Public Opinion About Police Weapons and Equipment: An Exploratory Analysis

Despite debates about the “material militarization” of the police, relatively little information on mass public opinion about police weapons, equipment, and gear currently exists. We analyze data from a national, opt-in panel of survey participants to assess public opinion regarding police use of 10 different types of weapons and equipment for use in confrontations with citizens. We find that public opinion defies easy classification into “militarized” versus “routine” equipment categories. Multivariate analyses indicate that perceptions of (a) police efficacy and (b) the frequency with which officers experience physical assaults on the job are the most consistent predictors of support for a range of weapons and gear, whereas perceptions of police misconduct and bias predict opposition to some types of tools. Partisan differences in attitudes between Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are less consistent predictors than broader perceptions about policing, but the effects of partisanship that are evident are substantively large.

‘No ordinary crowd’: Foregrounding a ‘hooligan schema’ in the construction of witness narratives following the Hillsborough football stadium disaster

This article examines the linguistic appropriation and deflection of blame in the witness testimonies and evidence-gathering processes of the South Yorkshire Police (SYP) following the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster. It specifically focuses on patterns of stylistic features, such as negation and syntactic foregrounding, which, it is argued, function to encode alternative institutionally congruent stories. It employs schema theory to explore how a ‘hooligan’ narrative was readily invoked and accepted by the SYP. Moreover, it addresses instances of both self-incrimination and the upgrading of police efficacy within statements produced by the South Yorkshire Metropolitan Ambulance Service (SYMAS), and offers a linguistic analysis that points to police involvement in the construction of the SYMAS testimonies.