By Camello, M., Planty, M., Krebs, C. P., & Faris, B

Measuring community perceptions and opinions of law enforcement can help agencies, government officials, and the communities they serve to understand the community’s feelings and perceptions about law enforcement and safety, which may be influenced by both crime and non-crime-related issues. Having this information enables agencies to learn, evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, refine their policies and practices, and improve their performance while building trust through increased transparency and responsiveness to public concerns. The objectives of this landscape report are to provide foundational principles on survey methodology, highlight three different approaches that can be used to measure community perceptions (general population surveys, post-contact surveys, and leveraging of data from existing sources), and describe novel modes for carrying out the various approaches.

Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI International, 2023. 77p.

By Brett Cowell,  Maria Valdovinos Olson,  Eiryn Renouard Jennifer Calnon Cherkauskas,  Ryan Fisher

Law enforcement culture, particularly the normalization and acceptance of voluntary risk-taking, can result in officers taking unnecessary risks when driving and working on or near a roadway. These dangerous behaviors— including not wearing a seat belt, reflective vest, or body armor, driving at excessive speeds, and driving while fatigued or distracted—are major risk factors for officer-involved motor vehicle collisions and struck-by incidents. Given the significant number of officers who are injured or killed in these types of roadway-related incidents each year, the National Law Enforcement Roadway Safety Program (NLERSP) team sought to examine how law enforcement culture may be contributing to these behaviors and provide law enforcement leaders with guidance on how to shift organizational culture to improve roadway safety. Through a review of the available literature on law enforcement culture and roadway-related incidents and the findings from a focus group comprised of law enforcement executives, supervisors, trainers, and officers, the NLERSP team identified several actionable steps agencies can take to address roadway-related safety risks. In addressing these risks, law enforcement leaders must strive to create a culture of safety within their agency—one that emphasizes and values “safety first” in law enforcement operations. While changing culture in law enforcement is not easy, the highly successful crash prevention program implemented by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, whose case study is featured in this brief, demonstrates that it is possible. As focus group participants explained, establishing a culture of safety for roadway operations can be accomplished by setting expectations through policy and training, communicating these expectations, providing unyielding support, and emphasizing accountability at all levels of the agency  

Arlington, VA:  The National Policing Institute, 2024. 34p.

By Julian Go

 In the early 20th century, police departments across America’s cities enhanced their infrastructural power by adopting various tactical, operational, and organizational innovations. Based upon a nested cross-city analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, including negative binomial regression analysis of the determinants of militarization, this study reveals that these innovations constituted an early form of militarization resulting from imperial feedback. Local Police Borrowed Tactics, techniques, and organizational templates from America’s imperial military regime that had been developed to conquer and rule foreign populations. Imperial feedback occurred as a result of imperial imports, many of them veterans of America’s imperial-military apparatus, who constructed analogies between colonial subjects abroad and racialized minorities at home. The study identifies an early form of police militarization, reveals the imperial origins of police militarization, and offers a potentially transportable theory of imperial feedback that stands as one among other possible routes to police militarization.  

   AJS Volume 125 Number 5 (March 2020): 1193–1254  

By Nick Tilley, Graham Farrell, and Ronald V. Clarke

This is a chapter from The Criminal Act: The Role and Influence of Routine Activity Theory edited by Martin A. Andresen and Graham Farrell. This chapter is available open access under a CC BY license. Target suitability is a cornerstone of Marcus Felson's routine activities approach, and critical in determining crime rates. Recent research identifies reduced target suitability, via improved security, as central to the 'crime drop' experienced in many countries. Studies in different countries show car theft fell with far more and better vehicle security. Yet increases in household security were more modest and do not track burglary's decrease as well. In this chapter, the authors explain that apparent anomaly as due more to an improvement in the quality of household security leading to reduced burglary. It is further suggested that improvements to home insulation in the UK that brought double glazing may have, somewhat inadvertently, introduced better frames and locks for doors and windows, that in turn reduced household burglary.; This is a chapter from The Criminal Act: The Role and Influence of Routine Activity Theory edited by Martin A. Andresen and Graham Farrell. 

London: Springer Nature, 2015.

By Stephen Farrall and Emily Gray

This book explores the impact of right-wing political ideology on crime, the criminal justice system, and attitudes towards punishment in Britain. Grounded in a rigorous analysis of repeated cross-sectional surveys such as the British Social Attitudes Survey and the British Crime Survey, as well as individual-level cohort data such as the 1958 National Child Development Study and the 1970 British Cohort Study, it examines changes in long-term crime rates, criminal justice policies, and their integration with social and economic policies in Britain over four decades. It offers a detailed discussion of how radical social and economic changes affected the fear of crime and attitudes to punishment, and how well Thatcherite social and economic values were embedded in contemporary British society. Drawing on a wide literature across criminology, political science, sociology, and social policy, this book demonstrates how a thorough understanding of crime cannot take place without an examination of the wider social policies enacted, the life courses of the individuals affected, and their communities and the political environment in which they live. It is essential reading for criminologists, sociologists, political philosophers, and social theorists alike since it combines thinking from political sciences, life-courses theories, and detailed analyses of the outcomes of social policy change

Abingdon, Oxon, UK: New York: Routledge, 2024.