By Tom Christoff, Benjamin Carleton, and Theron Bowman

The ability of a police department to act in a fair and just manner is vitally important to creating internal and external trust, which in turn increases the perception of legitimacy by those who work for the department and those the department serves. Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have faced increased scrutiny from the public in the last several years, with the events of 2020 exacerbating already simmering community relationships. The City of Little Rock has experienced recent issues of internal and external legitimacy stemming from the officer-involved shooting of Bradley Blackshire, a Black man, who was killed by a Little Rock Police Department (LRPD) officer in February 2019. The incident, in which Mr. Blackshire was fired upon at least 15 times, led not only to backlash from the public, but also internal strife within the LRPD. Since the February 2019 incident, the City of Little Rock, LRPD, the Chief of Police, and other members of LRPD have been the subjects of various lawsuits. In response to calls from members and leadership of the LRPD for an investigation, the City of Little Rock, through a competitive bid, selected CNA’s Center for Justice Research and Innovation to conduct an independent audit of the LRPD. This report details the findings and recommendations of this targeted audit of the LRPD. The audit team used a variety of sources, including policies, training records, administrative data, and focus groups and interviews with LPRD personnel to assess the department. Throughout this report we identify both strengths and weaknesses of LRPD’s operations with in the following areas:

1. Personnel policies and procedures

2. Training and professional standards

3. Accountability system data

4. Performance evaluations

5. Promotional process

6. De-escalation

7. Cultural competency

8. Harassment

9. Nepotism

10. Handling of private and confidential information

11. Early Intervention System

12. Body-worn cameras

13. Vehicle pursuits

14. Asset forfeiture

15. Take-home vehicle

Overall, this assessment will help LRPD standardize processes and metrics related to these topic areas, ultimately improving officers’ and community members’ levels of trust in the department.

Arlington, VA: CNA, 2021. 104p.

By Anthony Petrosino, Trevor Fronius and Trent Baskerville

School-based policing programs started as far back in the USA as the 1950s and became more popular in part as concerns about school safety increased. After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the scrutiny of municipal police extended to school policing, and the concerns that policing exacerbates the school-to-prison pipeline, particularly for Black and Brown children, led several districts to remove officers from their schools. However, some of these same districts have reinstated police following widespread reports of fighting and behavioural issues among students after nearly 2 years of sporadic education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper discusses some of the recent trends and high lights evidence from several systematic reviews of evidence on the efforts of school policing, including a large-scale effort for the Campbell Collaboration. A more recent evaluation published since the reviews were done is also discussed. Finally, the article highlights a report to Congress by the National Institute of Justice and concludes with policy implications and a future agenda for research.

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 18, 2024, 

By Brenden Beck,  Joseph Antonelli,  Angela LaScala-Gruenewald

Research Summary: Following high-profile police killings, many U.S. cities banned officers from using chokeholds and other neck restraints. The evidence for such bans, however, is limited. To test whether use-of-force policies prohibiting neck restraints are related to fewer police killings, we use three modeling approaches to analyze 2183 U.S. cities between 2009 and 2021. Police killings were lower in places that adopted neck-restraint bans and the bans were associated with less crime and fewer assaults on officers, net of controls. Because officer labor unions can affect use-of-force policies and the frequency of police killings, we also analyzed them, finding unionization increased the likelihood a city had a neck-restraint ban and had a null or negative association with police killings.

Policy Implications: Adopting a neck-restraint ban is likely an effective way to reduce deaths due to police use of force with minimal collateral consequences. The bans operate through a diffuse discouragement of many types of lethal force or as a part of an array of use-of-force policies. Their direct relationship to asphyxiation deaths remains unclear. Officer unionization is unlikely to change the frequency of police killings, except through its association with stricter use-of-force policies.

Criminology & Public PolicyVolume 23, Issue 3: Special Issue: Policing Practice and Policy Aug 2024 Pages 515-799

By Patricio Domínguez and Carlos Scartascini 

Crime levels are a perennial development problem in Latin America and a renewed concern in the United States. At the same time, trust in the police has been falling, and questions abound about citizens' willingness to support government efforts to fight crime. We conducted a survey experiment to elicit willingness to contribute toward reducing crime across five Latin American countries and the United States. We compare homicide, robbery, and theft estimates and find a higher willingness to contribute for more severe crimes and for higher crime reductions. In addition, we examine the role of information on the willingness to contribute by conducting two experiments. First, we show that exposing respondents to crime-related news increases their willingness to pay by 5 percent. Furthermore, while we document a 7 percent gap in willingness to pay for crime reduction between people who under- and over-estimate the murder rate, we find that this gap can be wholly eliminated by informing them about the actual level of crime. On average, our estimates suggest that households are willing to contribute around $140 per year for a 20 percent reduction in homicide. This individual-level predisposition would translate into additional investment in public security efforts of up to 0.5 percent of GDP.

Washington DC: IDB, 2022.  38p.

By Timothy F. Leslie, Cara L. Frankenfeld & Angela J. Hattery 

Background: Police shootings are unevenly spatially distributed, with substantive spikes throughout the USA. While minorities are disproportionately the victims of the police force, social or structural factors associated with this distribution are not well understood. The objective of this work was to evaluate police shootings in relation to victim race or ethnicity and residential segregation and racial diversity.

Methods: Validated crowdsourced data from the Washington Post’s Fatal Force (2015–2020) were linked with census tract-level data from the American Community Survey. Residential minority dissimilarity, interaction, and a racial and ethnic diversity metric were calculated in order to assess the potentially variant importance of evenness in distribution, exposure likelihood, and general representation. Logistic and multinomial regression was used to model associations between segregation and diversity, adjusted for other ecological characteristics. Analyses were stratified by victim race or ethnicity (Black, Asian, or Hispanic).

Results: Across all races combined, the odds of a police shooting in a particular census tract were associated with non-Hispanic Black dissimilarity (OR = 0.98, 95% CI 0.97, 0.99) and racial and ethnic diversity (1.046, 95% CI 1.044, 1.060). Areas with higher racial diversity had a higher likelihood of having a police shooting event with Black victims (OR = 1.092, 95% CI 1.064, 1.120) or Asian victims (OR = 1.188, 1.051, 1.343) than less diverse areas. Higher non-Hispanic Black interaction was associated with a lower likelihood of having a police shooting event with Black victims (OR = 0.914, 95% CI 0.833, 0.946) than lower interaction areas. Higher Hispanic dissimilarity was associated with a lower likelihood of having a police shooting event with a Hispanic victim (OR = 0.398, 95% CI 0.324, 0.489) than in lower dissimilarity areas.

Conclusions: The variant effects of residential segregation are only seen when victims are analyzed separately by race. There appears to be a protective effect for Hispanic populations in Hispanic communities, while the reverse is true of Black individuals. We urge law enforcement responsible for locations with segregated communities to monitor individual interactions that police have with residents as well as the patterns of frequency and context of those interactions.

Injury Epidemiology volume 9, Article number: 8 (2022) 

By Brian D. Graves  and Michael Fendrich 

Introduction: For adults involved with the criminal justice system who are reentering their communities post-incarceration, there is a large need for community-based substance use treatment. Little is known, however, about the types, availability, and benefits of programs targeting the reentry population in community settings that operate independently from the criminal justice system. Methods: We conducted a scoping review of community-based treatment programs for substance use among reentering justice-involved adults to examine the contemporary state of literature and identify research gaps. We searched four databases for peer-reviewed articles conducted in the United States and published between 2017 and 2021. Results: The final sample included 58 articles. Interventions varied, but the two most prominent were medications for opioid use disorder (35%) and peer support or social support interventions (22.4%). Studies were more likely to show positive impact on substance use outcomes than criminal justice outcomes. Themes were identified around participant characteristics, treatment delivery, and treatment benefits. Conclusions: Findings from this scoping review suggest that the range of evidence-based strategies for substance use treatment targeting the reentry population is growing, but there is a need for additional research that examines implementation, cost effectiveness, and racial/ethnic disparities.

Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports, 2024. 14p.

By David McElhattan

Research summary: A growing literature documents the effect of criminal justice contact on inequalities in the labor market. While ample evidence indicates that a criminal record itself imposes considerable disadvantage, the formal legal mechanisms that may contribute to criminal record-based exclusion have received less empirical attention. The present study examines how one such mechanism—legal requirements for employers and license boards to perform criminal background checks—shapes labor market outcomes among formerly incarcerated people. The study draws from novel longitudinal data on the extensiveness of background check requirements at the state level, as well as individual-level data on incarceration, wages, and unemployment from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Results show that while the extensiveness of state-level background check requirements does not significantly affect the likelihood of unemployment, formerly incarcerated people residing in states where background check requirements are extensive are estimated to earn significantly lower wages than their counterparts in states with few screening mandates. Policy implications: Criminal background check requirements stand as significant policy barriers that diminish the earning potential of formerly incarcerated people. Policy makers seeking to mitigate the collateral consequences of criminal convictions should narrow the scope of these laws to target specific, highly sensitive occupations, as opposed to broader workplace contexts. Reforms should also address persistent data quality issues in state criminal history record systems and shift the burdens imposed by incomplete or erroneous rap sheets. To minimize adverse self-selection, background check procedures should clarify for applicants the role that a criminal history record may play in clearance decisions. Finally, future research should assess the marginal benefit of criminal background checks compared with other methods of screening prospective hires and licensees.

Criminology & Public Policy, 2024. 39p.

By Ralph Rector, David Muhlhausen and Dexter Ingram

One of President Bill Clinton's priorities when taking office was to put 100,000 additional police officers on America's streets to help fight crime. On September 13, 1994, the President signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (P.L. 103-322), authorizing the Attorney General to implement a six-year, $8.8 billion grant program to enable state and local law enforcement agencies to hire or redeploy 100,000 additional officers for community policing efforts.11 Attorney General Janet Reno announced the establishment of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) in October 1994 to administer these grants. Since then, the COPS program has developed into a set of different federal grants that had cost American taxpayers $7.5 billion by the end of fiscal year (FY) 2000.12 It is reasonable for policymakers, community leaders, and taxpayers to question how effective the COPS program has been in meeting its objective of placing 100,000 additional police officers on the street.13 As recently as August 14, 2000, President Clinton reaffirmed this objective and then took credit for having succeeded in placing "more than 100,000 new community police officers" on the streets14 (though in congressional testimony, the COPS Office sometimes redefines the objective of the program to be the funding of 100,000 officers).15 This objective has been closely tied to the overarching goal of reducing crime.16 To meet this objective, it is reasonable to expect COPS grants to be targeted to the communities most plagued by violent crime. At a fundamental level, the issue of whether or not the COPS program has indeed achieved its goals can be addressed by analyzing two assertions: 1. More Police. Many of the supporters of the COPS initiative assert that its grants are responsible for adding 100,000 police officers to community patrols. To test for the accuracy of this assertion, Heritage analysts estimated the number of new police. 2. Lower Crime. Supporters also assert that the COPS program awarded grants to the communities with the greatest need. Heritage analysts tested the accuracy of this assertion by examining awards in terms of per capita population and crime rates. Confounding the goal of putting 100,000 additional police officers on the street is the possibility that recipients will supplant the funds--substitute funds from one source for another. In the case of COPS grants, supplanting occurs when state and local governments use program funds to hire officers they would have hired using their own money if the COPS program did not exist.17 In the 1994 Crime Act, Congress specifically prohibited states and local governments from using federal funds to supplant local funds.18 Determining whether supplanting has in fact occurred is necessary for the effectiveness of the program to be evaluated accurately. How well the Justice Department has allocated the COPS funding can be discerned by analyzing crime rates and population sizes for communities that received the grants, as well as by observing the concentration of grants among law enforcement agencies. Thus, determining whether the COPS grants went primarily to communities that have high violent crime rates, rather than to safer communities, is important to the analysis. To answer these questions, Heritage analysts first combined U.S. Department of Justice data on the COPS grants that have been awarded to police agencies across the country with data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports on violent crime, officer employment, and population. This merged micro-database makes possible an analysis of crime rates and COPS grants on an agency-by-agency basis.

Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2000, 28p.

By Beth Redbird and Kat Albrecht

Racial disparity in arresting behavior is a significant concern for people of color. It also delegitimizes law enforcement, increases tension between police and citizens, and can even increase crime. Efforts at police reform stall, in part because racial disparity in policing was previously unmeasurable. The authors present three new measures of racial disparity in arrest, measured across more than 13,000 agencies nationwide, allowing for reliable analysis of disparity across time and geographic space. These measures are validated against Department of Justice law enforcement misconduct investigations, the “gold standard” for assessing racial disparity in policing.

Evanston, IL: Institute for Policy Research,  Northwestern University, 2020. 48p.

By Gabrielle T. Isaza,  Robin S. Engel,  Nicholas Corsaro,  M. Murat Ozer

  This report summarizes the details of a problem analysis conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police/University of Cincinnati (IACP/UC) Center for Police Research and Policy (the “Center”) on domestic violence patterns for the Tulsa Police Department (TPD). The TPD identified domestic violence as an area requiring further understanding given the seriousness of the crime, and frequency as measured by citizen-generated calls for service. For the TPD, domestic violence-related incidents represent their third most frequent call for service, consuming substantial police resources. Prior to recommending an appropriate intervention strategy to reduce domestic violence, it is critical to better understand details regarding the specific domestic violence problem in Tulsa. For police agencies, a problem analysis includes the systematic examination of the underlying conditions of local problems they are tasked with solving. Problem analyses generally rely on information gathered from various sources, and should include examinations of both qualitative and quantitative data. The problem analysis process is critical for developing solutions that fit the problem in each community, because what works in one jurisdiction may not fit a similar problem in another setting (Boba, 2003). The following study documents a problem analysis based on a series of statistical analyses conducted on five-years of domestic violence data reported to the TPD (2013-2017) and victimization data gathered by the Family Service Center in Tulsa. Domestic violence is defined as an incidence of assault and battery against individuals connected to the suspect by one of fifteen different categories of relationship (see Oklahoma Statute §21-644). These variations in relationships cover both common (e.g. husband-wife or child-parent) and seemingly more distant (e.g. spouse-former spouse of partner or former roommate) relationships between individuals. Unfortunately, the automated data used by the TPD does not include a field for the relationship between the victim and offender. TPD data included reports for incidents, arrests, victims, calls for service, and field interview reports. These analyses were supplemented with domestic victimization data provided from the Family Service Center. The main findings of this problem analysis are summarized below. . Domestic violence-related calls for service were the third most frequent call received by the TPD (n=109,623; preceded by traffic stops and alarms) between 2013 and 2017. These reports were relatively stable over the five-year period, with an average of 21,942 calls per year. . Citizen-generated indicators of domestic violence (i.e. calls for service and incident reports) remained relatively stable over the five-year period, while the TPD-generated responses (i.e. FIR and arrest) to these crimes decreased noticeably over the same period of time. Arrests for domestic violence declined by 40.9% from 2013 to 2017, and FIRS similarly declined by 46.8% from 2013 to 2017.. TPD-generated incident reports indicate that 84.5% (n=13,381) of identified suspects were suspected of only committing one domestic violence offense, whereas 15.5% (n=2,447) were suspected of committing two or more offenses. . TPD-generated victimization reports indicate 83.8% (n=15,564) individuals were victimized once, and 16.2% (n=3,008) were victimized two or more times. . These findings demonstrate that the “repeat phenomenon” of domestic violence victimization in Tulsa is similar between victims and suspects. That is, victims are just as likely to be victimized more than once (16.2%) compared to offenders involved in more than one offense (15.5%). . Victimization data provided by the Family Safety Center indicates large increases in the number of services provided (180.6% increase) and the number of individuals receiving services (118.1% increase), likely due to the expansion of victim-services provided in Tulsa during the five-year study time period. Note that the increase of use of victim services is inconsistent with the downward trend in TPD domestic violence arrests. . Data from the FSC also indicates that the percentage of Black victims receiving FSC services (19.3%) was lower than expected given the victimization data captured by the TPD (31.6% for single incidents and 40.6% for repeat incidents), suggesting that Black domestic violence victims may be less likely to request or to receive services. . Analyses also show that 15.5% (n= 2,447) of the individuals suspected of domestic violence offenses were repeat offenders, and they accounted for 23.2% of the domestic violence incidents reported during the study period. . When offenders did commit a subsequent domestic violence offense for which an arrest occurred, the time between arrests was extremely long (an average of over 500 days). However, as the number of repeat domestic violence offenses increase per an offender, the number of days between these arrests decreases. Nonetheless, the average time between offenses is substantially long, indicating that focused deterrence approaches to repeat domestic violence offenders may not be effective in Tulsa (Sechrist, Weil, and Shelton, 2016).  Police data demonstrate that while a person was a victim in one incident, the same person was also commonly reported as the suspect in another domestic violence incident. Approximately 3,205 unique victims (17.2% of all domestic victims) were also charged as a suspect in a different domestic violence case.  Approximately 15% (8 out of 53) of offenders in domestic violence homicide incidents had a previous arrest for domestic violence.  A review of the relationship between the victim and suspect identified in the field interview reports indicates that the most common relationship type is current spouse/cohabitant (43.3%), followed by former spouse/cohabitant (20.3%), and dating (18.0%). Very few cases involve other types of relationships.  Field interview reports (FIR) revealed a substantial number of cases (36.7%), which involve the suspect threatening a future action—these represent an avenue for follow-up by TPD officer   

Cincinnati: International Association of Chief of Police (IACP) / University of Cincinnati (UC) Center for Police Research and Policy. 2019. 41p.

By Hannah D. McManus,. Murat Yildrim, Nicholas Corsaro, Robin S. Engel,

This study documents a multi-faceted examination of incidents of residential burglary and individual robbery reported to the KPD from 2013 to 2017, including descriptive statistics and multivariate analyses. The goals of this research are four-fold: (1) describe trends in reported residential burglary/individual robbery incidents over time, (2) describe case characteristics in reported residential burglary/individual robbery incidents, (3) identify case-level characteristics of residential burglary/individual robbery incidents that predict case clearance rates, and (4) identify neighborhood-level characteristics that predict case clearance.  

Cincinnati, International Association of Chief of Police (IACP) / University of Cincinnati (UC) Center for Police Research and Policy 2020. 47p.

By John R. "Rick" Brown, Robin S. Engel, et al.

The Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD) commissioned this report in partnership with the City of Colorado Springs to provide a proactive, independent systematic review of the patterns and trends associated with use of force by the CSPD. In response to Request for Proposal, Consultant Services (R20-093 IP), Assessment of Colorado Springs Police Department’s Use of Force released on July 20, 2020, the Transparency Matters, LLC (hereafter TMLLC) team was selected to complete this work. This report documents the results from comprehensive analyses of use of force incidents reported by the CSPD, specifically focusing on understanding how, when, why, and against whom officers use force, as well as the context of police encounters with the public, from both the community and officer perspectives. The purpose of this study is to examine current practices and identify opportunities to reduce the frequency and severity of use of force incidents, racial/ethnic disparities in force, and injuries to both officers and citizens through improvements to policies, training, and supervision. This report includes nine sections: (1) Introduction, (2) Review of CSPD Policies and Practices, (3) Data and Research Methods, (4) Physical Force and Weapons Used, (5) Types of Force, Force Effectiveness, and Injuries, (6) Pointing of Firearms, (7) Community Perspectives, (8) CSPD Officer Perspectives, and (9) Recommendations. This executive summary provides an overview of the primary findings from each of these report sections. 

Lancaster, PA:Transparency Matters and University of Cincinnati, 2022. 280p

By Institute for Intergovernmental Research

 This publication presents abbreviated case studies of large and small law enforcement agencies that have undergone or are currently conducting change initiatives to address a wide range of pressing issues common to law enforcement, such as backlogged sexual assault cases, lack of community trust, inadequate information and intelligence sharing, and increases in violent or juvenile crime. These issues and others prompted change initiatives among the 13 agencies interviewed for this resource. In September 2022, executives from several of the case study agencies met in Washington, D.C., for a working session to provide additional insights learned through the change experience (see appendix A for a list of roundtable attendees). The experiences of these agencies are documented in this publication with the hope that law enforcement executives and managers will find the strategies, actions, and lessons learned helpful in adapting to changes in their internal and external environments.

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. 2023. 60p.