THE REGULATION OF INTERACTION BY POLICE

Abstract

Abstract Scholars agree that a preoccupation of police is the maintenance of their authority during encounters with civilians. There is little knowledge of how they seek to do this. Using a subset of process data from a large, quantitative, observational field study of police, the authors analyze it from the perspective of general systems theory. They find that authority is maintained in most cases by much more subtle means than past studies have identified.