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Living in Occupied Territory: A Study of Militarization and Use of Force

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2020, Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, Sociology.
Police militarization is happening on a widespread scale across the United States. However, very little is known about its relationship with use of force. At the same time, there has been a growing focus on community policing. Given the concurrent establishment of both of these trends, it is problematic that we do not know how these two tactics interplay with one another, especially in regard to use of force. Additionally, though force is thought to be a mechanism of social control that is unequally distributed in nonwhite communities, studies examining the link between militarization and use of force have yet to include race/ethnicity into their analysis. This paper attempts to address this important gap in the literature by examining the relationship between militarization and use of force through the lens of minority threat theory. I use data from Law Enforcement Management and Statistics 2013, American Community Survey 2009, and Uniform Crime Reports 2013, as well as item response theory and multivariate regression techniques to study this relationship. Results show that militarization is positive and significantly related to the number of use of force incidents recorded by an agency. Additionally, community policing shares a positive and significant relationship with use of force. However, neither racial demographics nor community policing moderate the relationship between militarization and use of force. These findings stress that law enforcement agencies should proceed with caution when adopting new policing strategies without having a thorough understanding of how they relate to use of force.
Thomas Mowen (Advisor)
Steve Demuth (Committee Member)
Danielle Kuhl (Committee Member)
63 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Pryor, C. (2020). Living in Occupied Territory: A Study of Militarization and Use of Force [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1586375128284893

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Pryor, Cori. Living in Occupied Territory: A Study of Militarization and Use of Force. 2020. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1586375128284893.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Pryor, Cori. "Living in Occupied Territory: A Study of Militarization and Use of Force." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1586375128284893

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)