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452 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 1 (1980)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0452 and id is 1 raw text is: ANNALS, AAPSS, 452, November 1980

Perspectives on Police and Violence
By LAWRENCE W. SHERMAN
ABSTRACT: Police and violence are central to our con-
ception of government, yet they form a troublesome paradox:
in their efforts to stop violence, police must often be violent
themselves. This paradox leads to the three related questions
addressed in this volume. First, how can the police act more
effectively and justly against violence in society? Second,
how can we better understand and reduce the violence com-
mitted against police? Third, what accounts for the wide varia-
tions in police use of violence, and what can we learn from
that variation to reduce police violence to the lowest possible
level? The three questions are to some degree artificially
distinguished, since most of what they encompass are police
encounters with citizens from which violence emerges. But to
understand the whole of police and violence, we need first
understand its component parts.
Lawrence W. Sherman is an associate professor of criminal justice at the State
University of New York, Albany, and is director of research for the Police Founda-
tion. As the executive director of the foundation's National Advisory Commission
on Higher Education for Police Officers, he was a senior author of the commis-
sion's report, The Quality of Police Education. He is also the author of Scandal
and Reform: Controlling Police Corruption and is preparing a book on his two-year
study for the National Institute of Mental Health on homicide by police officers.
Among other research, he is currently directing an experimental evaluation of police
responses to violence between spouses.
The research on which this article is based was supported in part by a grant to the Criminal
Justice Research Center, Albany, NY, from the Center for Studies in Crime and Delinquency,
National Institute of Mental Health, entitled Homicide by Police Officers: Social Forces
and Public Policy.
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