The police officer decision-making process is a complex one, subject to multiple informational inputs from a variety of sources. Policing scholars have spent a significant amount of time investigating which of these inputs contribute to decisions made by police but our ability to explain how police officers decide on a non-arrest course of action is still limited. This research utilises a mixed methods approach to examine the process of police officer decision-making in dispute encounters. Both qualitative (analysed using content analysis) and quantitative data from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods are used to examine both the process and outcome of police decision-making in dispute encounters. In particular, this research seeks to determine the variation across officers in terms of type of information needed to determine a final outcome, the variation in terms of the outcomes reached, and the variation in terms of the depth of information search, which provides some insight into whether offices use a compensatory or non-compensatory decision-making process. The analysis of officer decision-making process revealed that officers, on average, utilise less than half of the information available to them in an encounter and, further, that officers often make interim decisions before deciding on a final outcome. The most common disposition was to take no further action; the second most common was to arrest. Further, the analysis reveals that officer decision-making strategies in the field appear to be non-compensatory, which has implications for how decision-making behaviour should be modelled and tested in the future.
