Dr. Tom McEwen prepared the report, National Data Collection on Police Use of Force, for the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC. Police may be called on to use force when making an arrest, breaking up an altercation, or performing a myriad of other routine activities. The basic problem in this area has been a lack of routine, national systems for collecting data on use of force, both in the normal course of duty in incidents of excessive force. This report describes federal approaches and the national workshop in which 40 experts considered appropriate data collection involving the public, the police, and the courts.