By Oeindrila Dube, Sandy Jo MacArthur and Anuj Shah

Prevailing views suggest that adverse policing outcomes are driven by problematic police officers and deficient policies. This study highlights an overlooked factor – cognitive demands inherent in police work. A training designed to improve officer decision-making under stress and time pressure, two key cognitive demands, lead to 23% fewer uses of force and discretionary arrests, and 11% fewer arrests of Black civilians. The results demonstrate the power of leveraging behavioral science insights to make policing more effective and equitable.

Policing practices have increasingly come under public scrutiny, spurring widespread calls for police reform. To date, prevailing views have attributed adverse policing outcomes (such as excessive force and unnecessary arrests) to factors such as prejudiced officers and deficient departmental policies. In this paper, the authors introduce a new focus that explores the role of cognitive demands in contributing to poor policing outcomes. Police work often involves making complex decisions in situations that produce stress, trigger many emotions, and require officers to act quickly. These cognitive demands make it more likely that officers will act without sufficient deliberation and that their actions will be driven by cognitive biases. In this paper, the authors explore this overlooked perspective, which suggests an additional avenue for improving policing outcomes.

WORKING PAPER · NO. 2023-118 . Chicago: University of Chicago, 2023. 99p.

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 Daniel AC Barbosa Thiemo Fetzer Caterina Soto & Pedro CL Souza

We provide experimental evidence that monitoring of the police activity through body-worn cameras reduces use-of-force, handcuffs and arrests, and enhances criminal reporting. Stronger treatment effects occur on events classified ex-ante of low seriousness. Monitoring effects are moderated by officer rank, which is consistent with a career concern motive by junior officers. Overall, results show that the use of body-worn cameras de-escalates conflicts

Warwick Economics Research Papers . Coventry, UK: University of Warwick, 2021. 56p.

By Gabrielle T. Isaza

De-escalation training has been widely promoted as a best practice to reduce harms during police-citizen encounters, particularly as it relates to police use of force. Despite this wide promotion, very little is known about the training’s effectiveness. This dissertation explores the impacts of a well-known de-escalation training, Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT), on a sample of police officers in Southwest Ohio. Specifically, this dissertation examines changes in officer attitudes and perceptions as well as self-reported use of the training using T-Test comparisons, ordinary least square regressions, descriptive statistics, and an examination of focus group discussions. Pilot survey instruments were developed and tested for use in future de-escalation training evaluations. This study found significant changes in officer attitudes related to the use of force, understanding of persons in crisis, and officer confidence in handling critical incidents in the hypothesized directions. However, minor levels of training decay were detected, indicating the importance of continual reinforcement of the training curriculum. Additionally, counter-intuitive findings related to one component of the training were found. Nonetheless, these empirical results demonstrated that ICAT training influenced officers in a way that made them more amenable to the principles and practices of de-escalation. This study adds to the very limited evidence base on de-escalation training effects for police. These findings are critical because the effective use of de-escalation techniques to diffuse conflicts can save lives and reduce the injuries of both citizens and police officers.

Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati, 2020. 200p.

By Jessica A. Reichert, Kaitlin Martins, Bruce Taylor, and Brandon Del Pozo

Police encounter individuals with opioid use disorder (OUD) during their routine work and are often called to the scene of overdoses. Despite this frequency, officer knowledge and attitudes about addiction, treatment, and harm reduction vary. Views held by officers, and the extent of their knowledge, can impact the decisions they make regarding people with OUD, yet our understanding of these factors is limited. Using stratified random sampling, we surveyed 248 officers from 27 Illinois police departments on their knowledge of addiction and the means to address it. We performed descriptive and regression analyses to examine differences based on officer characteristics. We found a high proportion of officers lacked knowledge of addiction, treatment, and harm reduction. Our findings suggest the need for police training to improve understanding of addiction. Community collaboration and coordination of resources may give officers the tools to better address OUD, reduce harm, and decrease overdose.

Chicago: Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority 2023. 22p.

By Emilee Green, Brian Kuczynski, Morgan McGuirk and Jessica A. Reichert

Repeated and deadly encounters between law enforcement officers and Black Americans have given way to mounting calls for police reform. Reformers have proposed reallocating funds from policing to communities and social services, rethinking police use of force policies, and improving measures for officer accountability. This literature review briefly describes the impetus for police reform, reviews proposed police reforms, and examines available research on the effectiveness of police reforms. Overall, research indicates police agencies should not only focus on reducing crime, but also protecting and fostering the relationship between the public and police.

Chicago: Illinois 2022. 20p.

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 Carole McCartney and Louise Shorter

The seizure, safe handling and secure storage of evidence during criminal investigations is pivotal to the successful detection and prosecution of offences. The safe retention of materials after an investigation closes, even post-conviction, is also critical both to the ability of the appellate system to function and for ‘cold cases’ to be reviewed. Yet despite periodic high-profile instances in which failures to ensure the integrity and retention of evidence have occurred, there is a reticence to admit to evidence being lost; in particular, to consider the issue on an aggregate rather than a case-by-case basis. This lack of transparency is compounded by an accountability deficit, in which the issue falls through regulatory gaps. Provoked to locate proof of lost evidence, this article examines police retention of investigative materials, and details the results of surveys undertaken with lawyers and miscarriage of justice campaigners (n = 65) and police (n = 87), and 21 interviews with serving and retired police officers. We identify ‘weak links’ in the evidence chain that need strengthening, including the enhancement of training, improved physical packaging and storage facilities, sufficient training of police staff and the creation of specialised ‘exhibits’ roles. Further to practical resource demands, the issue requires accessible data so that the problem can be acknowledged, and accountability and oversight mechanisms created to assure processes.

International Journal of Police Science & ManagementOnlineFirst 2023

By The City & County of San Francisco Police Department

In 2018, the San Francisco Police Department formed a Task Force on Strategic Police Staffing (“Staffing Task Force”) per direction from the Board of Supervisors and the Police Commission as adopted in Resolution No. 63-17. Resolution No. 63-17, supported and signed by the Mayor, “[urged] the San Francisco Police Commission to form a Task Force, in collaboration with the San Francisco Police Chief, on Strategic Police Staffing and with the purpose of determining the best methodology for establishing staffing levels in the San Francisco Police Department.” Resolution 63-17 was adopted to initiate an update to the 1994 Proposition D Charter amendment by determining SFPD staffing levels using a workload methodology based on the demand for police services rather than utilizing other metrics such as population size. As prescribed in Resolution No. 63-17, the Staffing Task Force included a cross-section of community stakeholders, nationally recognized police staffing experts, data analysts, City and County of San Francisco agency partners, and Police Commissioners. In early 2019, the San Francisco Police Department hired police staffing expert Matrix Consulting Group, Ltd (“Matrix”) to conduct a comprehensive staffing analysis of the Department. Matrix was directed to develop an understanding of SFPD staffing, operations, and workload; and to develop methodologies to use in the analysis. In 2019, Matrix developed the staffing analysis framework and presented the methodologies throughout the duration of the project to the Staffing Task Force to seek input and direction. In early 2020, Matrix released its report that described the methodologies used to establish SFPD staffing levels, developed in collaboration with the Staffing Task Force; and provided the results of the staffing analysis. In November 2020, San Francisco voters approved Proposition E, amending the City Charter to remove the previously established 1,971 baseline staffing level and requiring the Police Department to submit a report and recommendation on staffing levels every two years to the Police Commission for consideration when approving the Department’s budget. The purpose of this report is to recommend baseline staffing levels for the San Francisco Police Department using the rigorous, industry-reputed methodologies developed and used by Matrix Consulting Group and vetted by the Staffing Task Force.

City & County of San Francisco Police Department. 2023. 213p.

By Manja Nikolovska, Shane D. Johnson and Paul Ekblom

Crisis and disruption are often unpredictable and can create opportunities for crime. During such times, policing may also need to meet additional challenges to handle the disruption. The use of social media by officials can be essential for crisis mitigation and crime reduction. In this paper, we study the use of Twitter for crime mitigation and reduction by UK police (and associated) agencies in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest that whilst most of the tweets from our sample concerned issues that were not specifically about crime, especially during the first stages of the pandemic, there was a significant increase in tweets about fraud, cybercrime and domestic abuse. There was also an increase in retweeting activity as opposed to the creation of original messages. Moreover, in terms of the impact of tweets, as measured by the rate at which they are retweeted, followers were more likely to ‘spread the word’ when the tweet was content-rich (discussed a crime specific matter and contained media), and account holders were themselves more active on Twitter. Considering the changing world we live in, criminal opportunity is likely to evolve. To help mitigate this, policy makers and researchers should consider more systematic approaches to developing social media communication strategies for the purpose of crime mitigation and reduction during disruption and change more generally. We suggest a framework for so doing.

Crime Science 2020 9:20

By Peter Stout

Houston TX experienced a widely known failure of its police forensic laboratory. This gave rise to the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC) as a separate entity to provide forensic services to the City of Houston. HFSC is a very large forensic laboratory and has made significant progress at remediating the past failures and improving public trust in forensic testing. HFSC has a large and robust blind testing program, which has provided many insights into the challenges forensic laboratories face. HFSC’s journey from a notoriously failed lab to a model also gives perspective to the resource challenges faced by all labs in the country. Challenges for labs include the pervasive reality of poor- quality evidence. Also that forensic laboratories are necessarily part of a much wider system of interdependent functions in criminal justice making blind testing something in which all parts have a role. This interconnectedness also highlights the need for an array of oversight and regulatory frameworks to function properly. The major essential databases in forensics need to be a part of blind testing programs and work is needed to ensure that the results from these databases are indeed producing correct results and those results are being correctly used. Last, laboratory reports of “inconclusive” results are a significant challenge for laboratories and the system to better understand when these results are appropriate, necessary and most importantly correctly used by the rest of the system.

PNAS 2023 vol. 120, no. 41

By Melissa M. Labriola, Samuel Peterson, Jirka Taylor, Danielle Sobol, Jessica Reichert, Jon Ross, Jac Charlier, Sophia Juarez

Many law enforcement and other first responder agencies have adopted deflection as a front-line response to the increasing number of drug overdoses and deaths in the United States over the past two decades. Deflection programs aim to connect individuals with substance use disorder (not necessarily limited to opioids or one particular substance) who encounter the criminal justice system with treatment and other services according to the individual's needs.

This report describes the findings from a multi-site evaluation of law enforcement deflection in the United States. The authors describe how each program is implemented and identify key program facilitators and barriers. For two of the six sites, the authors conducted outcome analyses to determine whether the model is effective in reducing drug-related deaths and overdoses, arrests, and treatment admissions.

Key Findings

• Deflection programs in the United States can take many shapes and forms, but there are some trends emerging: gradual incorporation of additional pathways; an overall move toward greater complexity and breadth of service provision, including the coexistence of other diversion programs in the area; and a move toward the professionalization of deflection (e.g., needing own staff, formulation of best practices).

• Qualitatively, perspectives from stakeholders suggest positive results in terms of (1) individual participant journeys, (2) change in policing practice and views, (3) reductions in stigma, and (4) stakeholder and community buy-in.

• Facilitators of implementation can also be identified, primarily as strong partnerships and champions.

• Barriers include persistence of stigma, distrust of police, and challenges pertaining to services for people who use drugs writ large, such as treatment capacity and payment methods.

• The outcome analyses for one site (Lake County, Illinois) suggest a reduction in fatal overdoses and in property crime arrests, but findings for the other site (Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts) are mostly null, likely because of the small sample

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023. 52p.

By Dulani Woods, John S. Hollywood, Jeremy D. Barnum, Danielle Fenimore, Michael J. D. Vermeer, Brian A. Jackson

The advent of blockchain-based technologies has opened a new frontier for individuals wishing to conduct financial and other transactions remotely, anonymously, and without the need for a third party like a bank. Blockchain technology has various uses but is perhaps best known as the foundation for a certain type of digital currency called cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is increasingly an accepted form of payment in many legitimate business transactions, but it is also used to facilitate many illegal activities, in large part because of its capacity to facilitate mostly anonymous transactions remotely. As a result, law enforcement investigators need to develop new skills, competencies, and tools for ensuring justice. In support of the National Institute of Justice, researchers from RAND and the Police ExecutiveResearch Forum conducted a workshop with law enforcement practitioners, academics, and other experts. Workshop participants identified and priorit ized 24 research and development needs that, if invested in, would improve law enforcement's ability to adapt to these societal changes. These needs pertain to policies for digital key management, resources for law enforcement training on blockchain and cryptocurrency, and tools for investigations involving cryptocurrency.

In this report, the researchers detail the proceedings of the workshop, discuss the ten highest-priority needs identified by the participants, and provide additional context based on the participants' discussions. The participants prioritized needs associated with raising the level of knowledge for officers and investigators, training or hiring experts who can assist with investigations, and adapting existing policies and procedures to ensure that cryptocurrencies are handled responsibly.

Key Findings

• There are not enough law enforcement–specific blockchain and cryptocurrency training and experts to meet the demand for educating justice practitioners.

• Cryptocurrency can be transferred by anyone in possession of an easy-to-copy digital key. Individuals with copies of the keys may move assets before an agency can take possession.

• This digital key is merely a unique set of letters and/or numbers (i.e., text). This text allows the bearer to control digital assets of high value and should not be treated like other text-based information within a case file.

• Seized cryptocurrency assets can be transferred by anyone in possession of a digital key to a digital wallet of unknown ownership. This presents opportunities for officer misconduct.

• Blockchain and cryptocurrency are fast-moving, rapidly evolving technologies. Justice practitioners are having difficulty keeping up with the changes.

• There is a lack of expertise in all aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies across the justice system.

• Commercial cryptocurrency-tracking tools can be more expensive than an agency can afford. Open-source tools can require significant computing power.

• Once a problematic cryptocurrency wallet is identified by law enforcement (via subpoena or another method), there is no good way to notify other interested investigators in other jurisdictions.

Recommendations

• Identify best-practice policies and procedures for rapidly securing cryptocurrency assets during investigations.

• Develop best-practice policies and procedures (e.g., two-person systems) to minimize opportunities for mishandling cryptocurrency.

• Identify best-practice policies and procedures for handling, storing, transferring, and redacting digital cryptocurrency keys within record-management systems.

• Catalog and publicize the training resources that are already available, including training that is not tailored for justice practitioners.

• Develop regional or national sharing systems that facilitate sharing of training materials and actionable intelligence for ongoing cases (e.g., digital or cyber fusion centers).

• Develop model materials that can be easily adapted for training recruits, investigators, forensics experts, prosecutors, judges, and others.

• Conduct research to examine the balance of skills and expertise that law enforcement agencies look for when hiring and assess whether those are likely to meet current and future needs.

• Convene a standing group of practitioners and experts who can examine the “state of the possible” and generate requirements for research and development organizations.

• Work with federal, state, local, and private entities (e.g., the Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, Lawyers Without Borders) to make available appropriate cryptocurrency-tracking resources so that costs can be more easily shared.

• Assess the costs and benefits of developing a private-sector clearinghouse that will allow the public sector and vetted private-sector entities to coordinate (similar to how the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children screens potentially abusive materials.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023. 28p.

By Jeffrey A. Fagan and Alexis D. Campbell

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on 3933 killings to examine this intersection of race and reasonableness in police killings. First, we describe the objective circumstances and interactions of police killings and map those event characteristics to the elements of reasonableness articulated in case law. Second, we assess whether inherently vague constitutional regulation of lethal force is applied differently by officers depending on the civilian’s race, giving rise to a disproportionate rate of deaths among racial and ethnic minority groups. We then assess the prospects for remediation of racialized police killings by testing the effects of an existing evidence-based training curricula designed to reduce police use of deadly force towards persons experiencing mental illness. We find that, across several circumstances of police killings and their objective reasonableness, Black suspects are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than are persons of other racial or ethnic groups; even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable. Police killings of Latinx civilians are higher compared to whites and other racial or ethnic groups in some but not all circumstances. We find no evidence that enhanced police training focused on mental health crises can reduce the incidence of fatal police shootings of persons in mental health crisis or racial and ethnic disparities generally in police killings. Our findings suggest that the standards in constitutional case law fail to anticipate the circumstances of fatal police shootings and are therefore seemingly irrelevant in preventing racial disparities in police fatal police shootings. In light of this constitutional landscape, we argue that the ineffectiveness of enhanced police training to reduce shootings overall and racial disparity within these shootings may reflect the absence of race-specific components in their curricula. We suggest that the addition of training components that specifically address the role of race in officers’ perceptions of risk and their decision-making in potentially dangerous interactions with citizens may remediate both the incidence of police shootings and their apparent racial and ethnic disparity.

BOSTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:951 2020.

By Susan Olzak

An underlying premise of democratic politics is that protest can be an effective form of civic engagement that shapes policy changes desired by marginalized groups. But it is not certain that this premise holds up under scrutiny. This paper presents a three-part argument that protest (a) signals the salience of a movements’ focal issue and expands awareness that an issue is a social problem requiring a solution, (b) empowers residents in disadvantaged communities and raises a sense of community cohesion, which together (c) raise costs and exert pressure on elites to make concessions. The empirical analysis examines the likelihood that a city will establish a Civilian Review Board (CRB). It then compares the effects of protest and CRB presence on counts of officer-involved fatalities by race and ethnicity. Two main conjectures about the effect of protest are supported: Cities with more protest against police brutality are significantly more likely to establish a CRB, and protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African Americans and Latinos (but not for Whites). But the establishment of CRBs does not reduce fatalities, as some have hoped. Nonetheless, mobilizing against police brutality matters, even in the absence of civilian review boards.

American Sociological Review. 86(6): 2021.

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

Ben Grunwald and John Rappaport

“Wandering officers” are law-enforcement officers fired by one department, sometimes for serious misconduct, who then find work at another agency. Policing experts hold disparate views about the extent and character of the wandering-officer phenomenon. Some insist that wandering officers are everywhere—possibly increasingly so—and that they’re dangerous. Others, however, maintain that critics cherry-pick rare and egregious anecdotes that distort broader realities. In the absence of systematic data, we simply do not know how common wandering officers are or how much of a threat they pose, nor can we know whether and how to address the issue through policy reform.

In this Article, we conduct the first systematic investigation of wandering officers and possibly the largest quantitative study of police misconduct of any kind. We introduce a novel data set of all 98,000 full-time law-enforcement officers employed by almost 500 different agencies in the State of Florida over a thirty-year period. We report three principal findings. First, in any given year during our study, an average of just under 1,100 officers who were previously fired—three percent of all officers in the State—worked for Florida agencies. Second, officers who were fired from their last job seem to face difficulty finding work. When they do, it takes them a long time, and they tend to move to smaller agencies with fewer resources in areas with slightly larger communities of color. Interestingly, though, this pattern does not hold for officers who were fired earlier in their careers. Third, wandering officers are more likely than both officers hired as rookies and those hired as veterans who have never been fired to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a “moral character violation.” Although we cannot determine the precise reasons for the firings, these results suggest that wandering officers may pose serious risks, particularly given how difficult it is to fire a police officer. We consider several plausible explanations for why departments nonetheless hire wandering officers and suggest potential policy responses to each.

129 Yale Law Journal 1676-1782 (2020)

By Abdul Nasser Rad, David S. Kirk, and William P. Jones

Recent discussions of police violence in the United States and the corresponding lack of accountability have shone a light on a highly debated agent opposing police reform—police unions. Although police unionism continues to be an understudied area, a recent wave of empirical investigations, both qualitative and quantitative, have contributed to a nascent understanding of the ways in which police union mechanisms facilitate police misconduct and violence. Accordingly, in this review we first discuss the origins of police unionism in the United States, illustrating how historical forces, including racial animus, have shaped the existing landscape. Then, we highlight significant empirical work exploring the relationship between police unionism and misconduct. Thereafter, we review the potential intervening mechanisms, which are employed in ways to reduce disciplinary consequences of misconduct and excessive use of force, undermine oversight of the police, and limit police transparency. We end with a set of recommendations on future avenues for research.

Annual Review of Criminology, 2023. 6:181–203