Edited by Yvonne Daly

Police Custody in Ireland brings together experts from policing studies, law, criminology, and psychology, to critically examine contemporary police custody in Ireland, what we know about it, how it operates, how it is experienced, and how it might be improved. This first-of-its-kind collection focuses exclusively on detention in Garda Síochána stations, critically examining it from human rights and best practice perspectives. It examines the physical environment of custody, police interview techniques, existing protections, rights, and entitlements, and experiences of specific communities in custody, such as children, ethnic minorities, non-English speakers, the Mincéir/Traveller community, and those with intellectual disabilities or Autism Spectrum Disorder. Police Custody in Ireland gives a snapshot of garda custody as it is now and makes important recommendations for necessary future improvements. An accessible and compelling read, this book will be of interest to those engaged in policing and criminology, as well as related areas of interest such as human rights, youth justice and disability studies.

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2024. 363p.

By Vicki Sentas, Louise Boon-Kuo  & Justin R. Ellis

The violent and contested overpolicing of LGBTQI+ communities at Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has a long and visible history which has been amplified through intensified drug policing over the last two decades. This article scrutinises police practices during Sydney WorldPride events in February and March 2023, which included Mardi Gras events. It draws on a unique data set drawn from the NSW Police Force and an independent legal observer initiative, ‘Fair Play’, that provided support for policed people at WorldPride. We ask: What do police practices tell us about the exercise of police power over LGBTQI+ people at WorldPride? Our study found intensive and aggressive high-visibility policing characterised by invasive questioning and drug detection dog patrols, and humiliating and potentially unlawful searches. The impacts illustrate how policing criminalises and gatekeeps belonging to sexual and gender-diverse communities.

Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 1–17.2024.

By Lindsay Turner, Julie Atella, Virginia Pendleton, Sophak Mom

When Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd in May 2020, the nearby city of Brooklyn Park began urgent work, including convening listening sessions and tasking city commissions with creating a work plan to improve the Brooklyn Park Police Department.

In December 2020, the City of Brooklyn Park hired Wilder Research to uncover the root causes of violence in Brooklyn Park, understand community perceptions of the Brooklyn Park Police Department, create research-driven recommendations to improve community safety, and develop a tool to assess and improve the Brooklyn Park Police Department’s performance. Wilder Research reviewed existing research on community safety and policing, analyzed Brooklyn Park specific community survey data related to the root causes of violence, and conducted interviews with residents and employees of Brooklyn Park.

High-level findings:

• There are risks of violence when people are not economically secure or connected to their community.

• There are disparities in Brooklyn Park that likely contribute to violence and disorder.

• Improving traditional policing may not improve safety.

• Brooklyn Park Police Department policies and interviewee themes support that procedural justice is a key strength; even so, some BPPD policies and Minnesota laws conflict with best practices.

Recommendations:

• Focus on prevention. To improve safety, the city should address inequities, and ensure that the social conditions where safety thrives are equally distributed across races and places in Brooklyn Park.

• Improve interventions. The city should explore using community-based mental health and substance use responses, school-based safety workers, and other efforts to reimagine police responsibilities. The city should also partner with community stakeholders to expand focused deterrence initiatives, and interventions including treatment and restorative justice.

• Assess BPPD for improvements. We developed a scorecard to measure BPPD performance. We recommend the city, BPPD, and community members impacted by systemic marginalization and police contact partner to assess and recommend changes to BPPD.

St. Paul MN: Wilder Research, 2021. 115p.

Scott E. Wolfe , Jeff Rojek , Geoff Alpert ,Hope Tiesman, and Stephen James

Following the unfortunate rise in the number of law enforcement officers killed in the USA between 2010 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Assistance and Office of Community Oriented Policing Services created the national Officer Safety and Wellness (OSW) group to identify and support efforts to improve officer safety (Stephens et al., 2012). One of the more notable observations from the OSW group was that little is known about officerinvolved vehicle collisions despite these events often being the leading cause of officer fatalities in the USA on an annual basis (Stephens et al., 2013)[ 1 ]. This issue has largely been ignored by the research community and, as a result, there is virtually no empirical knowledge concerning the prevalence of vehicle collisions, the injury, and fatality outcomes of these events, the characteristics of these collisions, or the characteristics of individuals involved in such incidents. The impact of this empirical gap is a lack of knowledge for developing policy, practice, and training aimed at reducing injuries and fatalities resulting from vehicle collisions. The present study partially addresses this gap in the literature by examining more than 35,000 vehicle collisions involving officers in the State of California between 2000 and 2009. The analysis examines the outcomes of these events and the characteristics of the collisions and offices involved.

HHS Public Access. Author manuscript. Policing. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 February 10.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

David C. Perry

Police in the Metropolis by David C. Perry offers readers a compelling and thought-provoking exploration of law enforcement in a bustling urban landscape. Perry delves into the complexities of policing in a metropolis, tackling issues of crime, justice, and power dynamics with a keen eye for detail. Through vivid storytelling and meticulous research, the author sheds light on the challenges faced by those who protect and serve in a city teeming with life and conflict. Police in the Metropolis is a riveting read that provides valuable insights into the nuanced world of urban law enforcement.

CHARLES E. MERRILL PUBLISHING COMPANY.. Columbus, Ohio. 1973. 193p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

Edward R. Maguire

Although most large police organizations perform the same tasks, there is tremendous variation in how individual organizations are structured. To account for this variation, author Edward R. Maguire develops a new theory that attributes the formal structures of large municipal police agencies to the contexts in which they are embedded. This theory finds that the relevant features of an organization's context are its size, age, technology, and environment. Using a database representing nearly four hundred of the nation's largest municipal police agencies, Maguire develops empirical measures of police organizations and their contexts and then uses these measures in a series of structural equation models designed to test the theory. Ultimately, police organizations are shown to be like other types of organizations in many ways but are also shown to be unique in a number of respects.

NY. SUNY Press. 2003. 294p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

TODD DOUGLAS

As accusations of police misconduct and racial bias increasingly dominate the media, The Police in a Free Society: Safeguarding Rights While Enforcing the Law takes an unflinching look at the police, the communities they serve, and the politicians who direct them. Author Todd Douglas, a veteran state police commander, exposes the occurrences of police misconduct and incompetence as well as incidences of charlatans who intentionally inflame racial tensions with the police for their own political or financial gain.

Readers will better understand what police officers must deal with on a daily basis, grasp the role of lawmakers in keeping faith with the public, and appreciate the tremendous challenges that police leaders face in attempting to reverse recent trends and shore up public confidence in police officers. This is a rare glimpse into the often-ugly reality of what happens on America's streets, with insights gained from the perspective of the cop and suspect alike.

Praeger. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, Califomla • Denver, Colorado. 2017. 298p.

RAND CORP.

Facilitator, law law enforcement, and and community organizers introduce themselves and and summarize overall aim of the dialogue. For example, “Now we’d like to tell you why of the example, "Now we'd like to tell we we are are engaged in in this this work. In In recent years, we've seen many examples of tension of between police and the communities they serve. Importantly, events that happen and the that elsewhere can also affect and inform local community-police relations. We're doing also affect and inform this this exercise to help community members and police better communicate their to and police expectations." expectations.” It It also helps participants participants to to think about " “what what if if something happened here that is similar to what we’re seeing nationally?” “Would we be prepared?” here “Would that we is know similar how to what to respond? we're ” seeing “How nationally? should we " " respond? Would we ” be p

Santa Monica. CA. RAND CORP. 2023. 28p.

Rand Corp.

In recent years, a number of serious conflicts between police officers and members of the communities they serve have raised the importance of effective community-police relations in the United States. Building on its policing and community-based participatory research portfolio, RAND designed a community-based dialogue to address this problem. The dialogue is designed to start a conversation about these issues among community stakeholders, including police, government agencies, social service providers, resident representatives, and other concerned organizations. RAND has also designed a youth-focused dialogue to address specific scenarios most relevant to youth-police interactions.

By National Police Chiefs’ Council (UK)

This Review was established to ‘identify ways in which forces across England and Wales can be more productive, improving outcomes’1 . In the three fnancial years to March 2023, Government funded the recruitment of an additional 20,000 police ofcers. This – together with additional resources provided by precept - is a considerable investment into policing. As new recruits build up experience and capabilities, we would expect to see its impact in terms of public safety. Compared to 2007, ofcer numbers have increased seven per cent whilst the population has increased by about 12 per cent (and with it, demand). However, like-for-like comparisons are not necessarily helpful: technology for example should have made police forces more productive since then. But to a large extent we have found that if the uplift has helped fll the most urgent capacity gaps (and improve performance), it has not taken away the need to prioritise and task resources effectively. A productivity drive is as necessary now as it was in the years of officer reduction. An environment of budget pressures suggests difficult choices ahead for public sector investment. Public agencies will need to evidence, more than ever, that they are providing value for money and becoming more productive. Pouring additional resources into a service might create more outputs but it does not per se increase productivity if these resources are not used wisely. Neither do officer numbers guarantee reduced crime2. Effective resource allocation is essential to deliver the greatest gains. Coordinated planning and multi-agency collaboration are vital to maximise the chances of better public outcomes. In this context, as a prerequisite to further investment demands and to strengthening public legitimacy, it is imperative that the policing sector is able to demonstrate how it is making best use of its resources and what direct benefits its activity delivers to the public. THE OPERATING LANDSCAPE OF POLICING IS SHIFTING Policing demand has changed. Since the mid-1990s, there have been long-term falls in overall crime levels but since 2014, offences have risen again (while still 20 per cent below their 2002/03 level). New technologies have created new criminal opportunities: the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports 3.8 million fraud offences and cyber-enabled, or cyber-dependent crimes, and even across “traditional” crimes, the Metropolitan Police Service assesses that two ffths of robberies and 70 percent of theft are for mobile phones. Technological advances can also give rise to investigative opportunities, and policing productivity (and its perceived effectiveness in using technology) can act as a deterrent to criminality. Some patterns of crime are less easy to read. Violent offences recorded by police increased, but the Crime Survey for England and Wales suggests a decrease. Recorded sexual offences have markedly increased . More victims are fnding the courage to come forward and report crimes such as rape, domestic abuse and the sexual exploitation of children. The recognition of vulnerability in victimisation has become a powerful element shaping policing since the death of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter in 2007. Because of these changes, policing today requires a very different skillset. In 2003, armed with a knowledge of three crime types (burglary, theft and criminal damage), a constable knew how to approach 80 per cent of the demand coming their way. In 2023, in order to manage the same proportion of their work, this constable has to be competent across six disparate and wider categories of crime: theft, fraud (including online), violence with injury, stalking and harassment, public order and violence without injury. Non crime demand on officers equally broadened in scope during that time.

London: Home Office, 2023., 85p.

By Thiago R. Oliviera

This thesis draws on procedural justice theory and work into legal socialisation and legal cynicism to investigate the dynamics of public perceptions of trustworthiness and legitimacy of legal authority over time. Illustrating how longitudinal data can be theoretically fruitful in studies on public-police relations, I rely upon several analytic strategies that exploit panel data to examine attitudinal change over time. To examine the development of legitimacy judgements during adolescence, the mutual reproduction of different aspects of police trustworthiness over time, and the degree to which police contact leads to attitudinal change, I draw on data from three longitudinal surveys, which are representative of the adult population living in selected neighbourhoods in S˜ao Paulo, Brazil, adolescents who live in S˜ao Paulo, and the adult population living in Australia. At the heart of the thesis are four empirical papers. The first paper suggests that perceptions of overpolicing and underpolicing undermine legitimacy judgements and mutually reproduce each other over time, with implications for people’s recognition of the ruling power of the law. The second paper focuses on the development of legitimacy judgements among adolescents, and shows that exposure to neighbourhood and police violence may damage the process of healthy legal socialisation. The third paper examines whether police-citizen encounters are teachable moments, with the potential of leading to either positive or negative attitudinal change depending upon the perceived appropriateness of the interaction. The fourth paper addresses the issue of causality – an important gap in the procedural justice literature. Analysis suggests that aggressive police stops (e.g., at gunpoint) have a shortterm effect on perceived police fairness and a long-term effect on perceived overpolicing. Overall, results indicate that reliance on coercive policing strategies have several social costs, including public detachment and alienation from from the law. Adolescents who witness cases of police brutality show diminished development in legitimacy judgements, and the experience or expectation that police officers repeatedly intrude in the lives of people (overpolicing) and fail to ensure public safety (underpolicing) undermine people’s recognition of the state’s monopoly of violence. Yet, there is room for improvement. Perceptions of procedural fairness seem to enhance police trustworthiness and legitimacy. In sum, results indicate that people develop legal attitudes throughout the life course, but police (mis)conduct can lead to attitudinal change over time.

London: London School of Economics, 2022. 276p.

By Andrew Jordan and Taeho Kim

We study how civilian complaint investigators affect officer behavior in Chicago. We exploit quasi-random assignment of complaints to supervising investigators and use variation in whether supervisors tend to acquire sworn affidavits that substantiate the complaints. When the assigned investigator opens more investigations through obtaining affidavits, accused officers accumulate fewer complaints in the first three months of the investigation. We find that, prior to a scandal, assignment to high-investigation supervisors causes officers to make more arrests. However, this reverses after the scandal. Our findings suggest that police watchdogs can improve officer behavior in ordinary oversight environments but may backfire in heightened oversight environments.

Unpublished paper, 2022. 46p.

By Michael German and Kaylana Mueller-Hsia

The failure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement agencies to anticipate and prepare for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by far-right insurrectionists has elicited proposals to expand the bureau’s authority to investigate domestic terrorism.

The FBI already received expansive new powers after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and its current guidelines place few limits on agents’ ability to search broadly for potential threats. Confusion about the current scope of the bureau’s powers is understandable, however, as FBI leaders have regularly misstated their authorities in public testimony.

These misstatements deflect FBI accountability by focusing overseers on filling perceived gaps in its authority rather than examining how the bureau uses, misuses, or fails to use the tools it already has.

The real problem is not that the FBI’s authorities are too narrow, but rather that they are overbroad and untethered to evidence of wrongdoing. After 9/11, the Department of Justice (DOJ) reduced or eliminated reasonable evidentiary predicates to justify broader collection and sharing of Americans’ personal information. This new domestic intelligence process replaced evidence-driven investigations of suspected criminal activities with mass data collection and untriaged reporting of speculative harms unsupported by facts. The sheer volume of threat reporting resulting from this system suffocates effective intelligence analysis, flooding law enforcement leaders with thousands of specious threat warnings a day. In addition to unjustified invasions of privacy, the high rate of false alarms that this process produces naturally dulls the response, and the disconnect from evidence of criminality opens the door to bias-driven law enforcement responses. As they have in the past, the FBI’s unbridled authorities have resulted in abuses of civil rights and civil liberties without improving its ability to identify and mitigate real threats.

Misinformation from FBI officials has confused the policy debate. When senators investigating the January 6 attack asked Jill Sanborn, then the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, whether FBI agents monitored the multitude of threats made in public forums prior to the attack, Sanborn replied, “It’s not within our authorities.”

Sanborn claimed that the FBI cannot collect information involving First Amendment–protected activities without a predicated investigation or a tip from a community member or law enforcement officer. These statements are inaccurate, yet they featured prominently in the Senate’s report on the security, planning, and response failures regarding the attack on the Capitol.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2022. 21p.

By the American Civil Liberties of North Carolina; Sam Davis, et al.

Over the past seven years, North Carolina schools have devoted more than $100,000,000 dollars to placing more police officers in more schools.1 These massive investments have come in lieu of funding the kinds of support proven to enhance student well-being and learning. According to 2015–2016 federal data, North Carolina ranks near the top nationally in terms of the presence of police officers in schools,2 but among the worst states in terms of school funding.3 Additionally, schools in North Carolina have struggled to recruit and retain adequate staffing levels.4 The choice to prioritize funding police officers instead of teachers, counselors, and other schoolbased mental health providers has harmful and long-lasting consequences for North Carolina’s children, especially children of color and children with disabilities. Indeed, North Carolina was recently ranked as one of the worst states for overall youth mental health.5 And children are experiencing more acute mental health needs after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated existing inequities for students of color, as is visible in rising rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide, particularly for Black youth,6 and contributed to worsening conditions for students with disabilities.7 North Carolina’s massive investments in police are not paying off: police officers do not improve safety in schools. Instead, the presence of police officers harm students, including by criminalizing typical adolescent behavior that police choose to deem disorderly or otherwise criminal. For example, police officers are empowered to arrest students for disorderly conduct in schools—a criminal offense in North Carolina—that then funnels them into the criminal legal system. This report presents and discusses the implications of federal data regarding the staffing its schools with police officers instead of the mental health providers that students need like counselors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, and community health workers. The report analyzes the consequences of this choice by reviewing federal data regarding school referrals to law enforcement, with particular attention to disparities by race and disability status. In addition, the report highlights state data that shows disturbing racial disparities regarding school-based complaints, and charges for disorderly conduct in schools in particular. In sum, North Carolina fails to meet the recommended ratios for school-based mental health providers across the board despite the fact that today’s children—and Black children in particular—need access to mental health support now more than ever before. Instead, North Carolina continues to maintain a high number of police officers in its schools who have expansive discretion to decide which students to refer into the criminal legal system and for what. The consequences of this choice are dire, especially for Black students and students with disabilities.

Raleigh: ACLU of North Carolina, 2023. 29p.

By Deepak Premkumar

After a spate of protests touched off by high-profile incidents of police use of force, there has been a renewed focus on whether public scrutiny shapes policing behavior, otherwise known as the Ferguson Effect. This question has gained additional urgency as the country grapples with increases in murders. This paper provides the first national analysis showing that after police killings that generate significant public attention and scrutiny, officers reduce effort and crime increases. The effects differ by offense type: Reduced police effort yields persistently fewer arrests for low-level offenses (e.g., marijuana possession) but limited changes in arrests for violent or more serious property crimes. I show that decreased interaction with civilians through police stops may be driving the results. However, the increase in offending is driven by murders and robberies, imposing significant crime costs on affected municipalities. The effects only occur after there is broad community awareness of the incident. These findings are robust to numerous changes in empirical specification, transformations of the dependent variable, and varying levels of fixed effects that control for changes in state law and treatment spillovers. I also present evidence that suggests these effects are not driven by a pattern-or-practice investigation or a court-mandated monitoring agreement. To distinguish between the potential effects that may simultaneously impact arrest levels following a high-profile police killing, I develop a theoretical model that provides empirically testable predictions for each mechanism. I find that the reduction in low-level arrests corroborates public scrutiny as the causal channel. Finally, I provide evidence that the increase in offending is driven by both a response to the reduction in policing effort and a reaction to the police killing itself, suggesting that measures to reduce use of force should be prioritized.\

Unpublished paper, 2019, revised 2022. 132p.

By Jody van der Heyde, Andrew Faull and Martin Sycholt

Trust in the police is vital to a functioning democracy, but relations between South Africa’s residents and police have long been characterised by mistrust. This report introduces procedural justice as a cost-effective, evidence-informed practice that can increase public trust and confidence in the police, and enhance police legitimacy and social cohesion. The report provides an overview of the theory and presents data on trust, customer satisfaction and police morale in South Africa.

South Africa: Institute for Security Studies, 2023. 16p.

By Jeffrey A. Fagan and Amanda B. Geller

Following Soto v. State (1999), New Jersey was the first state to enter into a Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to end racially selective enforcement on the state’s highways. The Consent Decree led to extensive reforms in the training and supervision of state police troopers, and the design of information technology to monitor the activities of the State Police. Compliance was assessed in part on the State’s progress toward the elimination of racial disparities in the patterns of highway stops and searches. We assess compliance by analyzing data on 257,000 vehicle stops on the New Jersey Turnpike by the state police from 2005– 2007, the final months of the Consent Decree. Specifically, we exploit heterogeneity of officer and driver race to identify disparities in the probability that stops lead to a search. We assume a crime-minimizing or welfarist rationale for stops, under which race-neutral factors are equally likely to motivate stops, regardless of driver or passenger race. We also test a Fairness Presumption by comparing search patterns between driver-officer pairs where the driver and officer are different races, and a set of race-neutral benchmarks where the driver and officer are the same race. Results of fixed effects logistic regressions show that Black and Hispanic drivers, when stopped, are more than twice as likely as White drivers to be searched, regardless of officer race. The results also suggest that search patterns vary significantly by officer race: Black officers are less likely to conduct a search in the course of a stop than are White drivers. We also see significant interactions between the race of officers and that of the drivers they stop: Black drivers are significantly more likely to be searched by White officers than they are by Black officers; on the other hand, Hispanic drivers are significantly less likely to be searched by either Black or White officers than they are by Hispanic officers. Racial disparities in the selection of stopped drivers for search and in the rates of seizure of contraband suggest that despite institutional reforms under the Consent Decree in management and professionalization of patrol officers, there were no tangible gains in distributional equity. We review the design of the Consent Decree and the accompanying oversight mechanisms to identify structural weaknesses in external monitoring and institutional design in the oversight of the State Police that compromised the pursuit of equality goals.

J. SOC. POL'Y & L. 16 (2020). Available at:

By Kanna Hayashi , Tyson Singh Kelsall, Caitlin Shane , Zishan Cui., et al

Background

Several jurisdictions in Canada have recently considered decriminalizing possession of illicit drugs for personal use (henceforth, simple possession) as part of their responses to the ongoing drug toxicity/overdose crisis. In this context, we sought to examine an early implementation case of a de facto depenalization policy of sim‑ ple possession ofences in Vancouver, Canada, that was enacted in 2006. Specifcally, we characterized experiences of people who use drugs (PWUD) whose drugs were discretionally seized by police without arrest.

Methods

Data were derived from three prospective cohorts of community-recruited PWUD in Vancouver over 16 months in 2019–2021. We conducted multivariable generalized estimating equations analyses to determine the prevalence of and factors associated with drug seizure. Sub-analyses used data collected in 2009–2012 and examined the trends over time.

Results

Among 995 participants who were interviewed in 2019–2021, 63 (6.3%) had their drugs seized by police at least once in the past 6 months. In multivariable analyses, factors significantly associated with drug seizure included: homelessness (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]: 1.98; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.09–3.61), working in the unregulated drug market (AOR: 4.93; 95% CI 2.87–8.49), and naloxone administration (AOR: 2.15; 95% CI 1.23– 3.76). In 2009–2012, 67.8% reported having obtained new drugs immediately after having their drugs seized by police. Odds of drug seizure were not significantly different between the two time periods (2019–2021 vs. 2009–2012) (AOR: 0.93; 95% CI: 0.64–1.35).

Conclusions

Despite the depenalization policy, the Vancouver Police Department has continued to seize illicit drugs from PWUD, even in cases where no arrest occurred. This policing practice may create health and safety risks for PWUD as it forces PWUD to increase the engagement with the unregulated illicit drug market. Our findings support calls for abolishing this often-undocumented discretionary policing practice that may exacerbate ongoing health inequities and interfere with peer-based overdose prevention efforts.

Harm Reduction Journal (2023) 20:117

By Karen Bullock , Iain Agar , Matt Ashby , Iain Brennan, Gavin Hales , Aiden Sidebottom and Nick Tilley

Knife crime remains a major concern in England and Wales. Problem-oriented and public health approaches to tackling knife crime have been widely advocated, but little is known about how these approaches are understood and implemented by police practitioners. To address this knowledge gap, this article draws on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 44 police personnel to consider the processes and challenges of applying problem-oriented and public health approaches to knife crime. Findings show that knife crime was seen as a complex social problem which would not be solved by ‘silver bullets’; prevention was prioritised and the limitations of enforcement were widely acknowledged; there was an emphasis on understanding and responding to vulnerability and risk; discussion of ‘holistic’ and ‘whole systems’ approaches was evident (but these concepts were rarely defined); and the problem of serious violence was viewed as a shared, multi-agency issue that the police could not tackle alone. Various challenges were also evident, most notably around analysis of the drivers and patterns of knife crime and the evaluation of knife crime interventions. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for knife crime prevention and the implementation and advancement of problem-oriented and public health approaches to policing

Crime Science, 12(2): 2023

By Andy Higgins and Ruth Halkon

Public support and approval sit at the heart of the British policing model and are critical dependencies for effective policing. Although citizen attitudes have slipped out of formal policy focus over the last decade, a complex combination of factors – most obviously the recent set of misconduct scandals and cultural failings exposed within the Metropolitan Police in particular – have pulled questions of trust, confidence, and police legitimacy back into the spotlight. The first data to emerge from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) following its hiatus during Covid, confirms a consistent deterioration in public sentiment towards the police, which has begun to spread into more ‘relational’ dimensions (of fairness and respectfulness), not just appraisals of service quality. The downturn in London is particularly stark. These conditions and their causes require action from police leaders and policy makers, and a range of ‘issue based’ reform efforts, reviews and change programmes are underway. Additionally, however, the strategic-level questions these shifts pose, about the future working relationship between police and public, demand that concerted attention should also be given to contact – the way that citizens experience ‘everyday’ interactions with the police, across a variety of contexts, and the attitudinal traces these episodes leave behind. Personal contact is what citizens consistently say affects their trust and confidence in police, and its impact can ripple beyond those directly involved, through ‘vicarious’ transmission (e.g., reports from family and friends) and media (and social media) coverage. It also seems to be an aspect of service delivery amenable to policy and practice change, drawing on a well-established evidence-base about what is likely to be effective. But contact is also an area of considerable flux and disruption. Right across society, technology is precipitating radical shifts in the way citizens communicate with each other and interact with businesses, organisations, and government services. Online commerce and service provision, social media, videoconferencing, artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbots, and advanced analytics are all contributing to a much more complex and plural contact environment. These developments are shifting public expectations and promise real benefits in terms of the speed, efficiency, convenience, and choice available to citizens in their everyday lives. The pace of change, however, is such that the wider social implications are difficult to comprehend. Policing, of course, is not immune to these shifts and technologically enabled developments such as in online crime reporting, self-service portals, social media engagement, Body-Worn Video, live chat and video-link responses are increasingly coming to augment and meditate the public experience of dealing with the police. At a strategic level, the service seems optimistic about the potential for these and future innovations to generate mission critical efficiencies, optimise effectiveness, enable the sector to keep pace with public expectations, and promote public trust and confidence – although the mechanisms through which the latter might occur remain largely under-theorised. This report begins to address the interconnections between those two trajectories: the deterioration in police/public relations (and associated imperatives on policing to halt and reverse this), and the technological transformation of police/public contact. More specifically, it asks: what are the implications, opportunities, and risks for public confidence (and related attitudes) arising from the introduction of new technology into police/public contact experiences? Our investigation proceeds in three parts: • First (in Section 2) we revisit and summarise what is already known about the way police/public contact impacts on public confidence (and related attitudes) from research conducted in more ‘analogue’ times and contexts. • Second (in Section 3) we ask: what evidence is emerging, what is promising and what can be hypothesised, about how various forms of technology might impact on public experiences of contact, and the lasting impressions these leave behind? We present six promising mechanisms and one pressing risk. • Third (in Section 4) we conclude by considering the strategic implications for policing and present eight recommendations. Our analysis is informed by a literature review, analysis of survey data collected by the London Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime (MOPAC), a survey of police contact management and community engagement leads, a roundtable discussion, and interviews and discussions with relevant experts and stakeholders.

London: Police Foundation, 2023. 57p.