By Alex Menninger, Sharyn Adams, Jessica Reichert

Introduction

A disproportionate number of police contacts involve people with behavioral health needs, such as those experiencing a mental health crisis or struggling with a substance use disorder (Livingston, 2016). Deflection is one type of program in which police officers are able to refer persons who they encounter to behavioral health services (Lindquist-Grantz et al., 2021). Participation is voluntary, and the referral service is free to participants. Deflection aims to reduce criminal justice system involvement and connect people with treatment and other services to improve individual and community health (Charlier & Reichert, 2020).

We evaluated the development of a new deflection program in Illinois, Little Egypt Alternative Pathways (LEAP), that covers Jackson, Johnson, and Williamson counties (southern Illinois is known as Little Egypt due to perceived geographic similarities [Williamson County Government, n.d.]) The goal is for police in the Illinois State Police-led Southern Illinois Enforcement Group (SIEG), a multijurisdictional police task force, to refer persons to services in these counties. An overview how participants interact with the program is shown in Figure 1.

Program development began with multi-day, guided action planning sessions facilitated by Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities’ Center for Health and Justice (TASC CHJ). Action planning brought together local community stakeholders to learn about deflection programs, form objectives, and discuss implementation strategies. After six days of action planning, the final product was a Solutions Action Plan that detailed the group’s plan to create their deflection program. To evaluate and offer insights into the planning process, we collected data through field observations and surveys and developed recommendations to guide future action planning sessions and promote the success of LEAP’s program.

Methodology

A researcher from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA) attended the six action planning sessions in February and March of 2023 for a total of 29 hours of field observation. All action planning sessions were conducted in person and included 6 to 13 local service providers each day. We administered a paper survey to participants at the end of each action planning day to gather information on participants’ action planning process, levels of engagement, intentions for implementation, and perceived benefits of a deflection program. We gathered participant demographic information on day 1 of action planning and administered a collaboration survey on day 5. We analyzed the action planning sessions based on field notes and supportive documents and summarized what transpired each day. We also analyzed the survey data from people who attended each day and the data from the collaboration survey using descriptive statistics. Findings revealed participants’ views about what transpired during the action planning process, what feedback they had about the sessions, and how they perceived collaboration during the process.

Key Findings

Twenty representatives from 12 local organizations participated in at least one of the six action planning sessions. One of the participating organizations was a law enforcement agency that will serve as the primary referral source of participants to deflection specialists. The other 11 organizations were service providers and community organizations that will receive referrals from deflection specialists. The majority worked in behavioral health. Action planning sessions were additionally attended by TASC, Inc. staff, who are not a part of TASC CHJ; an ICJIA researcher; a subject matter expert; and a representative of the Illinois State Police. The distinct roles that staff from TASC CHJ and TASC, Inc. play in a deflection program are that TASC CHJ facilitates action planning and then the program is handed off to TASC, Inc. TASC, Inc. is the agency that employs the “deflection specialists” who conduct case management and make referrals to services.

Early in the action planning process, participants identified substance use and mental health crises as the greatest areas of concern in their community. The group agreed interagency communication was important for program success. Participant engagement increased on days 2 and 3 of action planning as the group discussed how police were to refer potential participants and what the established outcomes for this program should be. On day 3, participants also voiced some confusion about the different roles that TASC CHJ and TASC, Inc. play in program development and implementation. The confusion seemed to be somewhat resolved on day 4 of action planning, when the TASC, Inc. deflection specialists attended and gave more explanation. As the action planning sessions neared their end, the group finalized four program outcomes for the deflection program and, to achieve them, 19 strategies and 63 action steps. Action steps focused on partnerships, community outreach, marketing, and trainings.

Survey results from the beginning of action planning indicated participants felt additional community partners were needed to promote program success. Attendees were satisfied with the action planning process overall, although their satisfaction declined in the second half of action planning. Participants were confident that the program would benefit the community, but uncertain about its sustainability and the extent to which all involved organizations shared long-term goals. This perception is not surprising given participants had minimal discussion about short- or long-term program goals. On the last day of action planning, participants stated they would likely take an active role in program implementation. Results from the collaboration survey identified insufficient resources and organization participation as the areas of greatest concern. Collaborative strengths included high levels of agreement among respondents about the program being beneficial and about its accomplishment depending on multi-organizational collaborations.

Recommendations

Based on our findings, we provide recommendations to address concerns regarding attendance, engagement, and program implementation. First, since engagement fluctuated during sessions, we recommend increased attendance at action planning sessions. Increased attendance would likely boost the representation of local community organizations and increase service capacity. It also potentially would enhance the quality of the action plan and benefit participants’ satisfaction (Luyet et al., 2012). Second, we recommend repeating the descriptions of stakeholder roles to help clarify the roles of TASC CHJ (leading action planning and technical assistance) and TASC, Inc. (day-to-day operations). Third, we recommend increasing participants’ understanding of the planning, implementation, and operational processes. Next, we also suggest that groups formulate measurable outcomes and prioritize action steps, which can be done through the creation a program logic model (Gleicher, 2017; Centers for Disease Controls and Prevention, n.d.). The collaboration survey could serve as a baseline measurement of the group’s perceptions about collaborative dynamics that may be inhibiting progress toward measurable outcomes. The survey can be given out to note changes in collaborators’ perceptions over time and tie them to outcomes and action steps. Finally, the program should try to increase collaboration by engaging political and community leadership (D’Amour et al., 2009; Farhoudian et al., 2022).

Conclusion

The action planning process brought together local service providers and law enforcement to develop a solutions action plan for the LEAP deflection program in southern Illinois. The program will connect individuals experiencing a substance use disorder or mental health crisis with behavioral health and other services in their community. The final action plan formulated objectives, strategies, and action steps toward implementing the deflection program. Further clarification of the program process and roles as well as increased local community engagement can improve program development to promote success.

Chicago: Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, 2024. 58p.

United States. Department Of Homeland Security. Office Of Inspector General

From the document: "The United States Secret Service (Secret Service) planned and conducted protective operations at several sites on January 6, 2021, including the Capitol, and took actions to assist the United States Capitol Police (USCP). We initiated this review to evaluate the Secret Service's preparation for, and response to, the events of January 6, 2021. [...] We conducted this review to evaluate the Secret Service's preparation for, and response to, the events of January 6, 2021. [...] We made six recommendations to improve the Secret Service's policies and processes for planning and responding to similar events."

United States. Department Of Homeland Security. Office Of Inspector General . 31 Jul, 2024 .

By Robles, Nicolas M.; Alhajjar, Elie; Geneson, Jessie; Moon, Alvin; Adams, Christopher Scott; Leuschner, Kristin; Steier, Joshua

From the webpage description: "Building on research on quantum machine learning, researchers investigated the effect of quantum-enhanced artificial intelligence within the context of the six U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) missions. For each mission, the authors illustrate how quantum boosts could help DHS perform its computational duties more efficiently. They also explain some situations in which quantum computing does not provide benefits over classical computing. Last, they provide recommendations to DHS on how to leverage quantum computing. This paper should be of interest to policymakers, researchers, and others working on quantum computing or artificial intelligence."

RAND CORPORATION. 27 AUG, 2024.

By United States. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency

The following passage from the document contains multiple links embedded in the text: "The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) conducts Risk and Vulnerability Assessments (RVAs) for the federal civilian executive branch (FCEB), high priority private and public sector critical infrastructure (CI) operators, and select state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) stakeholders. Concurrently, the United States Coast Guard (USCG) conducts RVAs on maritime CI operated by SLTT and private-sector organizations. The RVA is intended to assess the entity's network capabilities and network defenses against known threats. In Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23), CISA and the USCG conducted a combined total of '143' RVAs across multiple CI sectors. [...] The goal of the RVA analysis is to develop effective strategies to improve the security posture of FCEB, CI, maritime, and SLTT stakeholders. During each RVA, CISA and the USCG collect data through remote and onsite actions. This data is combined with national threat and vulnerability information to provide organizations with actionable remediation recommendations prioritized by risk of compromise. CISA designed RVAs to identify vulnerabilities threat actors could exploit to compromise network security controls. After completing an RVA, CISA and the USCG provide the assessed entity a final report that includes recommendations, specific findings, potential mitigations, and technical attack path details. The FY23 reports provided these general observations: [1] Assessors completed their most successful attacks via common methods, such as phishing, valid accounts, and default credentials. [2] Assessors used a variety of tools and techniques CISA has captured in previous RVA analyses to successfully conduct common attacks. [3] Many organizations across varying CI sectors exhibited the same vulnerabilities. [4] CISA assessment personnel used common vulnerabilities facilitated by shortcomings in secure by design and default principles and other misconfigurations to compromise systems."

UNITED STATES. Government. Washington DC. SEP, 2024. 24p.

By Patricio Domínguez and Carlos Scartascini 

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

Washington DC: IDB, 2022.  38p.

By Tim Marler; Susan Straus

This final research report describes a project aimed at addressing police officers’ need for better training to teach them how to operate effectively in the various stressful conditions they encounter on the job. The report presents the development and testing of a framework for implementing low-cost, virtual reality (VR), and game-based training (GBT), which would allow officers to develop skills in an immersive environment without expensive equipment, facilities, or human actors. The report describes the research team’s development of a prototype VR system that would ensure that virtual training environments reflect intended training goals; it describes the study’s approach to developing the framework: identifying the most stressful police scenarios; developing detailed scenario scripts; identifying key required skills and tasks in scenarios and mapping them to virtual content; programming the scenarios in a VR system; developing a research protocol to test the system; and developing a plan to implement the proposed technology in police department training curricula. The framework approach is designed to be scalable and the report notes that it may ultimately improve access to simulation-based training content across law enforcement departments.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2024. 32p.

By David Weisburd,  David B. Wilson,  Charlotte Gill,  Kiseong Kuen, and Taryn Zastrow

One of the key policing innovations of the last three decades has been community-oriented policing. It is particularly important because it is one of the only proactive policing approaches that consistently improves citizen evaluations of the police. At the same time, a series of reviews have concluded that there is not persuasive evidence that community policing reduces crime. In this paper we argue that these conclusions are likely flawed because of what we term crime reporting sensitivity (CRS) bias. CRS bias occurs because community policing leads to more cooperation with the police and subsequently increased crime reporting. Such increased crime reporting bias adjusts crime prevention outcomes of community policing downward. We illustrate this process by reanalyzing data from the Brooklyn Park ACT Experiment (Weisburd et al., 2021). We begin by showing the specific crime categories that contribute most to CRS bias. We then use a difference-in-differences panel regression approach to assess whether the experimental intervention in Brooklyn Park led to significant CRS bias. Finally, we use bounded estimates from the Brooklyn Park Experiment to adjust meta-analytic results from prior community policing studies to examine whether the conclusion that community policing does not impact on crime would need to be revisited if CRS bias was accounted for. We find that adjusted estimates tell a very different, more positive, story about community policing, suggesting that future studies should recognize and adjust for CRS bias, or identify other measures not influenced by this mechanism.

Journal of Law & Empirical Analysis, 1(1) 2024 

By Hannah Cochran and Robert E. Worden  

The proliferation of body-worn cameras (BWCs) among police agencies across the nation emerged largely in response to sweeping demands for increased police accountability and transparency: heightened tensions between the police and the public in the aftermath of several high-profile in-custody deaths spurred attention to this technological innovation, and its benefits were expected to accrue to both law enforcement and community. Early media accounts’ praise for BWC technology heralded its potential to rebuild police-community relationships, reinforce accountability mechanisms for police, improve the quality of evidence in police investigations, and reduce the number of frivolous civilian complaints. Emblematic of its widespread appeal, in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s shooting, the Brown family urged the public to unite behind a platform that promotes the police use of body-worn cameras (Sink, 2014). The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2015) endorsed the dissemination and implementation of policing technologies such as BWCs, and it noted the urgent need for expanded research on the efficacy and practicability of BWCs. The Task Force also called for inquiry into the potential impacts of BWCs on the communities in which they are deployed. To wit, the report (2015: 32) quoted Ronald L. Davis, then the director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office), who wrote (in Miller and Toliver, 2014: vii): Although body-worn cameras can offer many benefits, they also raise serious questions about how technology is changing the relationship between police and the community. Body-worn cameras not only create concerns about the public’s privacy rights but also can affect how officers relate to people in the community, the community’s perception of the police, and expectations about how police agencies should share information with the public. The public’s embedded significance and relevance to the implementation of BWCs is underrepresented by the body of research on the subject, most of which spotlights police perceptions, and police and citizen behavior. In their review of BWC research, Lum and colleagues (2019) found that the number of studies examining officer behavior and attitudes were double those in which citizen or community attitudes were examined as outcomes. BWC technology emerged in part as a response to public demands; a fundamental question underlying the use of BWCs is what the public thinks about BWCs, and why. But evidence on how the public views this technology, and the correlates of public sentiment is slim. Expanding this research could be crucial to understanding the potential impacts of current and future reforms, and that is the purpose of our study.  

 Albany, NY: The John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety, Inc.   2020. 43p.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Julian Go

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

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

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

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

London: Springer Nature, 2015.

By Stephen Farrall and Emily Gray

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

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