By Brandon L Garrett

In the past three years, there has been a surge of lawmaking concerning policing at the federal, state and local levels, including in response to the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and subsequent racial justice movements across the country. Unwarranted uses of force, including deadly force, are all too common in America, particularly for Black men. Unfortunately, legal barriers often prevent meaningful accountability in response to a crisis of poor police practices and actions. Some recent legislation has at times taken a more comprehensive approach towards the challenge of addressing injustices and rethinking public safety, while other legislation takes a targeted approach, and still additional legislation has addressed a range of newer issues concerning policing, including deployment of technology, data collection, officer wellbeing, behavioral health diversion, and funding. To better understand lawmaking in response to calls for reform, at the Wilson Center for Science and Justice, we began tracking the introduction of policing-related legislation in Spring 2020.1 Our database, which has been updated continually, includes over 3,800 bills — federal, state, and local — across a wide range of topics related to law enforcement from 2018 through 2022. This is the largest such database assembled.2 It is available here: policing legislation.law.duke.edu. The sheer breadth of the topics and the activity is remarkable, although only about 10 percent of these laws have been enacted. Further, we develop how counting legislation does not fully capture trends where some single pieces of legislation include wide-ranging provisions. In addition, legislation regulating police can accomplish a range of objectives and goals, including laws designed to both limit and empower local police, sometimes in the same legislation. We plan to update the database over time to track this legislation and also examine additional prior years.

Durham, NC: Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, 2023. 18p.

By Alexander F. Roehrkasse

Recent research has documented negative associations between children’s welfare and mobility and their exposure to neighborhood incarceration. But inequality in such exposure among children in the United States is poorly understood. This study links tract-level census data to administrative data on prison admissions to measure 37.8 million children’s exposure to neighborhood incarceration in 2008, by race/ethnicity and poverty status. The average poor Black or African American child lived in a neighborhood where 1 in 174 working-age adults was admitted to prison annually, more than twice the rate of neighborhood prison admission experienced by the average U.S. child. Residential segregation and the spatial concentration of incarceration combine to create significant ethnoracial and economic inequality in the neighborhood experiences of U.S. children.

United States, Sage Journals. 2021, 5pg

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 Human Impact Partners and Fresno Barrios Unidos

This research brief, created in partnership with Fresno Barrios Unidos, intentionally centers the experiences and perspectives of students, who are most directly impacted by school policing. We evaluate the health impacts of divesting from police contracts and investing in healing-centered practices and spaces on school campuses in the Fresno Unified School District (FUSD) in Fresno, California by exploring the public health research on school policing and its alternatives, and by incorporating student voices via interviews with Fresno students on ways to best support their health, safety, and learning at school.

FUSD has a critical opportunity to join the movement for student wellness by removing police from Fresno school campuses. Given the experiences of students we interviewed for this brief, the hundreds of public comments submitted to Fresno City Council during the budget cycle, and the available evidence on school practices that harm student health and well-being compared to those that promote student health and well-being, we recommend that FUSD:

End Fresno Unified School District’s contract with the Fresno Police Department

Remove all police from school campuses in Fresno

Invest the funding from the school police contract into student wellness and support, including trauma-informed practices, restorative and transformative justice processes, and health and wellness centers, working in collaboration with students and community organizations

With this report and with the years of organizing that came before it, FUSD now has an opportunity to hear and respond to student perspectives, to prioritize the health of students in the district, and to invest in services that support and care for students.

Oakland, CA: Human Impact Partners, 2021. 29p.

By Benjamin W. Fisher, Anthony Petrosino, Hannah Persson, Sarah Guckenburg, Trevor Fronius, Ivan Benitez, Kevin Earl

Abstract

Background

School-based law enforcement (SBLE) has become a common intervention. Although SBLE is meant to make schools safer, critics suggest it may not accomplish this purpose, and may have unintended negative consequences such as increasing students’ exclusionary discipline or contact with the criminal justice system. There may also be secondary effects related to perceptions of the school or student learning.

Objectives

The purpose of this review is to synthesize the literature evaluating the use of SBLE, including outcomes related to (a) crime and behavior problems; (b) perceptions of safety; and (c) learning.

Methods

We conducted a systematic literature search to identify studies that examined outcomes associated with SBLE use. Eligible studies used experimental or quasi-experimental designs; included samples of students, teachers/staff, schools, or school districts; reported on a policing strategy focused on crime prevention or school safety that did not involve officers teaching a curriculum; included a measure that reflects crime and behavior problems, perceptions of safety, or learning; and were in a primary or secondary school. Following a multi-stage screening process to identify studies eligible for inclusion, we estimated a series of meta-analytic models with robust variance estimation to calculate weighted mean effect sizes for each of three main categories of outcomes and commonly occurring subsets of these categories. We examined heterogeneity in these estimates across features of the primary studies’ design.

Results

The search and screening process yielded 1002 effect sizes from 32 reports. There were no true experiments, and the quasi-experiments ranged from strictly correlational to permitting stronger causal inferences. SBLE use was associated with greater crime and behavior problems in studies that used schools as the unit of analysis. Within this category, SBLE use was associated with increased exclusionary discipline among studies that used both schools (g = 0.15, 95% confidence interval [CI] [0.02, 0.27]) and students (g = 0.003, 95% CI [0.002, 0.003]) as the unit of analysis. SBLE use was not associated with any measures of crime or violence in schools. SBLE use was associated with greater feelings of safety among studies that used schools as the unit of analysis (g = 0.18, 95% CI [0.13, 0.24]), although this estimate was based on only seven effect sizes from two correlational studies. All the other models, including those examining learning outcomes, yielded null results. None of the moderators tested showed meaningful relationships, indicating the findings were consistent across a variety of study design features.

Authors’ Conclusions

This study's findings provide no evidence that there is a safety-promoting component of SBLE, and support the criticism that SBLE criminalizes students and schools. Although we found no evidence of differences across methodological features, risk of bias in the primary studies limits our confidence in making causal inferences. To the extent that the findings are causal, schools that invest in strategies to improve safety will likely benefit from divesting from SBLE and instead investing in evidence-based strategies for enhancing school safety. Schools that continue to use SBLE should ensure that their model has no harmful effects and is providing safety benefits.

Campbell Systematic Review, 19(4): 2023.

By Emma Rackstraw

Television shows with police officer protagonists are ubiquitous on American television. Both fictional shows and reality shows portray a world where criminals are nearly always apprehended. However, this is a distortion of reality, as crimes mostly go unsolved and police officers infrequently make arrests. What does the omnipresence of this genre mean for the general public's conception of police, for the practice of policing, and for the communities being policed? I use department-level and officer-level arrest data to find that arrests for low-level, victimless crimes increase by 20 percent while departments film with reality television shows, concentrated in the officers actively followed by cameras. These arrests do not meaningfully improve public safety and come at the cost of the local public's confidence. I then document quasi-experimentally and experimentally that these shows -- particularly their overrepresentation of arrests -- improve non-constituent viewer attitudes towards and beliefs about the police. The results are consistent with "copaganda" shows inflating trust in police nationally while subjecting some to harsher but not more effective enforcement. I consider the implications for police reform

Rackstraw, Emma, When Reality TV Creates Reality: How “Copaganda” Affects Police, Communities, and Viewers (October 30, 2023).

By Cleaveland, Ann; Cohn, Alan, 1964-; Nagamine, Matthew; Thomas, Dawn H.; Rimsky Vernon, Alison

From the document: "This report presents findings from Cybersecurity Futures 2030, a global research initiative focused on exploring how digital security could evolve over the next five to seven years. The goal of this project is to help shape a future-focused research and policy agenda that is widely applicable across countries and sectors. The findings are based on discussions held at a series of in-person workshops conducted throughout 2023 in Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Washington DC (USA), Kigali (Rwanda), New Delhi (India) and Singapore, as well as a virtual workshop with participants from multiple European countries and the United Kingdom. The workshops centred on discussion of four scenarios that portray diverse 'cybersecurity futures' that are fictional (but plausible) depictions of the world roughly in the year 2030. UC [University of California] Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) independently designed the scenarios to explore trade-offs in goals and values that decision-makers will have to contend with in the near future."

World Economic Forum . 2023. 16p.

By United States. Federal Emergency Management Agency

From the document: "The 2023 NPR [National Preparedness Report] outlines the nation's progress towards achieving the National Preparedness Goal of 'A secure and resilient nation with the capabilities required across the whole community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk' as well as recommendations for closing remaining gaps. This annual report draws upon various data sources, including open-source data, FEMA and community preparedness data sets, and submissions from federal departments and agencies. FEMA also recognizes critical infrastructure owners and operators as important partners in emergency management and community resilience, but did not collect insights into preparedness from this group, as such research presently extends beyond the scope of this report."

United States. Federal Emergency Management Agency. Dec, 2023. 59p.

By Toner, Helen; Ji, Jessica; Bansemer, John; Lim, Lucy; Painter, Chris; Corley, Courtney D.; Whittlestone, Jess; Botvinick, Matt; Rodriguez, Mikel; Shankar Siva Kumar, Ram

From the document: "AI is experiencing a moment of profound change, capturing unprecedented public attention and becoming increasingly sophisticated. As AI becomes more powerful, and in some cases more general in its capabilities, it may become capable of posing novel risks in domains such as bioweapons development, cybersecurity, and beyond. Two features of the current AI landscape are especially challenging from a policy perspective: the rapid pace at which research is advancing, and the recent development of more general-purpose AI systems, which--unlike most AI systems, which are narrowly focused on a single task--can be adapted to many different use cases. These two elements add new layers of difficulty to existing AI ethics and safety problems. In July 2023, Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) and Google DeepMind hosted a virtual roundtable to discuss the implications and governance of the advancing AI research frontier, particularly with regard to general-purpose AI models. The objective of the roundtable was to help bridge the gap between the state of the current conversation and the reality of AI technology at the research frontier, which has potentially widespread implications for both national security and society at large."

Georgetown University. Walsh School Of Foreign Service. Center For Security And Emerging Technology . 2023. 23p.

By Taryn A. Merkl PUBLISHED APRIL 29, 2021 With a foreword by Eric H. Holder Jr

The protest movement sparked by George Floyd’s killing last year has forced a nationwide reckoning with a wide range of deep-rooted racial inequities — in our economy, in health care, in education, and even in our democracy — that undermine the American promise of freedom and justice for all. That tragic incident provoked widespread demonstrations and stirred strong emotions from people across our nation.

While our state and local governments wrestle with how to reimagine relationships between police and the communities they serve, the Justice Department has long been hamstrung in its ability to mete out justice when people’s civil rights are violated.

The Civil Rights Acts passed during Reconstruction made it a federal crime to deprive someone of their constitutional rights while acting in an official capacity, a provision now known as Section 242. Today, when state or local law enforcement are accused of misconduct, the federal government is often seen as the best avenue for justice — to conduct a neutral investigation and to serve as a backstop when state or local investigations falter. I’m proud that the Justice Department pursued more Section 242 cases under my leadership than under any other attorney general before or since.

But due to Section 242’s vague wording and a series of Supreme Court decisions that raised the standard of proof needed for a civil rights violation, it’s often difficult for federal prosecutors to hold law enforcement accountable using this statute.

This timely report outlines changes to Section 242 that would clarify its scope, making it easier to bring cases and win convictions for civil rights violations of these kinds. Changing the law would allow for charges in cases where prosecutors might currently conclude that the standard of proof cannot be met. Perhaps more important, it attempts to deter potential future misconduct by acting as a nationwide reminder to law enforcement and other public officials of the constitutional limits on their authority.

The statutory changes recommended in this proposal are carefully designed to better protect civil rights that are already recognized. And because Black, Latino, and Native Americans are disproportionately victimized by the kinds of official misconduct the proposal addresses, these changes would advance racial justice.

This proposal would also help ensure that law enforcement officers in every part of the United States live up to the same high standards of professionalism. I have immense regard for the vital role that police play in all of America’s communities and for the sacrifices that they and their families are too often called to make on behalf of their country. It is in great part for their sake — and for their safety — that we must seek to build trust in all communities.

We need to send a clear message that the Constitution and laws of the United States prohibit public officials from engaging in excessive force, sexual misconduct, and deprivation of needed medical care. This proposal will better allow the Justice Department to pursue justice in every appropriate case, across the country.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 26p.

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 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 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.