By Jeremy D. Barnum., Kevin D. Lucey,  Meagan E. Cahill,  William H. Sousa, 

  Illicit drug use is a significant problem in the United States, driven in large part by the opioid crisis. In 2023, the nation reported 107,543 drug overdose deaths, with more than 80,000 deaths involving an opioid. Stimulants have also become a growing problem; in 2023, more than 36,000 overdoses involved a psychostimulant, and nearly 30,000 involved cocaine (CDC 2024). Law enforcement is a crucial piece of the broader response to the drug crisis (PERF 2021). Proactive police interventions that leverage problem-solving and involve partnerships with community stakeholders offer the most substantial evidence of effectiveness (Mazerolle, Soole, and Rombouts 2007). One strategy to reduce drug problems is third-party policing (TPP). TPP involves police efforts to persuade or coerce nonoffending third parties (landlords, business owners, etc.) to take on more responsibility for addressing crime and disorder at or around their premises (Mazerolle and Ransley 2006). Typically, police begin by seeking voluntary cooperation of third parties by sharing information with them about specific problems, educating third parties on ways to prevent problems, or providing support to third parties to make changes. When third parties resist collaborative efforts, police may use coercive approaches, such as warnings, property inspections, or enforcement of civil remedies (Bichler, Schmerler, and Enriquez 2013; Eck and Wartell 1998; Mazerolle and Roehl 1998b). The study This report describes a randomized controlled evaluation of a TPP intervention implemented in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. The intervention, called Operation CheckOut, aimed to reduce drug problems at hotel s and motels by fostering trusted partnerships between police and hotel staff. Officers from the Anne Arundel County Police Department (AACOPD) conducted four in-person visits between August 2022 and May 2023 to a randomly selected group of hotels. During in-person visits, officers engaged in a scripted procedural justice dialogue with hotel managers, delivered educational materials, identified legal responsibilities, and provided a dedicated email address that functioned as a “tip line” to report problems or suspicious activity directly to the Operation Check-Out team. The intervention was designed as a partial replication of Operation Galley, a TPP intervention   implemented by the Queensland (Australia) Police Service in 2017 (Mazerolle et al. 2018). The goal of the intervention was to bolster intelligence, investigations, and enforcement actions; reduce crime and disorder; and improve perceptions of police. Key findings Outcome analysis Calls for service data were analyzed to determine the impact of Operation Check-Out on four outcomes: (1) drug activity, (2) sick persons (e.g., overdoses), (3) disorder, and (4) violence. Average monthly calls for service for each outcome were compared among hotels in the treatment and control groups during the pre-intervention period, during the intervention period, and during the post-intervention period. Three findings were significant: 1. Calls reporting drug activity were lower at treatment hotels during the post-intervention period than during the pre-intervention or intervention periods. 2. Calls reporting sick persons were lower at treatment hotels during the post-intervention period than during the pre-intervention or intervention periods. 3. Calls reporting disorder were higher at treatment hotels during the intervention period than during the pre-intervention or post-intervention periods. That there were significantly fewer drug activity calls at treatment hotels following Operation Check-Out than there had been before is encouraging, as the intervention was specifically designed to mitigate drug problems. Reducing drug activity reduces the need for hotel staff to call 911. Also, as part of their efforts to build rapport with hotel management, officers often provided their direct work lines—allowing management to call specific officers familiar with their facility and problems instead of the generic 911 line. That there were significantly fewer sick person calls at treatment hotels during the postintervention period than during the pre-intervention or intervention periods further supports the idea that Operation Check-Out reduced drug activity during the intervention period with impacts realized during the post-intervention period. Given less drug activity, fewer overdoses would be expected. Finally, the finding that there were more disorder calls at treatment hotels during the intervention period than during the pre-intervention or post-intervention periods is somewhat unexpected, as fewer disorder calls would be expected in an environment with greater cooperation, enforcement, and police presence. One plausible explanation is that hotel staff were more willing to contact the police as a result of Operation Check-Out because, for example, they may have felt they had a supportive partner in addressing issues at their hotel, or they may have understood that the intervention involved repeated visits and become concerned about bringing trouble to the hotel if they failed to report problems to police.

Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum, 2025. 103p.

By Lauren Lyons  

  he alarming recurrence of unjustified killings by police highlights systemic issues that should be deeply concerning to us all. Beyond excessive use of force, the police treat marginalized people in disproportionately harmful ways that reflect and perpetuate endemic injustice; they respond inappropriately to complex social and public health problems like homelessness, addiction, and mental illness, risking harmful escalation and exacerbating underlying issues. Police culture tends towards cynical authoritarianism, adopting an “us-versus-them” mentality that positions (at least a subset of) citizens as adversaries. All of this has resulted in severely diminished public trust in the police, fraught police-community relations, and rising skepticism of the legitimacy of policing institutions. Public outcry over these problems has catalyzed the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. The police murder of George Floyd was followed by mass protests in the summer of 2020, and since then, there has been widespread public debate on how to mitigate police violence and the distrust it engenders. Some call for incremental reforms, like changing laws and policies governing police use of force or strengthening misconduct reporting and decertification processes. Others demand that we reimagine the role of policing in our institutional landscape, reallocating powers, resources, and responsibilities from the  police to other institutions. The goal of this paper is to refine and defend this reallocative demand, which I refer to as the unbundling proposal. There has been a promising uptick in philosophical discussions of policing in recent years. Some focus on principles to guide police conduct, often drawing on theories of self-defense and professional ethics. Philosophers also propose measures to address police misconduct such as expanding legal statutes to outlaw harmful tactics, revoking the licenses of bad actors, providing reparations to victims of police violence, implementing self-evaluation and evidence-based improvements to departmental policy, restructuring police departments, broadening police participation in harm reduction and other forms of nonviolent order maintenance, and avoiding tactics that heighten the risk of illegitimate policing. These strategies, especially when combined, can improve policing. Rather than a discussion of their comparative merits and disadvantages, I present and defend an alternative ameliorative approach. The unbundling proposal asks not how police should act but rather what the scope of policing should be: Which situations require police presence? In the ethics of war, we distinguish between jus in bello (the ethics of conduct in war) and jus ad bellum (the ethics of whether war is justified). The unbundling proposal addresses an issue that is analogous to jus ad bellum considerations: when police should be deployed (instead of how they should behave). This approach complements rather than conflicts with many proposed reforms, but it also addresses a broader and less examined issue. Moreover, despite substantial public support, there has been no sustained discussion of unbundling in analytic ethics and political philosophy, and the attention the proposal has received is largely critical. The unbundling proposal is connected closely to movements to defund and eventually abolish the police. The slogan “defund the police” really means “defund and refund,” with activists calling for cutting police funding and reallocating it to other nonpolice institutions and community organizations. As such, “defund, refund” is one public finance-focused component of the broader unbundling proposal. For abolitionists, unbundling and other measures that reduce the scope and power of the police are critical steps toward ultimately dismantling the institution. Though I am not defending abolition here, the discussion should (1) clarify the practical action strategy of police abolitionists and (2) offer a more robust and appealing picture of the defund demand. The structure of this paper is as follows. In section 1, I present the unbundling proposal, identifying the specific dimensions of policing that proponents argue should be unbundled and reallocated. There I also discuss the definition of policing upon which unbundling is based. Then, I present a novel set of normative arguments for unbundling that reflect various rationales emanating from policing-critical social movements. The case for unbundling is strongest if we take them in tandem. The first two arguments (section 2) draw on principles of institutional design. I argue first that we should unbundle policing because public institutions with violent capacities should have narrow mandates; nonviolent, noncoercive responses to social problems should be the default. I then claim that unbundling constitutes a better distribution of epistemic labor. Catchall order-maintenance policing is epistemically overdemanding, while more narrowly defined roles foster better expertise and outcomes. The argument in section 3 centers on the effects of policing in unequal societies with historical injustice—specifically, how policing disproportionately burdens Black people, other people of color, and members of marginalized groups, driving structural injustice. I aim to reconstruct one argumentative thread that leads us from (1) these unfair effects to (2) the unbundling proposal. In doing so, I address the broader question of what forms of solutions are appropriate when institutions are infected with injustice, suggesting that in this case and others, justice-undermining effects require us to turn towards extra-institutional, reallocative measures. My hope is that the paper will be interesting for skeptics and advocates of unbundling and related proposals, adding some clarity to divisive debates and expanding the library of solutions to the pressing problems with policing defended within philosophy 

Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy

By The Policing Project at NYU School of Law 

  The story of the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative begins in 2019. At that time, the City of Chicago faced a number of serious challenges involving crime and community confidence in the police. Decades-long concerns about discriminatory policing, police accountability, use of force, external oversight, and community responsiveness had reached a critical point that demanded action. Following the police shooting of Laquan McDonald, the United States Department of Justice investigated and found a pattern or practice of unconstitutional policing by the Chicago Police Department (CPD), linking a lack of public trust to reduced crime prevention effectiveness. Within this environment, CPD personnel visited New York City to learn about the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) recently developed Neighborhood Policing model. That approach focused on reorganizing patrol activities in police districts to allow officers to engage meaningfully with the community and address local issues. The NYPD credited this method with enhancing community involvement and revitalizing focus on community policing. It is worth noting that Chicago’s original, groundbreaking community policing model, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS), shared many features with the NYPD model, such as promoting partnership with community. But CAPS became under-resourced over time and today is a stand-alone program focused on community events rather than crime strategy. Identifying the NYPD model as a promising approach to improving public safety and relationships with the community, CPD leadership asked the Policing Project at New York University School of Law to work with the Department and local communities to develop a strategy to re-imagine the NYPD model to meet the needs and particular challenges of Chicago. Since 2019, the Policing Project has been supporting the development and implementation of the model, made possible by the partnership of a dedicated coalition of Chicago philanthropic organizations. The Neighborhood Policing Initiative (NPI) is a core policing strategy focused on problem-solving and crime reduction activities, undertaken in collaboration with neighborhood residents in a manner that builds trust between police and community. Through NPI, the community and the police share responsibility for addressing public safety issues in communities. NPI’s goal is to transform the community-police dynamic to produce meaningful public safety. Rather than solely relying on traditional police responses, NPI seeks to bring together Chicago communities to identify problems and develop solutions to guide police efforts going forward.  NPI’s vision is for this philosophy to permeate every level of the Department, equipping CPD and the communities it serves to reach a shared understanding of what policing should look like. Under NPI, residents are an ongoing, central part of the actual decision-making process on how they are policed.

New York: NYU University School of Law, Policing Project, 2025. 118p.   

Sandra Walklate , Charlotte Barlow

The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of positive policing in relation to domestic abuse by opening up what is meant by this approach through an examination of what is taken for granted about it within much of the academic literature. Using data from a small-scale study involving case file analysis and interviews with police officers, the paper suggests in practice, positive policing involves a wide range of actions on the part of police officers. In exploring this data, the paper introduces the concept of ‘contextual safeguarding’ as a key feature of ‘positive policing’ in relation to domestic abuse. The paper makes the case for understanding ‘positive policing’ in the context of domestic abuse through the lens of ‘contextual safeguarding’ and that this would have beneficial consequences for wider debates on this issue.

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 19, 2025,

By Katherine Hoogesteyn, Meret S. Hofer, Travis A. Taniguchi, and Jennifer R. Rineer

  Maintaining adequate staffing levels to ensure public safety is a critical challenge for law enforcement agencies, especially with rising officer turnover driven by sociopolitical factors and changing workforce demographics. This narrative review examines strategies to enhance officer retention by synthesizing findings from both policing and related fields. These strategies are organized into five categories: (1) compensation and financial incentives, (2) career development and professional growth, (3) workplace environment and support, (4) wellness and resilience, and (5) feedback and organizational learning. The review underscores the importance of context-specific, tailored approaches and calls for rigorous studies to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of these strategies. Recommendations include adapting organizational structures to foster innovative retention strategies, optimizing resource management, and implementing continuous evaluation processes to promote sustained officer retention.  

  RTI Press Publication No. OP-0096-2503. Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press.2025. 22p.

 By the United Nations: International Narcotics Control Board

Supported efforts to secure borders, strengthen trusted private sector partners and disrupt trafficking in dangerous new psychoactive substances, synthetic opioids and related chemicals by: • Exchanging, as of 2025, over 125,000 government intelligence pieces on seizures in real time, involving over 3 million trafficking signals through the IONICS suite of tools, in line with mandates in article 35, subparagraph (g), of the 1961 Convention as amended • Facilitating the action of 95 national law and regulatory enforcement agencies and six international partner organizations in Operation Zeneth, in which over 1.5 million lethal doses of nitazenes were detected and seized in 2024 • Coordinating the agencies of Kenya and Uganda in Operation African Star II, which detected 48,000 falsified, unauthorized or illicitly manufactured pharmaceutical products entering East Africa, with detection through United States law enforcement agencies, the Pulse platform of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, the IONICS suite of tools and the Scanning of Novel Opioids on Online Platforms (SNOOP) systems and related technologies • Providing early-warning alerts to Governments, for enforcement actions, on ketamine trafficking, MDMB-INACA and related chemicals, vaping products containing new psychoactive substances, new psychoactive substances, performance-enhancing substances and 7-hydroxymitragynine • Delivering 115 INCB GRIDS Programme expert meetings and training events increasing enforcement capabilities and access to state-of-the-art tools and technologies to over 880 agencies, thereby securing borders and strengthening the resilience of communities and businesses at risk of being targeted by drug traffickers • Coordinating operational responses through its regional technical officers posted in Abuja, Almaty (Kazakhstan), Bangkok, Cairo, Mexico City and New Delhi, and at the GRIDS Cyber-Communications Centre in Vienna.........Strengthened the knowledge and capacity of national authorities1 to implement the drug control conventions by: • Delivering training on the drug control conventions to more than 1,500 officials from 160 countries in all regions by means of five e-modules and online and in-person training • Engaging Governments, international and regional organizations, and civil society actors in an ongoing dialogue on treaty implementation in the areas of the availability of controlled substances for licit purposes, supply reduction and demand reduction • Providing countries with the knowledge and capacity to implement the international drug control conventions, including through the findings and recommendations contained in the Board’s annual report and report on precursors for 2024, which were launched globally by its members, as well as its technical publications on narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances • Participating in the regular session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, including in thematic discussions and in a special event to commemorate the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking and launch the UNODC World Drug Report 2025, as well as in side events and an informal dialogue with the Vienna NGO Committee on Drugs held on the margins of the session, and in intersessional meetings

Vienna: UNODC, 2026. 166p.

By  Maia Sacchetto

  Premising that there are more flexible forms of Nigerian crime, such as small and scattered groups not in connection with each other that operate mainly as drug dealers of small districts in the suburbs of northern Italy, this research focuses on the most structured forms of criminal organizations, those directly descended from the cultist circles born in Nigeria in the '60s and resulted in real mafia associations already in the motherland and then extended throughout Europe. The choice of this theme and this very specific category of Nigerian organized crime is based on the belief that well-structured and organized groups are more dangerous and difficult to counter for three reasons basically: the first is that it is rarer for associates to decide to betray the group to favor information to the police or intelligence. This is because of the closer ties between group members (and in this case this element takes on an even more incisive relevance since the subject is an ethnically based organized mafia in which ethniccultural ties provide the basis for interaction between associates), but also and especially because of the coercive and intimidating forces between members of mafia associations towards the ones prone to cheat on the group; the second is developed from the assumption that a more sophisticated internal structure of the association also corresponds to more elaborate modus operandi and operational strategies that allow prosecutors of illicit activities to camouflage or hide the proceeds of illicit activities; the third reason is closely related to the first and second and consists in the fact that mafia associations that are highly organized and capable of taking advantage of substantial material resources are also more likely to act in a capillary, widespread, large-scale and sprawling manner to the point of infiltrating the legal economy. As will be described in the first chapter of this research, the Black Mafia originated in Nigeria as a protest movement against constituted power and composed mainly of members of Nigeria's leading universities. Over time it expanded, heightened the violence of its manifestations, and began to move out of the realm of mere ideological rebellion by directly affecting public institutions. In a short time, the cults turned into full-fledged clans and began to act in Nigeria as the Italian mafia acts in Italy, intimidating political and economic opponents who would stand between their illicit activities and the achievement of their goals: the accumulation of wealth and power. From the outset, these associations are thus characterized by a high degree of pervasiveness in the political, social and economic structure of their country, as well as multifacetedness by dealing with a massive and varied range of illicit activities, including support in the arms trafficking of terrorist groups such as Boko Haram. With the conclusion of the Cold War, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and restrictions in the mobility of people, and the emergence of the new globalized and interconnected world, the Black Mafia, which had already shown a remarkable predisposition to expand and sprawl, crossed its national borders. Following a progressive evolution, it has developed into a form of transnational organized crime which according to the UNODC represents the main threat to the security and political and economic stability of states (UNODC, 2006)1 . Undergoing continuous metamorphosis and adapting immediately to the changing needs of the market and globalization, it has then become increasingly sophisticated and pervasive (UNODC, 2018)2 . Out of sheer opportunism, it started allying itself with other forms of crime in order to strengthen its organization and to extend to more and more operators: drug traffickers, arms traffickers, human traffickers, up to encompassing operators that act daily in a regime of legality, all in order to increase their revenues 

By Ana Muñiz

Through an analysis of interviews with Southern California attorneys, supplemented by archival materials, this article contributes to the literature on gangs, critical criminology, and Gothic tropes by examining how the ambiguous nature of gang profiling allows state actors to target racialized others in various legal and administrative venues with little evidence and few procedural protections. I conceptualize gang phantasmagoria as the constant, amorphous, unpredictable, and haunting threat of racialized gang allegations and argue that the dynamic shapes the work of legal practitioners and constitutes a state mechanism of racial terror. Specifically, first I argue that government officials deploy the specter of gangs to both portray asylum seekers as monstrous threats and justify restrictions in asylum eligibility. I then illustrate how the potential for gang phantasmagoria to upend asylum applications and trigger the deportation of their clients elicits constant low-grade anxiety for attorneys. Consequently, attorneys are forced to adopt more cautious approaches to legal work in a way that indirectly facilitates the social control of young Latinx immigrants.

Critical Criminology, olume 30, pages 159–175, (2022

By The United States Government Accountability Office

Agencies at the federal, state, and local levels have facilities capable of analyzing emerging street drugs—psychoactive substances newly circulating in the drug market. For example, the Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have forensic laboratories that can analyze seized drugs and identify emerging substances. Current laboratory-based technologies can detect and identify emerging street drugs when appropriate methods (protocols) and reference standards are available. Portable technologies can detect drugs at the point of seizure but face accuracy challenges due, in part, to user error. Technology manufacturers told GAO they are developing more lay-friendly user interfaces and operational methods.

From fiscal year 2019 through 2024, the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services awarded a combined total of about $12.5 million in grants for the development of new methods and technologies for analyzing emerging street drugs. New methods and technologies may make laboratory processes more consistent, among other enhancements. Method development can be done on faster timelines than technology development.

While new methods and technologies could enhance some capabilities, forensic scientists face key challenges with analyzing emerging street drugs, including:

• Lack of resources. Laboratories GAO spoke to consistently referenced insufficient staffing and time.

• Unstandardized reporting. According to stakeholders, varying reporting requirements at thestate and local levels can lead to gaps in data.

• Limited information sharing. Law enforcement may not always share up-to-date information about emerging drugs with medical examiners and hospitals.

If these challenges could be addressed, laboratories could be in a better position to meet the nation’s needs for emerging drug analysis. However, GAO is not making recommendations to address these challenges because they are primarily faced by state and local laboratories.

By: Nathan P. Jones1 & W. Layne Dittmann2 & Jun Wu3 & Tyler Reese2

This study is a mixed methods case study of the Fernando Sanchez Organization (FSO) better known as the Tijuana Cartel in the 2008–2010 period, aimed at better understanding internal structures and the roles of individuals in crossborder polydrug networks under pressures from rivals and state leadership targeting. In addition to historical archival data to build a qualitative case study, it uses arrest warrant data (an emergency wiretap application and a Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO indictment) from the FSO drug network investigation in order to visualize the structure of the cross border network and to explore research questions regarding the relationship between actor centrality/network topography metrics and variables of interest including organizational role, age, gender, number of prior arrests, location of criminal activity, and location of residence using social network analysis (SNA). Findings included: narcotics distributors, drug couriers, and enforcers for the network all had higher centrality in the network, age was only slightly negatively correlated with eigenvector centrality, gender had no bearing on centrality, the number of prior arrests also had no bearing on degree or betweenness centrality, but did positively correlate with eigenvector centrality. Findings also demonstrated faction subgroup analysis had considerable overlap with both law-enforcement-reported-address and location of criminal activity (coded as actor attributes). This finding suggests it may be possible to predict the location of criminal activity and residence through faction analysis in other binational trafficking networks.