant. Thus, in a time of community policing, officers who support it do manifest some arrest decision patterns distinguishable from those of colleagues who adhere to a more traditional view of law enforcement.