By Nila Bala and Emily Mooney

Seventeen-year-old William Miller was simply trying to go to a morning dentist appointment, when two adults—a school resource officer and school discipline assistant—blocked off the exit and threatened him with suspension if his car proceeded further. William explained that his absence was excused and that he could provide a note supporting the legitimacy of the excuse upon his return. But the officer and assistant continued to block the exit and tell him that, unless he got a parent on the line, he would be considered truant if he left. At one point, body cam footage shows the teenager attempting to pull his car around the deputy’s golf cart, only for the police officer to say, “You’re going to get shot if you come another fucking foot close to me. You run into me, you’ll get fucking shot.” William does not proceed further, but the arguments between the 17-year-old and two adults continue for several minutes. Seemingly unbeknownst to them, William’s mother had already called the school earlier to inform them of his absence and grant her permission. Nevertheless, River Ridge High School later suspended William for multiple weeks and then expelled him due to the incident. The adults involved faced no admonishments or repercussions for their behavior. Incidents like these should cause all people to question the role and priorities of police who interact with children in school settings. After all, children are different from adults, and William’s behavior, although perhaps immature, is far from unexpected. Developmental research (and any parent’s anecdotal accounts) suggest youth, especially teenagers, are often highly-impulsive and risk-loving. Given these facts, responses to their misbehavior—William’s attempt to go around the golf cart in this instance—should be crafted with care and informed by youth development principles. However, accounts like this, along with others in Miami and Chicago, demonstrate that this is not always how police youth interactions are handled. And, even the most well-intentioned police officers may cause more harm than good by unnecessarily introducing youth to the justice system, interacting with youth in a manner that leads to a negative impression or by exacerbating racial and ethnic disparities in the system. Accordingly, this policy study seeks to provide an overview of the current state of policing within school settings. It will then focus on identifying conservative priorities for police to uphold in this context, acknowledging that schools and communities often ask police to do more than they are best equipped for or should do. And it will offer potential policy considerations for positive change.

R STREET POLICY STUDY NO. 196 March 2020

Washington, DC: R Street, 2020. 8p.

By Lars Trautman

In many ways, the criminal justice system is the epitome of government control; it is also a system marked by high costs and poor outcomes, especially for juveniles. Seeking to build a more effective system, Florida established its civil citation and similar diversion programs to provide an alternative path for juveniles accused of committing low-level offenses. These programs empowered civil society and community members to contribute at all levels, including as program operators, treatment and service providers, and as a source of volunteers for government managed programs. The results of this public-private partnership have been largely positive, including boasting the lowest recidivism rate of all of the programs under the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice’s purview, which suggests the value of empowering civil society to help address criminal justice issues.

Washington, DC: R Street, 2019. 22p;

By Lars Trautman and Jonathan Haggerty

Handcuffs close about a person’s wrists and the few, simple words “you are under arrest” are spoken as the individual is placed in the back of a police car. It is a scene that plays out once every three seconds in the United States and sets into motion a criminal process that exhibits at times all of the control and potential for damage of a runaway locomotive. Indeed, regardless of whether a murder indictment or an ordinance violation spurred the arrest, the immediate aftermath is the same. The individual loses their freedom and gains a new entry in their criminal history, while the officer must spend hours transporting and processing the individual with the specter of additional court time hanging over the future. And, while arrest is warranted for many of the more serious transgressions, it is an ill-fitting and disproportionate response to myriad other situations. Yet, traditionally, the only other option officially available to officers is to do nothing.

The shortcomings of this approach have not been lost on many law enforcement leaders and other crisis first responders, and in recent years, police departments from Seattle, Washington to Gloucester, Massachusetts have instituted new strategies and initiatives meant to break this old paradigm and present their officers with options beyond the binary choice to arrest or take no action. Operating under a variety of labels that usually reference ‘diversion’ in some form, these efforts have ranged from actively searching out vulnerable members of the community and connecting them with services to de-escalating potentially criminal encounters through citations or treatment opportunities. Often, it has meant law enforcement officers working in concert with other first responders; in some instances, non-law enforcement personnel may direct a response themselves—indeed, for crises without a criminal justice component, this can represent the optimal response. It has also involved turning to a set of independent crisis response procedures, such as protective custody or citations in lieu of arrest, that entail a noncriminal or deescalated enforcement response and can operate as part—or instead—of a more comprehensive diversion program. Although these strategies are often locally designed and implemented, they do not operate in a legal or political vacuum. Instead, localities are subject to a web of state laws and regulations that directly bear on their ability to institute pre-arrest diversion and other crisis response strategies effectively. Laws that grant local officials noncriminal responses to crises can propel diversion efforts or provide alternative, supplemental crisis responses. Laws that require criminal responses or otherwise circumscribe when and how non-law enforcement responders are able to intervene can impede them. In light of this, the present study dives into these problems by reviewing and analyzing the primary statewide barriers to and accelerants of pre-arrest diversion and crisis response strategies. It begins by providing an overview of pre-arrest diversion strategies. It then delves into five categories of law or regulation that most directly affect these strategies and often serve as the basis of fully-fledged crisis responses in their own right: emergency mental health hold laws, protective custody statutes, citation authority, substance abuse Good Samaritan laws and ambulance transport destination rules.

R STREET POLICY STUDY NO. 187 November 2019

Washington, DC: R Street, 2019. 34p.

By SteVon Felton

The 1991 beating of Rodney King and the subsequent acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers responsible for the attack sparked massive riots and protests across the nation. Following an investigation by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, Congress granted the attorney general the power to investigate “a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers that violates Constitutional or federal rights.” In cases of a proven pattern or practice of police misconduct, the court may use a federal, court-enforced order, known as a consent decree, as a mechanism to force police departments to address institutional failures. Under such orders, a law enforcement agency and the Justice Department, overseen by an independent monitor, negotiate and establish concrete benchmarks to determine which reforms will constitute the successful end of the decree. Since the first consent decree in 1994, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department has conducted over 65 investigations and entered into 40 reform agreements with police departments across the country. According to the Division, these negotiations are most effective when they can “ensure accountability, transparency and the flexibility to accomplish complex institutional reforms.” Indeed, a number of studies have now confirmed that consent decrees helped resolve management and oversight issues in cities such as Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Cincinnati.4 However, while federal consent decrees have their place in promoting systemic policy change, they consistently fail to effect local and cultural change within departments. Several factors contribute to this phenomenon. For starters, as is often the case, centralized models like federal consent decrees cannot adequately adjust to localized systems of knowledge and regional distinctions between departments. Because they target local governments rather than individuals, the reform agreements reached by the DOJ and local law enforcement agencies often fail to sustain cultural change.5 Moreover, within some police departments, consent decrees lack the very thing that is perhaps most important to their success—the support of officers. Without buy-in from individual officers, police departments often disregard best practices that they view as externally forced upon them. And because policing is a profession that allows substantial discretion, in some departments officers openly ignore state and federal policies.6 Given the localized nature of police-citizen interactions, a top-down approach to police reform is virtually guaranteed to be unsuccessful. In light of these failures, the New Orleans Police Department’s Ethical Policing is Courageous (EPIC) program provides an alternative structure that begins with officers’ localized knowledge level and ends with systemic change. By allowing officers to police themselves, EPIC utilizes them and their experiences as resources to promote meaningful change

R STREET SHORTS NO. 70 April 2019

Washington, DC: R Street, 2019. 5p.

By Matthew B. Ross

 1. Introduction In November 2021, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office of Public Integrity and Accountability (NJOPIA) engaged the author of this study for the purpose of conducting an independent analysis of traffic stops made by the New Jersey State Police (NJ-SP). Based on the author’s extensive experience working with state and local policymakers to develop early warning systems for identifying police disparities, the NJ OPIA requested that the analysis focus on the central question of whether there was disparate treatment on the part of NJ-SP towards racial and ethnic minorities.2 After cleaning and linking all of the raw data provided by the New Jersey Office of Law Enforcement Professional Standards (NJ-OLEPS), the analytical sample used in this analysis consisted of 6,177,109 traffic stops made by NJ-SP from 2009 to 2021. In the full analytical sample, 60.52 percent of traffic stops were made of White non-Hispanic motorists while 18.8 percent were Black/African-American and 13.44 percent were Hispanic/Latinx. The overall volume of minority motorists stopped by NJ-SP increased from 35.34 percent in 2009 to 46.28 percent in 2021. The overarching finding from the analysis of the NJ-SP data from 2009-21 is that there was extremely strong evidence of a large and persistent disparity both is the decision to stop as well as the decision to engage in post-stop enforcement like search, vehicular exits, use of force, and arrest. In general, the results were estimated with a very high degree of statistical confidence, survived multiple robustness tests, and were found across most years and troops/stations. In the opinion of this study’s author, these disparities represent strong empirical evidence that NJ-SP is engaged in enforcement practices that result in adverse treatment towards minority motorists. Following best practices, this study applies an ensemble of the most reliable statistical tests available in the scientific literature. The intuition of this approach is that the shortcomings of any individual test are overcome by the totality of the evidence produced by a multitude of tests examining a broad set of enforcement outcomes.

Boston: Northeastern University, 2023. 44p.

By Matthew B. Ross, Jesse J. Kalinowski, Kenneth Barone

Connecticut’s novel approach to collecting and analyz-ing traffic stop data for evidence of disparate treatment is widely considered to be a model of best practice. Here,we provide an overview of Connecticut’s framework,detail solutions to the canonical empirical challenges of analyzing traffic stops, and describe a data-driven approach to early intervention. Unlike most juris-dictions that simply produce an annual traffic stop report, Connecticut has developed an ongoing system for identifying and mitigating disparity. Connecticut's Framework for identifying significant disparities on an annual basis relies on the so-called “preponderance ofevidence” approach. Drawing from the cutting-edge of the empirical social science literature, this approach applies several, as opposed to a single, rigorous empiri-cal test of disparity. For departments identified as having a disparity, Connecticut has developed a process for intervening on an annual basis. In that process, police administrators engage with researchers to conduct an empirical exploration into possible contributing factors and enforcement policies. In Connecticut, this approach has transformed what had once been a war of anecdotes into a constructive data-driven conversation about policy. Variants of the Connecticut Model have recently been adopted by the State of Rhode Island, Oregon, and California. Connecticut’s approach provides a useful model and policy framework for states and localities conducting disparity studies of police traffic stops

Criminology & Public Policy. 2020;19 pages:1289–1303.

By Benjamin W. Fisher, Ethan M. Higgins, Aaron Kupchik, Samantha Viano , F. Chris Curran5 , Suzanne Overstreet, Bryant Plumlee , and Brandon Coffey.

Law enforcement officers (often called school resource officers or SROs) are an increasingly common feature in schools across the United States. Although SROs’ roles vary across school contexts, there has been little examination of why. One possible explanation is that SROs perceive threats differently in different school contexts and that the racial composition of schools may motivate these differences. To investigate this possibility, this study analyzes interviews with 73 SROs from two different school districts that encompass schools with a variety of racial compositions. Across both districts, SROs perceived three major categories of threats: student-based, intruder-based, and environment-based threats. However, the focus and perceived severity of the threats varied across districts such that SROs in the district with a larger proportion of White students were primarily concerned about external threats (i.e., intruder-based and environment-based) that might harm the students, whereas SROs in the district with a larger proportion of Black students were primarily concerned with students themselves as threats. We consider how these results relate to understandings of school security, inequality among students, racially disparate experiences with school policing, and school and policing policy

Social Problems, Vol. 69, No. 2, May 2022, 19p.

By Alan Doig, Michael Levi, and Jodie Luker

In 2023, the UK government issued a national Fraud Strategy in response to concerns over increases in reported fraud and the low levels of law enforcement resources available to investigate cases. The Strategy was announced as a fundamental shift in how the government intended to respond to frauds and attempted frauds against individuals. The article focusses on the evidence base that may be assumed to underpin and shape any strategy by assessing and analysing the data what would have been available at the time the Strategy was drafted.The article argues that the Strategy has not taken any time to explore past strategies and any lessons to be learned and nor did it appear to substantively accessed, used, analysed and interpreted the available data, and nor used that data as an evidence base to develop an approach will have to be strategic, prioritised and innovative. The article concludes that, in strategic terms, the Strategy may be unlikely to achieve its objectives.

Security Journal (2025) 38:8