An Exploration of Officer Gender and Use of Force Incidents in a Transit Police Department

Abstract

The literature is unclear about whether male officers engage in more use of force incidents than female officers. One limitation of the research is that studies tend to focus on local police and have ignored other law enforcement. To address this, we explore potential gender differences among transit police officers using use of force data from 2009 to 2016. The results revealed a similar level of force used by male and female officers, but there appear to be some noteworthy differences by weapon type. While they were equally likely to use tasers, male officers were more likely to use batons and hand control and female officers were more likely to use firearms and OC spray. Additionally, we found some interesting differences in the predictors for taser use as compared to other weapons, particularly OC spray. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• Gender use of force
• transit police
• tasers

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We used the same scale as Ready and White (2011) to determine size of the police department, which was: small (<75 officers), medium (75–299 officers) and large (300+ officers).

2 Since our data is limited to use of force incidents, officer presence and verbal direction are eliminated from our force factor values.

3 Officer age and time on the force were highly and significantly correlated so we chose to use days on the force as a measure of experience seemed more important than the officer’s age.

4 This limitation is true of most research examining gender differences given the lower representation of women in police agencies. However, the SEPTAPD sample had a lower percentage of female officer use of force incidents compared to other research.

Additional information

Funding

The data collection for this study was supported by Rowan University seed funding.