Legacy of LEMAS: Effects on Police Scholarship of a Federally Administered, Multi-Wave Establishment Survey

• NCJ Number: 248985
• Journal: Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management Volume: 37 Issue: 3 Dated: January 2014 Pages: 630-647
• Author(s): Matthew C. Matusiak; Bradley A. Campbell; William R. King
• Date Published: January 2014
• Length: 19 pages
• Publication Format: Article; Document (Online)
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical); Report (Study/Research); Program/Project Description; Literature Review; Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article describes the impact of the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) series on criminal justice scholarship by showing the connection between policing scholarship and the data provided by LEMAS, and it analyzes the LEMAS constructs and variables used by researchers in referenced journal articles.

Abstract

The article begins with a brief review of police organizational data-collection efforts prior to the first LEMAS survey in 1987. It then describes the LEMAS legacy, which is administered by the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Since 1987, LEMAS has periodically collected data from U.S. police agencies. The article next compares LEMAS impact on police scholarship in relation to other popular BJS data series, such as the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). This is followed by the identification of the elements of the LEMAS data that are most often used by researchers, as well as LEMAS' role in fueling police research. A systematic literature review is used to identify studies that used LEMAS data; studies are classified based on the LEMAS variables and constructs used. The results show that the majority of studies that use LEMAS data employ it to measure police organizational structure. A smaller sub-set of studies use LEMAS to measure law enforcement agency operations. Recommendations are offered for BJS and for researchers who use LEMAS data. The main recommendation for BJS is that the LEMAS Survey continue to regularly collect detailed information on police organizations, since it is the authors' understanding that the forthcoming wave of LEMAS data-collection will not include the organizational-structure data that has been collected in the past. 2 tables, 2 figures, 37 references, and an appended listing of the authors of the articles included in the literature review