Jennifer L. Lanterman
Title: Modeling Aggravated Assaults on Police Officers
Paper Excerpt:
Introduction
Previous research focuses on predisposing factors or precipitating factors to explain the
assault event. Predisposing factors include various personality characteristics of the assaulted
police officer or the suspect, or being in certain high-crime areas. Precipitating factors include
the activities the assaulted police officer or the suspect was engaged in immediately prior to the
assault, or some facilitating situational element. These models provide some insight into the
assault event, but they are incomplete. In a situational analysis of police assaults, Wilson (1990)
asserts, “[f]urther research is necessitated to integrate situational attributes with officer and
assailant characteristics in order to provide a complete explanation of this phenomenon” (x-xi).
Wilson’s statement reflects a gap in the literature—there is a need for a mixed individual-
situational model to fully understand the violent victimization of police officers.
More than a decade after Wilson’s (1990) assertion that a mixed individual-situational
model is necessary, there remains a notable absence of this model. Meyer et al. (2001) provide
some insight as to why this model has not been created, explaining that it is nearly impossible to
collect the data necessary to test theories and hypotheses, and if the data do exist and are
accessible, they are extremely expensive to collect and analyze (69).
The current study will generate and test a typology of armed aggravated assaults that
includes individual, environmental, and situational variables, using the armed aggravated assault
event as the unit of analysis. This study is based on a preliminary project, which yielded a few
anecdotal relationships. It is assumed that this research will identify additional explanatory
factors for the unique form of violence presented in the armed aggravated assault of police
officers. Therefore, this study is predominantly exploratory in nature, and exploratory methods
are used to test the model or typology.
1