Understanding police use of force in New Jersey: do civilian demographics influence police behavior?

In recent years, there has been increased scrutiny around the ways police officers use physical force while carrying out their duties. Though it is often necessary for officers to use force during arrests, there have also been innumerable cases of officers going beyond their mandate and inflicting unreasonable amounts of violence on civilians. In 2017, NJ Advance Media produced a groundbreaking report detailing the way New Jersey police officers use force while on the job. This paper will use the Force Report and other data to test for relationships between demographic factors and uses of force by police. Using multivariate regression analyses and GIS mapping software, the relationships between rate of use of force and race, income, education, political affiliation, and violent crime rate will be quantified and visually displayed for over 400 New Jersey municipalities. Using these methods, strong relationships between income, violent crime rate, and the use of force rate were found. The other independent variables had weaker relationships with the use of force rate.M.A.Includes bibliographical reference