In February 1997, following the release of the Criminal Justice Commission's report titled Reducing Police-Civilian Conflict: An Analysis of Assault Complaints Against Queensland Police, a joint working group was formed to provide the Queensland Police Service (QPS) and the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) with recommendations for the introduction of strategies that could be used to reduce complaints of assault against police.
This briefing paper examines one of the joint working group's initiatives involving an observational study of police-citizens encounters (PCE) in the Metropolitan and South Eastern Regions. These are incidents where a police officer exercises a coercive power, such as arresting someone, or where there is some form of verbal or physical conflict between the officer and a citizen.
