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Police decision making: An examination of conflicting theories

Article  in  Policing An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management · August 2012

DOI: 10.1108/13639511211250794

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Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management
Emerald Article: Police decision making: an examination of conflicting
theories
Scott W. Phillips, James J. Sobol

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To cite this document: Scott W. Phillips, James J. Sobol, (2012),"Police decision making: an examination of conflicting
theories", Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Vol. 35 Iss: 3 pp. 551 - 565
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Police decision
Police decision making: making
an examination of
conflicting theories
Scott W. Phillips and James J. Sobol 551
Criminal Justice Department, Buffalo State College, Buffalo, New York, USA
Received 25 February 2011
Revised 21 June 2011
Abstract Accepted 7 July 2011
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare two conflicting theoretical frameworks that
predict or explain police decision making. Klinger’s ecological theory proposes that an increased level
of serious crimes in an area decreases the likelihood an officer will deal with order-maintenance issues,
while Fagan and Davies suggest an increase in low-level disorder will increase order maintenance
behavior of police officers.
Design/methodology/approach – Using a vignette research design, the authors examines factors
that may contribute to police officers’ decision to make a traffic stop in four jurisdictions with varying
levels of serious crime. Ordered logistic regression with robust standard errors was used in the
analysis.
Findings – Analysis of the findings demonstrates that officers who work in higher crime areas are
less likely to stop a vehicle, as described in the vignettes. Additional predictors of police decision to
stop include vehicles driven by teenaged drivers and drivers who were speeding in a vehicle.
Research limitations/implications – The current research is limited to an adequate but fairly
small sample size (n ¼ 204), and research design that examines hypothetical scenarios of police
decision making. Further data collection across different agencies with more officers and more
variation in crime levels is necessary to extend the current findings.
Originality/value – This paper adds to the literature in two primary ways. First, it compares two
competing theoretical claims to examine a highly discretionary form of police behavior and second,
it uniquely uses a vignette research design to tap into an area of police behavior that is difficult to
study (e.g. the decision not to stop).
Keywords United States of America, Police, Policing, Decision making, Workload, Traffic stops,
Vignettes
Paper type Research paper

Introduction
Police work requires officers to deal with a substantial amount of non-criminal activity,
such as resolving disputes (Johnson and Rhodes, 2009) or dealing with problems or
very low-level offenses that fall into the broad description “order maintenance
activities” (Walker and Katz, 2005). There are potential benefits when officers deal with
these low-level problems or offenses, such as reducing the chance of further crime or
increasing the officer’s environmental knowledge to improve problem solving (Walker
and Katz, 2005). One of the most common types of order maintenance activities takes
place in the form of a traffic stop (Walker and Katz, 2005), which could be seen as
“a form of order maintenance where the officer has taken action against a suspected
individual in order to prevent crime” (Vito and Walsh, 2008, p. 93).
Many traffic stop studies were conducted in the past decade to determine if police Policing: An International Journal of
officers were using race in their decision to stop a vehicle (e.g. Gaines, 2006; Meehan Police Strategies & Management
Vol. 35 No. 3, 2012
pp. 551-565
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
The authors would like to thank Sean P. Varano for his invaluable assistance in the vignette 1363-951X
construction process. DOI 10.1108/13639511211250794
PIJPSM and Ponder, 2002a, b; Mosher et al., 2008; Petrocelli et al., 2003; Schafer et al., 2004;
35,3 Smith and Petrocelli, 2001; Withrow, 2004a, b). Some of these studies included
neighborhood characteristics in their examination of police decision making, such as
an officer’s perception of the racial makeup of a patrol area (Albert et al., 2005) and the
crime rate of a neighborhood (Petrocelli et al., 2003; Withrow, 2004a, b). Where many
studies of traffic stop decision making were unguided by theory (Engel et al., 2002), the
552 work of Klinger (1997) and Fagan and Davies (2000) provide theoretical guidance to
predict or explain how patrol area can impact an officer’s decision to stop a person.
Both theoretical frameworks, however, offer different predictions based on the type of
criminal activity in the patrol area. A postulate within Klinger’s (1997) ecological
theory assumes that workload influences when formal legal authority is applied.
That is, police officers reserve their attention for more serious crimes in areas with
higher-crime rates or more serious criminal behavior. Conversely, Fagan and Davies
(2000) theory asserts that officers are more aggressive in response to low-level order
maintenance problems.
This research sought to examine the relationship between the work location of a
police officer and its impact on a police officer’s judgment to stop a vehicle to determine
which theoretical framework is supported. There were at least two justifications for
this study. First, because police department policy is often based on theoretically
framed research (Engel et al., 2002), it is important to assess components of these two
competing theoretical frameworks to determine which is empirically sound when
explaining police behavior. Further, if theories are necessarily incomplete (Bernard and
Ritti, 1990), the present study may uncover conditions unique to each so they can be
appropriately adjusted.

Theory
Researchers argued that studies of traffic stop decision making should not be viewed
as scientific research because they failed to explicitly state the guiding theory of their
research (Engel et al., 2002). To address this concern, the present inquiry attempted to
shed light on police officer behavior during their routine patrol duties using two
conflicting theoretical perspectives. One suggests that low-level offenses increase the
likelihood that police officers will stop a person in an effort to deal proactively with
bigger problems. The second proposes that officers are less likely to deal with low-level
offenses and reserve their limited time and resources to deal with more serious crimes.

Order maintenance policing

Fagan and Davies (2000) provide a detailed discussion of police decision making,
explaining why the 1982 Broken Windows theory of Wilson and Kelling, which
focussed on police response in disorderly places, morphed into a policing tactic that
focussed on people. It had been theorized that social disorganization in the form of an
increased poverty rate, predominately decreased age distribution (i.e. younger
population), and population turnover lead to increased crime rates across
neighborhoods. Fagan and Davies (2000) explained that while social disorganization
predicted rates of disorder in an area (e.g. loitering, public drinking), social
disorganization does not predict homicide rates and only weakly predicted robbery
rates. Therefore, efforts to control serious crime via disorder policing are unlikely to be
effective.
Based on the notion that proactive enforcement of minor crimes and disorder would
reduce serious crime, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) increased their use
of tactics dealing with order maintenance issues in neighborhoods with the highest Police decision
levels of disorder crime. Order maintenance policing was intended to focus on “quality making
of life” issues, such as public drinking or panhandling, under the assumption that
police enforcement of laws against these types of crime would reduce more serious
criminal behavior. Fagan and Davies (2000) reported that the NYPD order maintenance
policing policy was intended to address gun-crimes as one of the more serious criminal
behaviors that could be deterred through aggressive enforcement of disorder crimes[1]. 553
A successful order maintenance policing approach would require a “pro-active
interdiction” (Fagan and Davies, 2000, p. 475) of anyone suspected of violating even
minor offenses. This tactic, however, led to an increased use of “pretextual” stops,
where police officers would scrutinize a person for any type of minor offense in order to
establish a minimal level of reasonable suspicion to stop and frisk the person in the
hopes of discovering a more serious offense (Fagan and Davies, 2000).

Ecological workload
A neighborhood attribute that likely has a direct impact on police officers’ decision
making is the actual workload of the officers who patrol a neighborhood. Klinger (1997)
suggested that as the number of calls-for-service and deviance levels of a work location
increase, officers have less time to deal with citizens’ complaints. When an officer has
less time available for dealing with the work in their patrol area, officers must manage
their time by prioritizing the tasks they focus on. This formula pushes the officer’s
“towards leniency as deviance increases” (Klinger, 1997, p. 293). When a police officer
works in a location that has fewer calls-for-service or lower levels of deviance, the
officer is free to use as much time as needed to deal with an incident (Klinger, 1997).
Klinger (1997) relies on the work of Donald Black to build his discussion of
“leniency,” which Klinger described as the amount of law a police officer applies to an
incident. For example, a police officer could spend a substantial amount of time
stopping vehicles but never issue a citation. Strictly speaking, not issuing a ticket
would be considered a lenient response by the officer. Still, the workload aspect of
Klinger’s (1997) ecological theory clearly implies that “leniency” is the actual attention
or effort that a police officer devotes toward a problem. As a result, when Klinger stated
police officers will be lenient “for increasingly serious crimes as levels of district
deviance increases” (Klinger, 1997, p. 293), it is reasonable to assume that police officers
who patrol areas with more serious crime would be less likely to focus their attention
on traffic stops.
Klinger’s work has yet to receive consistent empirical support. For example, Sobol
(2010) examined postulates of Klinger’s theory and conceptualized workload as the
amount of time officers had “assigned” vs “unassigned” to explain the vigor with
which the police used their formal authority. Surprisingly, Sobol found that workload
and district crime were negatively correlated (r ¼ 0.16) and that workload did not
significantly affect the vigor with which the police used their formal legal authority.
Other research shows that neighborhood characteristics influence an officer’s decision
to “translate” a call-for-service into an official crime report; however, “neighborhood
influences vary by crime type” (Varano et al., 2009, p. 560). Looking at studies on traffic
stop specifically, to date, no study has included a workload variable in their analysis,
but a few studies offer what might be considered reasonable surrogates that help build
a foundation for this approach. Contrary to what might be expected within Klinger’s
(1997) ecological theory, Roh and Robinson (2009) reported that patrol beats with more
crime (i.e. hot spots) are related to an increased likelihood of a traffic stop. In addition,
PIJPSM Phillips (2009a) found that sheriff’s deputies were less likely to stop a vehicle than
35,3 officers in two small township police agencies. Although Phillips does not speculate,
it may be that sheriff’s deputies have substantially more area to cover and are more
likely to conserve their time resources by engaging in fewer traffic stops.

Literature review
554 Background: traffic stop research
A number of different factors might influence the decision to stop a vehicle:
neighborhood aspects, characteristics of the driver, organization influences, and legal
factors. Each will be briefly discussed below in order to frame an understanding
of the present research.
Scholars have advised that a greater understanding of traffic stop behavior is
limited because many studies rely on data from one large police department or
jurisdiction (Mosher et al., 2008; Novak, 2004; Parker et al., 2004). Police behavior often
occurs in a beat or neighborhood context and the use of race in the decision to stop
a vehicle “could possibly be more prevalent in racially homogeneous communities”
(Novak, 2004, p. 73). Smith and Petrocelli (2001) found that the Part-I crime rate of an
area was not related to the police decision to stop a vehicle. Later, Petrocelli et al. (2003)
examined multiple neighborhood characteristics in the decision to stop a vehicle,
including percent black population of the neighborhood, percent of families below
poverty line, percent unemployed in neighborhood, mean family income, and Part-I
crimes per 1,000 population. They found that police tended to make more stops in
neighborhoods with higher-crime rates. Alpert et al. (2007) examined the racial makeup
of neighborhoods where traffic stops occurred and found no connection between racial
composition and police stops. Withrow (2004a) found that drivers stopped during the
night and driving in higher-crime areas were more likely to be black drivers. Similarly,
when using in-car computer queries as a measure of surveillance, Meehan and Ponder
(2002b) found that officer scrutiny “significantly increases as [African Americans]
travel farther from ‘black’ communities and into whiter neighborhoods” (p. 422).
Some research has found that a driver’s race is related to the police officer’s decision
to stop a vehicle. Several studies reported a relationship between black drivers and the
decision to stop a vehicle (Miller, 2008; Warren et al., 2006), while others have found
only a weak (Novak, 2004) or no relationship (Phillips, 2009a) between black drivers
and the decision to stop a vehicle. Driver age, however, was found to be related to the
decision to stop (Miller, 2008). Further, the driver’s gender (i.e. male) was significantly
related to police decision to stop a driver (Miller, 2008; Warren et al., 2006).
Early research into the influence of police organizations on an officer’s decision
making suggested management style and agency size may impact traffic stop
behavior. Wilson (1978) posited that officers who worked in agencies with a legalistic
management style “will issue more traffic tickets at a higher rate” (p. 172). Others
(Brown, 1981; Mastrofski et al., 1987) found that police officers working in agencies
of differing size behave differently in traffic stop situations. More recently, Mosher et al.
(2008) reported that most prior research of police decision making in traffic stop
situations takes place in only one jurisdiction. This drawback does not allow
researchers to determine if organizational characteristics influence the decision making
of police officers. Phillips (2009a) analyzed the responses of police officers in two small
agencies against sheriff’s deputies and found that sheriff’s deputies were significantly
less likely to stop a vehicle. His study is limited because he collected data in only three
law enforcement agencies and the number of officers in this study was small.
 When legal considerations were included in the research, Withrow (2004b) stated Police decision
most traffic stops occur when a driver commits a more serious traffic offenses (e.g. making
moving violations) than for less serious traffic offenses (e.g. equipment violations).
Others suggest that drivers who are speeding (Phillips, 2009a), commit moving
violations (Warren et al., 2006), or equipment violations (Alpert et al., 2007) are likely to
be stopped. Novak (2004) reported that white drivers are more likely to be stopped for
moving violations, unsafe driving, and speeding. 555
It has been suggested that a measure of vehicle characteristics or quality that is
involved in a traffic stop should be studied because some cars may be customized
in a manner the draws the attention of police officers (Batton and Kadleck, 2004;
Ramirez et al., 2000). While vehicle quality has never been clearly operationalized in
prior studies, it is suggested that “car effect” (Batton and Kadleck, 2004) could include
a poor quality vehicle (Engel and Calnon, 2004) or an older vehicle (Miller, 2008;
Warren et al., 2006), Alpert et al. (2007) found that vehicle age had no impact on
the decision to stop a vehicle; other research indicated older vehicles were related to the
decision to stop a vehicle (Miller, 2008). Phillips (2009a), however, found that a newer
vehicle was related to the decision to stop the vehicle.

This study
As the literature review demonstrated, the decision making of street-level police
officers in traffic stop incidents may be influenced by different factors. The few studies
that incorporated a neighborhood crime-rate variable (Petrocelli et al., 2003; Withrow,
2004a) found a positive relationship between this dimension and the decision to stop a
vehicle. These results tended to support the framework provided by Fagan and Davies
(2000). Such findings, however, may be difficult to generalize since their data were
collected from one large urban police department (e.g. NYPD). In addition, Klinger’s
(1997) discussion provides a general theoretical framework for police behavior, but
does not consider the other variables that may mediate the influence of area, such as
organizational size, the agencies management style, or the type of law enforcement
agency (i.e. local, county, or state).
This study sought to examine assumptions from the two competing theoretical
models to explain police decision making in traffic stop situations. It offers an empirical
examination of the influence of “neighborhood,” as suggested by both Fagan and
Davies and Klinger, on the judgment of police officers in traffic stop situations
while controlling for various aspects of the incident, including driver characteristics
and legal aspects. Two features of this study contribute to our understanding of
police decision making. First, data were collected in multiple police agencies of
varying sizes, which can help minimize the problem of “aggregation bias” in most
other studies of only one large jurisdiction (Mosher et al., 2008, p. 46). Like other
studies, however, the respondents do comprise a convenience sample. Second,
a vignette research design is used (Rossi, 1979; Rossi and Anderson, 1982), allowing
the inclusion of multiple variables into vignettes to examine the decision making
of a police officer to stop a vehicle. An additional benefit to the vignette research
design is that it may minimize. Withrow (2004b) stated “because there is no record of
the individuals not stopped,” most designs cannot determine the influence any
variable on getting stopped (p. 229, emphasis in original). The vignette research
design minimizes this problem because the design allows for the inclusion of
multiple variables and can control for those cases where a person is not stopped
by officers.
PIJPSM Data and methods
35,3 Study location
Data used in this study were collected from police officers in four police agencies in
New York State. Table I provides general information on the agencies and jurisdiction.
The study locations can be roughly divided into two groups. One is the work district of
a large urban police agency with neighborhoods of concentrated population and higher
556 levels of serious crime and disorder, while the other three study locations consist of two
small township agencies and a county sheriff’s department with very low crime levels.
Including officers from two small agencies and a county sheriff’s department
distinguishes this research from other studies of the police and traffic stop decision
making because the studies cited in this paper used data primarily collected in large
agencies or suburban areas near larger cities.
The Lower Town Police Department and the Upper Town Police Departments (all
department names are pseudonyms) serve townships and employ part-time and
full-time police officers. These townships border each other, as well as a city of
approximately 50,000 people (not part of this study). Police officers in the townships
furnish routine patrol services, are dispatched to calls by the county sheriffs’
department, and provide no special services, such as detectives. The township police
agencies offer a fairly diverse working environment for officers, with traditional style
neighborhoods laid out in a grid pattern that include single family and apartment
housing, shopping plazas with department stores, grocery stores, small shops,
secondary highways with extensive commuter and commercial traffic, and rural areas
with farms and rural housing. The third agency is the Lake County Sheriff’s
Department. Deputies provide patrol services for a sizable rural area as well as several
small towns and villages that employ no other police services. All three agencies serve
a fairly homogenous population, and have few violent index crimes.
The large police agency that participated in this study was the River City Police
Department, specifically the North District (River City has five patrol districts). This
agency is also located in Upstate New York. As indicated in Table I, North District
is densely populated and is considered fairly common as large city areas go.

Race (white,
Property crimes African
(burglary, American,
Square Patrol Violent index crimes larceny, Population Others)
Jurisdiction miles officers (2007) car theft) served %

Lower Town 64 14 17 (2 rapes, 1 robbery, 14 177 8,978 93, 3, 4

P.D. aggravated assaults)
Upper Town 9 17 16 (4 robberies, 12 334 19,038 97, 1, 2
P.D. aggravated assaults)
Lake Co. 552 60 79 (15 rapes, 14 1,336 108,714a 90, 6, 4
robberies, 50 aggravated
Table I. assaults)
Description of research North District 9.6 96 1,063 (14 murders, 53 5,230 78,700 44, 34, 7b
locations (US Census data rapes, 533 robberies, 462
and New York State aggravated assault)c
Division of Criminal
Justice Services crime Notes: aDoes not include the population (111,134) of three cities within the county that employ their
data, US Census Bureau) own police agencies; bUS Census data for 2000 for all of River City; cdepartment data
The population of North District is racially diverse compared to the smaller Police decision
jurisdictions, and has a substantially higher number of violent index and property making
crimes than the other agencies.

Research design
A vignette research design employ aspects of a random experiment by incorporating
each variable as a unique dimension within the vignette, and randomly vary the level 557
of each dimension between vignettes (Rossi, 1979; Rossi and Anderson, 1982).
Vignettes are then randomly assigned to respondents. This design measures
respondents’ judgment or decision making as the level of each dimension changes.
That is, as the level of one dimension changes, its influence in the judgment or
decision-making process may shift in relation to another dimension. The vignettes
used for this study were constructed along several variables (discussed below), and
vignettes have been successfully used to examine police opinion and decision making
in other work situations (Eterno, 2003; Hickman et al., 2001; Phillips, 2009b; Phillips
and Sobol, 2010).
Vignettes possess aspects of a controlled, random experiment and, therefore,
provide a benefit in studying the judgment of police officers in traffic stop incidents:
collecting data on vehicles not stopped. When there is an absence of data regarding
citizens not stopped, as is the case in almost all prior traffic stop research, untangling
the significant aspects of those who are stopped from those who are not is unworkable,
making it impossible to discover which dynamics explain variations in police officer
decision making. Further, using vignettes provided a unique opportunity to study
multiple factors that may influence a police officers’ decision to stop a vehicle prior to
actually stopping a vehicle. Most studies of traffic stop decision making collects data
after the stop has occurred.

Data collection
A total of 100 survey packets, each of which included randomly constructed vignettes
exploring different activities police officers’ encounter (domestic violence incidents, use
of force incidents, traffic stop incidents), were constructed. Each packet contained two
randomly selected vignettes describing a driver and vehicle that they encounter during
routine patrol. Police officers in the sample agencies were provided with a randomly
selected survey packet. Several methods were used to improve the validity of responses
because police officers may be reluctant to respond to outsiders who ask questions
about their behavior. A cover letter informed the respondents that their answers
would not be seen by police management. Second, officer identities would be kept
anonymous.
Two methods were used to collect data in the smaller agencies during the summer of
2005. First, survey packets were passed out to patrol deputies in the Lake County
Sheriff’s Department during all roll-call periods over the course of several days.
Deputies completed the surveys during that time and returned them in a sealed
envelope to the researcher. In total, 39 surveys were passed out and 38 were returned
completed. The Upper Town Police Department does not have a routine roll-call period;
however, during the data collection period the department had scheduled a department
staff meeting. The police chief allowed the researcher to distribute surveys to police
officers during this meeting. A total of 13 survey packets were distributed to the
available officers and all were returned completed. The second method for collecting
data was used in the Lower Town Police Department because Lower Town does not
PIJPSM have a routine roll-call period. Survey packets were left for the officers in their
35,3 departmental mailboxes. Officers returned the surveys to the police chief in a sealed
envelope, and they were returned in bulk to the researcher. In total, ten surveys
were distributed and nine were completed.
The second data collection period occurred during the summer of 2006. A graduate
student who works as an officer in River City distributed newly constructed survey
558 packets to patrol officers in North District during all roll-call periods where they were
completed and returned in a sealed envelope. Other than a brief verbal explanation of
the study and the anonymity of the respondents, the graduate student had no
interaction with the officers. The packets contained traffic stop vignettes constructed
in an identical fashion as those used in the smaller agencies. In total, 45 survey packets
were distributed and 42 were completed. A total of 102 police officers completed
two vignettes and each completed vignette represented a case in the data file. The total
number of complete vignettes from all respondents in the four police agencies thus was
204. Table II provides a description of the variables used in this study.

Dependent variable
Many studies of traffic stop decision making use multiple dependent variables, such
as the original decision to stop a vehicle, the decision to search the vehicle, and
how the stop ended (i.e. no action, warning, citation) (Engel and Calnon, 2004; Petrocelli
et al., 2003). One deficiency when using a vignette design is that it is difficult to include
“contingency” questions that would elicit subsequent decisions as an incident
progresses through time. As a result, this study used only one dependent variable: a
police officer’s self-reported likelihood of stopping a vehicle on a five-point Likert scale
(1 ¼ very unlikely to stop traffic; 5 ¼ very likely to stop traffic).

Independent variables – vignette dimensions and officer characteristics

The following is a review of the vignette dimensions used in this study. For a detailed
discussion of the justification for these dimensions, see Phillips (2009a). Research
vignettes described three driver characteristics. The first dimension was the driver’s

Variables Range M SD

Dependent variables
Stop 1-5 3.61 1.01
Independent variables
Sheriff 0-1 0.37 0.48
Upper Town 0-1 0.12 0.33
Lower Town 0-1 0.08 0.28
Black 0-1 0.34 0.47
Hispanic 0-1 0.32 0.46
Sex 0-1 0.53 0.49
Age teen 0-1 0.36 0.48
Age_20 0-1 0.30 0.46
Vehicle type 0-1 0.50 0.50
Tint 0-1 0.50 0.50
Cell phone 0-1 0.33 0.47
Table II. Speeding 0-1 0.39 0.48
Variable description Experience 0-35 10.17 6.78
race: white, black, and Hispanic. The second dimension was the driver’s gender and Police decision
a third dimension is the driver’s age. The driver’s age is an ordinal-level variable making
describing a driver who appears to be in their late teens, late 20s, or late 30s (the
reference category). This description is intentionally vague because police perception
of a driver, not the actual age of the driver, is considered important to a police officer’s
decision to stop a vehicle (Ramirez et al., 2000). These age categories were selected
because it was believed that police officers would be much less likely to stop older 559
drivers (i.e. those who appear at least 40 years old), and a pre-teen driver would almost
certainly be stopped.
The first vehicle characteristic was type of vehicle: a “new SUV” or an “old 4-door
sedan.” A second vehicle characteristic that might draw the attention of a police officer
is window tinting (Batton and Kadleck, 2004). This dimension was dichotomized here:
the vehicle had tinted windows, or the dimension will be left blank in the vignette, an
acceptable method for varying the level of a dimension ( Jacoby and Cullen, 1999).
A specific traffic violation was included in all vignettes in order to establish a legal
justification for the stop. Ramirez et al. (2000) argued that it may be helpful to
include different types of violations to understand the role traffic offenses play in police
decision making. Three traffic violation levels were used here in the vignette
dimensions. First, a traffic violation will be indicated as “speeding.” A specific speed
was not included. Not all police vehicles are equipped with a RADAR system to
determine the exact speed of a car, and it is anticipated that simply indicating to a
police officer that a person is speeding will satisfy the amount of information
necessary to establish probable cause for a stop. Second, the 2002 legislation in
New York State made it a traffic offense to talk on a hand-held cell phone while
driving a vehicle. This offense was included as an intermediate-level violation. The
third dimension described a broken tail light, a minor equipment violation. A sample
vignette and dimension levels can be found in the Appendix.
Because the small police agencies involved in this study employed almost no female
or minority officers, it was decided that asking additional questions of a personal
nature in these agencies would threaten confidentiality and might result in a reduced
response rate. The only officer characteristic that was collected was the years of
experience.

Analytic strategy
Because each police officer completed two vignettes, the data may have a clustered
structure. Clustering of observations may violate the assumption of independence in
the variables, causing an artificially deflated standard error and making it easier to
find significance effects (Williams, 2000). For this reason the “cluster robust standard
error” option in STATA was utilized. This option provides a more robust estimate of
the standard error because it adjusts for the potential clustering of observations.

Findings
As seen in Table III, police officers serving in the two smaller townships were
significantly more likely to report stopping a vehicle described in the vignettes
compared to officers who worked in the larger city area (North District was the
reference group in the analysis). Although patrol deputies who worked for the county
sheriff’s department were not significantly different in their responses to vignettes than
officers in North District, these findings suggest that workload dimensions may shape
police decision making in traffic stop incidents. That is, the police officers working in
PIJPSM Variable Coefficient Robust SE Odds ratio
35,3
Sheriff 0.20 0.49 1.22
Upper Town 1.02* 0.43 2.77
Lower Town 1.96** 0.30 7.09
Black 0.00 0.37 1.00
560 Hispanic 0.10 0.20 1.10
Sex 0.38 0.33 0.68
Age teen 0.35* 0.17 1.42
Age_20 0.33 0.21 1.39
Vehicle type 0.25 0.15 1.28
Tint 0.49 0.38 1.63
Cell phone 0.58 0.33 1.79
Speeding 0.78** 0.12 2.18
Table III.
Experience 0.00 0.02 1.00
Ordered logistic
Pseudo R2 0.05
regression for likelihood
of traffic stop (N ¼ 204) Notes: *po0.05, **po0.01

North District, an area with higher levels of serious crimes when compared to the other
jurisdictions in this study, do not appear very concerned with stopping vehicles for
traffic violations. Klinger’s (1997) suggestion that officers who work in higher-
workload neighborhoods focus less on minor offenses appears to be supported when
examined in the context of traffic stop situations described in the vignettes.
Two other vignette dimensions were also related to the decision to stop a vehicle.
First, if the vehicle was speeding, police officers were significantly more likely to stop
the vehicle. This was the most serious traffic offense described in the vignettes, and the
finding is interesting because the offense was simply described in the vignette with
no supporting information (i.e. the speed was not confirmed with RADAR). Second,
officers were more likely to indicate they would stop a teen-aged driver when compared
to a driver who appeared to be in their 30s. None of the other driver or vehicle
characteristics described in the vignettes were related to the officer’s decision to stop a
vehicle.

Conclusion and discussion

This study was constructed in response to the body of research suggesting that
neighborhood context may influence police decision making, and the fact there are two
conflicting theories to explain variation of police behavior across those contexts.
Klinger’s (1997) ecological theory posits that police officers respond to components of
their work environment, including the area workload, and that they must manage their
time more effectively. Fagan and Davies (2000) explained that officers are more
aggressive when dealing with a neighborhood’s order maintenance issues in order to
address more serious crimes in those areas. The findings from this investigation
suggest that officers assigned to high-crime areas would be less likely to deal with low-
level traffic violations described in vignettes, lending support to Klinger’s framework.
Fagan and Davies (2000) order maintenance explanation of police officer decision
making should not be dismissed. They described police behavior that was influenced
not simply by the environment, but also the police organization. The New York City
Police Department administration expected aggressive street intervention by street
officers. A second latent component of their study, which was never explicitly
discussed, is that order maintenance policing appears to include a heavy “foot patrol” Police decision
element. Foot patrol officers may be able to focus their attention more heavily on order making
maintenance tasks because it is a slower method of patrol and is concentrated in urban
areas where officers are expected to deal with order maintenance offenses. Further,
foot patrol officers might answer fewer calls-for-service, thus they would not have the
same workload considerations of the officers described by Klinger (1997).
The order maintenance explanation of Fagan and Davies also bears further 561
examination because the crime values provided in Table I are raw numbers, suggesting
North District has the more substantial crime problem than the other study locations. If
crime rate is used (in this study, violent index crime plus property crime/population) for
comparison purposes, Upper Town and Lower Town have higher-crime rates than
Lake County. Because the results indicate officers in the townships are more likely to
stop a vehicle described in the vignettes than deputies in the sheriff’s department, this
seemingly supports the assertion of Fagan and Davies.
Readers should be cautioned not to extend these findings too far. While officers in
higher-crime areas may be less likely to stop a vehicle described in the vignettes, this
may be a general response to the vignettes alone. It is unknown if real-world situations
would result in the same response. Similarly, we are unable to determine how a police
officer would respond, in reality, if they had to choose between a simultaneous
call-for-service or traffic stopping incident. Furthermore, there may be a temporal
component in an officer’s decision making that was not part of the vignettes, nor is it a
consideration in the two theoretical frameworks. A police officer who is on patrol
during the slower times of a shift, for example, 3-4 a.m. may stop a vehicle because of
boredom, and this may occur regardless of the characteristics of the patrol area (Barthe
and Stitt, 2009). If this is the case, both theoretical frameworks require adjustment.
Before discussing directions for future research, several research limitations should
be acknowledged. First, this study does not have specific data on the workload of
the officers. Where Varano et al. (2009) used calls-for-service as an indicator of
workload, this study used raw violent crime and property crime levels as proxy
measures for the workload of the police officers who patrol in the different police
agencies. Second, while the sample size in this study is adequate, future scholars
should attempt to increase the number of officers studied. Third, large jurisdictions,
such as River City, may have intra-jurisdictional variations that should be explored, as
carried out by Varano et al. (2009) when they used census tracts to examine police
decision making. Data collected in only one district missed this possibility. Third, the
use of data from jurisdictions with clearly different characteristics is not the same as
measuring officer’s behavior when working in small areas or neighborhoods. It is
believed, however, that the divergent jurisdictions used in this study provided an
acceptable surrogate for further researchers to build upon. Finally, there are limits
to the use of vignettes in a study, in that they only mimic reality. For example, where
this research was able to specify driver characteristics in the vignettes, this is not often
the case in reality (Phillips, 2009a; Waddington et al., 2004). This consideration must be
balanced against the benefits of a vignette research design, such as the ability to
increase the sample size in small police agencies, the ability to integrate and control
multiple dimensions, and their ability to control for those cases where a person is not
stopped by officers.
This study has theoretical and policy implications. First, both theoretical
frameworks discussed in this study appear to need adjustments. Klinger’s (1997)
argument may not apply well to sheriff’s deputies who patrol expansive rural areas.
PIJPSM Further, he may have to consider smaller “beat” sized areas as an ecological unit so as
35,3 to evaluation whether police decision making varies. Fagan and Davies (2000) position
may pertain to a narrow patrol tactic used in higher-crime area. With respect to
policy implications, if police officers in higher-crime areas minimize their attention on
low-level offenses, this may actually feed into the continued disorder that contaminates
a neighborhood. Police administrators may have to find ways to shift an officer’s
562 attention to low-level problems in order to reduce the conditions that feed more serious
crime (Lurigio and Rosenbaum, 1994). Police administrators might want to focus on
additional training for those officers assigned to particular high-crime areas or at least
reconsider officer preference and seniority when it comes to officer deployment. The
placement of officers in particular districts or areas could have significant
ramifications for the control of crime (Sobol, 2010). Using officer preference or
seniority as factors that determine officer assignment may not be the most
organizationally efficient way to implement and sustain police efforts to combat crime
or implement various community policing initiatives. Finally, results from the current
study also shed light on the necessity to consider the number of officers assigned
within a particular district or jurisdiction. If indeed officer workload is a vital precursor
to officer decision making, then one way to offset the amount of workload for any one
officer is to have more on duty during any particular shift. Future research might wish
to consider this dimension in the development of their vignettes and assess the extent
to which it influences the police officers decision to stop a vehicle.
Note
1. Where the social disorders described in the Fagan and Davies (2000) discussions are
inherently non-traffic in nature, they never specifically describe the patrol type, whether foot
or motor patrol, being used by the NYPD’s order maintenance policing. The impacts of
patrol type on the results of this study are reviewed in the discussion section.

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mixed methods approach offering heuristic and practical implications”, Political Science,
Vol. 41 No. 3, pp. 221-43.
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pp. 395-407.

Appendix. Vignette dimensions and levels

Dimension A: Race
1 – White
2 – Black
3 – Hispanic
Dimension B: Gender
1 – Male
2 – Female
Dimension C: Age
1 – Appears to be a teenager
2 – Appears to be late 20s
3 – Appears to be late 30s
Dimension D: Vehicle type
1 – New SUV
2 – Older sedan
Dimension E: Window conditions
1 – Tinted windows
2 – Left blank
Dimension F: Traffic offense
1 – Broken tail light
2 – Speaking on a hand-held cell phone
3 – Speeding

Corresponding author
Scott W. Phillips can be contacted at: [email protected]

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