By Susannah N. Tapp and Elizabeth J. Davis

In 2020, an estimated 21% of U.S. residents age 16 or older (about 53.8 million persons) reported experiencing contact with police during the past 12 months (figure 1), down from 24% in 2018. Approximately 10% of residents had experienced a police-initiated contact in 2020, while 11% experienced a resident-initiated contact and 3% were involved in a traffic accident that led to a police contact. Findings in this report are based on data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) 2020 Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS), with selected data from the 2018 and 2015 PPCS data collections. The PPCS is a supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which collects information from a nationally representative sample of persons age 12 or older in U.S. households. The PPCS collects information from persons age 16 or older on nonfatal contacts with police during the 12 months prior to the interview. Police contacts were classified by the year of the survey and not by the year of the contact.

Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2022. 25p.

By Fernando Saltiel and Cody Tuttle

We show that the quality of police hires varies over the business cycle. Officers hired when the unemployment rate is high have fewer complaints, disciplines, and are less likely to be fired than officers hired when the unemployment rate is low. Effects are larger for younger workers who have weaker outside options in recessions. We find that the size and quality of the applicant pool increases in high unemployment years–more people take entry exams and a smaller fraction fail the exam. Our findings shed light on how outside options affect police hires and speak to policy questions about police recruitment.

Bonn: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics 2022. 48p.

By Aaron Stagoff-Belfort, Daniel Bodah, and Daniela Gilbert

As policymakers and the public consider how best to address crime nationwide, deeper insights on policing should guide decisions about its funding and role in the provision of public safety. An assumption that policing is cost-effective may guide decisions to provide law enforcement with additional resources, yet a range of policing activities can result in “social costs of policing”: people suffering physical and behavioral health problems; losing educational opportunities, jobs, housing, and transportation; and withdrawing from civic engagement. These effects stem not only from violent interactions with police, but also from indirect exposure to routine policing activities; for instance, living in a neighborhood where police stop many people on the street. Even being arrested but not convicted and not having any continuing criminal legal system involvement can cause significant harm. This evidence brief seeks to fill a critical gap in understanding the benefits and costs of relying on policing as a primary approach to safety. When we measure what effect policing has on public safety, we must include the social costs of policing that make communities less healthy and prosperous, and consider whether the crime reduction benefits that policing can provide may be achieved through less costly means. The American Public Health Association has declared police violence—which often stems from encounters over minor infractions—a public health issue. Beyond acts of police brutality, routine law enforcement actions such as arrests and street stops can also destabilize communities.

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  Such activities are common: in the United States, more than nine million arrests are made annually—one every three seconds—though 80 percent of those are for low-level offenses, and only five percent are for serious violent crimes. Responding to social problems through policing is a policy choice, and arrests.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2022. 33p.

By Peter Manning

With the rise of surveillance technology in the last decade, police departments now have an array of sophisticated tools for tracking, monitoring, even predicting crime patterns. In particular crime mapping, a technique used by the police to monitor crime by the neighborhoods in their geographic regions, has become a regular and relied-upon feature of policing. Many claim that these technological developments played a role in the crime drop of the 1990s, and yet no study of these techniques and their relationship to everyday police work has been made available. Noted scholar Peter K. Manning spent six years observing three American police departments and two British constabularies in order to determine what effects these kinds of analytic tools have had on modern police management and practices. While modern technology allows the police to combat crime in sophisticated, detail-oriented ways, Manning discovers that police strategies and tactics have not been altogether transformed as perhaps would be expected. In The Technology of Policing, Manning untangles the varying kinds of complex crime-control rhetoric that underlie much of today's police department discussion and management, and provides valuable insight into which are the most effective—and which may be harmful--in successfully tracking criminal behavior.

New York: New York University Press, 2011. 338p.

By Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency:

From the Introduction: "Infrastructure is the backbone of our communities, providing not only critical services (such as water, transportation, electricity, and communications), but also the means for health, safety, and economic growth. These systems often extend beyond our communities providing service to entire regions and contributing to the delivery of National Critical Functions [hyperlink]. Given the vital importance of infrastructure to our social and economic well-being, it is imperative we ensure our networks are strong, secure, and resilient. [...] The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) developed the Infrastructure Resilience Planning Framework (IRPF) to provide an approach for localities, regions, and the private sector to work together to plan for the security and resilience of critical infrastructure services in the face of multiple threats and changes. The primary audience for the IRPF is state, local, tribal, and territorial governments and associated regional organizations; however, the IRPF can be flexibly used by any organization seeking to enhance their resilience planning. It provides resources for integrating critical infrastructure into planning as well as a framework for working regionally and across systems and jurisdictions."

United States. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. Nov. 2022. 56p.

By Emily Owens and Jaclyn Rosenquist

In order to better understand the role that race or ethnicity may play in who is stopped by their officers, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) provided the California Policy Lab (CPL) with a data set of 2,141,817 enforcement stops made by the CHP from January to December of 2019. The data was collected pursuant to California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (RIPA). In order to extend the statistical analysis presented in the 2021 Annual RIPA Board Report, we evaluated enforcement stops in combination with non-enforcement stops using two generally accepted approaches to measure racially disparate policing: benchmarking and a hit rate analysis.

Los Angeles: California Policy Lab, 2021. 59p.

By Mike Brodgen and Preeti Nijhar

Community policing has been a buzzword in Anglo-American policing for the last two decades, somewhat vague in its definition but generally considered to be a good thing. In the UK the notion of community policing conveys a consensual policing style, offering an alternative to past public order and crime-fighting styles. In the US community policing represents the dominant ideology of policing as reflected in a myriad of urban schemes and funding practices, the new orthodoxy in North American policing policy-making, strategies and tactics. But it has also become a massive export to non-western societies.

Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing, 2005. 259p.

Edited by Mahesh K. Nalla and Graeme R. Newman

Indigenous communities are typically those that challenge the laws of the nation states of which they have become—often very reluctantly—a part. Around the world, community policing has emerged in many of these regions as a product of their physical environments and cultures. Through a series of case studies, Community Policing in Indigenous Communities explores how these often deeply divided societies operate under the community policing paradigm. Drawing on the local expertise of policing practitioners and researchers across the globe, the book explores several themes with regard to each region:

How community policing originated or evolved in the community and how it has changed over time The type of policing style used—whether informal or formal and uniformed or non-uniformed, whether partnerships are developed with local community organizations or businesses, and the extent of covert operations, if any The role played by community policing in the region, including the relative emphasis of calls for service, the extent to which advice and help is offered to citizens, whether local records are kept of citizen movement and locations, and investigation and arrest procedures.

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  The community’s special cultural or indigenous attributes that set it apart from other models of community policing Organizational attributes, including status in the "hierarchy of control" within the regional or national organization of policing The positive and negative features of community policing as it is practiced in the community Its effectiveness in reducing and or preventing crime and disorder. The book demonstrates that community policing cannot be imposed from above without grassroots input from local citizens. It is a strategy—not simply for policing with consent—but for policing in contexts where there is often little, if any, consent. It is an aspirational practice aimed to help police and communities within contested contexts to recognize that positive gains can be made, enabling communities to live in relative safety.

Boca Raton, FL: London; New York: CRC Press, 2013. 396p.

By Richard C. Lindberg
In this serious yet entertaining book, historian Richard Carl Lindberg probes unexplored avenues of Chicago history and presents the first in-depth history of the Chicago Police Department in over a century. The book traces the stormy history of the department from the 1850s to the Summerdale Scandal of the near present. Interspersed with the major chapters about the chaotic struggle between reform and the machine are short, intimate vignettes: the Armory Station, a gray, somber fortress that housed some of Chicago's most desperate characters for over thirty years; Francis O'Neill, Chicago's turn-of-the-century police chief who collected Irish folk songs and transcribed them into sheet music; the first fingerprint conviction in Cook County in which a man paid the ultimate price; and a retrospective look at some of the most infamous murder cases of the century and how the police solved them. Lindberg discusses the tie between politics, organized crime, vice, and the police department. He presents a history of Chicago politics and law enforcement in chronological order and recounts pivotal events in Chicago history in the police context.

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  The book reveals how police corruption in Chicago was the result of the political drag on the department; the pernicious influence of meddling aldermen and vice operatives that prevented the police from carrying out their sworn duties in a forthright manner. Lindberg examines the lack of central authority over the police department; police superintendents were traditionally weak, subservient figures to the mayor, unable, and often unwilling to exercise control over the bureaucracy. Students and scholars of history, criminal justice, Chicago history, and law enforcement will find To Serve and Collect provocative reading.

Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991. 366p.

By Tim Prenzler

While many police officers undertake their work conforming to the highest ethical standards, the fact remains that unethical police conduct continues to be a recurring problem around the world. With examples from a range of jurisdictions, Police Corruption: Preventing Misconduct and Maintaining Integrity examines the causes of police misconduct and explores applied strategies designed to maximize ethical conduct and identify and prevent corruption.

Boca Raton; London; New York: CRC Press, 2009. 240p.

By Office Of Senator Mark R. Warner

From the Introduction: "Over the past decade, the American public has witnessed increasingly brazen and disruptive attacks on its health care sector that jeopardize sensitive personal information, delay treatment, and ultimately lead to increased suffering and death. In 2021, cybersecurity attacks on health care providers reached an all-time high, with one study indicating that more than 45 million people were affected by such attacks in 2021 - a 32 percent increase over 2020. The health care sector is vulnerable to cyberattacks for a number of reasons, including its reliance on legacy technology, a wide and highly varied attack surface (that only grows more complex from the ever-increasing number of connected devices), a high-pressure environment where even the slightest delay can have life-or-death consequences, funding constraints, and an outdated mode of thinking that views cybersecurity as a secondary or tertiary concern."

Office Of Senator Mark R. Warner . 2022. 36p.

By Jialu L. Streeter

For decades, California has had one of the country’s largest
populations of unhoused people. In recent years, however,
the challenges have severely worsened for the Golden State.
The homelessness counts in California rose by 42 percent
between 2014 and 2020, while the rest of the country had a
9 percent decrease. On any given night, the state has more
than 160,000 homeless persons.

California’s homeless crisis is associated with high housing
costs, inadequate shelter spaces, deinstitutionalization,
and changes in the criminal justice system.

Stanford, CA: The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), 2022. 13p.

By Sarah Gillespie,Devlin Hanson,Nicole DuBois,Cary Lou,Christine Velez,Jennifer Esala,Tracey O'Brien

In 2016, the City and County of Denver launched the Denver Supportive Housing Social Impact Bond Initiative (Denver SIB) to shift resources from expensive emergency services to more permanent, affordable housing and supportive services. The initiative aimed to increase housing stability and decrease jail stays for people trapped in the homelessness-jail cycle. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Evidence for Action program, the Urban Institute launched a health outcomes study as a complement to the ongoing SIB evaluation. This report focuses on the year before people were enrolled in the SIB evaluation, giving us a picture of the status quo for health services in Denver for people experiencing cycles of homelessness and incarceration.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2021. 59p.

By Sarah Gillespie, Devlin Hanson, Josh Leopold, Alyse D. Oneto

In 2016, the City and County of Denver launched the Denver Supportive Housing Social Impact Bond Initiative (Denver SIB) to shift resources from expensive emergency services to more permanent, affordable housing and supportive services that can be difficult to fund without up-front capital. The initiative aimed to increase housing stability and decrease jail stays for people trapped in the homelessness-jail cycle. This report details the costs of supportive housing provided by the Denver SIB and the costs and cost offsets associated with supportive housing’s effects on outcomes across the housing and homelessness assistance, criminal justice, and health care systems.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2021. 49p.

By Mary K. Cunningham, Devlin Hanson,Sarah Gillespie,Michael Pergamit,Alyse D. Oneto,Patrick Spauster,Tracey O'Brien,Liz Sweitzer,Christine Velez

Homelessness is growing in communities across the United States as housing becomes increasingly unaffordable and public systems fail to support people who need assistance, forcing thousands to sleep outside or in shelters. Without access to housing and services, many people experiencing chronic, or long-term, homelessness are trapped in a homelessness-jail cycle—rotating in and out of jail, detoxification centers, and emergency health care. This cycle doesn’t help people access the assistance they need to find stability, and it comes at a major cost to taxpayers. Rather than paying for the consequences of leaving people in homelessness, communities could invest in housing and services that end this harmful pattern. Results from the five-year Denver Supportive Housing Social Impact Bond Initiative (Denver SIB) show how both people and public budgets benefit when communities take this proactive approach.ess, communities could invest in housing and services that end this harmful pattern. Results from the five-year Denver Supportive Housing Social Impact Bond Initiative (Denver SIB) show how both people and public budgets benefit when communities take this proactive approach. The Denver SIB, launched in 2016 by the City and County of Denver, aimed to increase housing stability and decrease jail stays among people who were experiencing chronic homelessness and who had frequent interactions with the criminal justice and emergency health systems.

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  The Denver SIB, which provided supportive housing (a permanent housing subsidy and intensive services) to help participants stay housed, used a Housing First approach. Housing First programs don’t require participants to meet any preconditions, and they are built on the idea that secure, affordable, and permanent housing must be available before people can work on other challenges, such as mental health or substance use disorders. The Urban Institute, with partners from The Evaluation Center at the University of Colorado Denver, tracked implementation of the Denver SIB and evaluated its effects between 2016 and 2020. The evaluation used a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard for determining a program’s impact, that included 724 people: 363 people were in the treatment group (referred to the supportive housing program) and 361 people were in the control group (receiving services as usual in the community).

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2021. 94p.

By Samantha Batko, Sarah Gillespie,Katrina Ballard,Mary K. Cunningham

In response to unsheltered homelessness, communities often turn to punitive responses: issuing ordinances that criminalize homelessness, clearing homeless encampments, and arresting people. This results in people becoming trapped in a cycle of homelessness and jail. The solution to this cycle is Housing First, an evidence-based strategy that has been proven to help people stay in housing and improve their quality of life. Until housing is available at the scale needed to end homelessness, communities can improve outcomes for people enduring unsheltered homelessness and for the community as a whole by considering promising innovations that prioritize inclusive public space management and shift the role of law enforcement agencies from policing homelessness to solving homelessness in partnerships with service providers. This report reviews the evidence for housing as the solution to homelessness and emerging evidence for inclusive public space and alternative crisis response policies and practices.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2020. 35p.

By Jordy Coutin

On Thursday, July 29th 2021, Los Angeles (LA) Mayor Eric Garcetti signed into law an ordinance amending Section 41.18 of the Los Angeles Municipal code (Spectrum 1 News, 2021). The series of amendments, proposed by LA City Council, reinstates prohibitions to “sit, lie, sleep, store, use, maintain, or place personal property upon any street, sidewalk, or other public right-of-way” in much of Los Angeles City, with particular enforcement around homeless services delivery sites, schools, parks, libraries, and underpasses (Shover et al., 2021; L.A.M.C. § 41.18, 2021). Violating these laws can carry fines for people experiencing homelessness (PEH) who refuse shelter and services, and authorizes forced removal if they do not voluntarily vacate encampments. Though the legislation includes a stated goal to prevent interactions between law enforcement and PEH and avoid arrest, advocates argue the ordinance will likely result in more contact between police and PEH (Zahniser & Oreskes, 2021). This legislation comes at the same time as residents and elected officials have renewed calls to re-examine the role police play in society, with a particular emphasis on the impacts of policing Black communities. Considering these public requests, the purpose of this paper is to examine findings from the literature on the types of policies that cause interactions between municipal and county law enforcement (referred to as police hereafter) and PEH, their outcomes, and the models and best practices being used by local governments to minimize negative outcomes

Los Angeles: Homelessness Policy Research Institute, University of Southern California, 2021. 18p.

By Madeline Bailey, Erica Crew, and Madz Reeve

On any given night in the United States, more than 550,000 people are experiencing homelessness.1 Among these, approximately 96,000 are chronically homeless, meaning they are facing long and repeated episodes of homelessness that make it increasingly difficult to return to housing.2 This crisis is perpetuated by a legal system that criminalizes survival behaviors associated with homelessness, fails to account for the ways in which people who are homeless face impossible odds within the legal process, and then releases them back into the community with even more obstacles than they faced before.3 Confirming this cycle, researchers have found that homelessness is between 7.5 and 11.3 times more prevalent among the jail population, and in some places the rate is much higher—for example, in San Francisco, California, a 2013 survey found that between 10 and 24 percent of people in jail identified as homeless at the time of arrest.4 Because of punitive laws and enforcement practices, people who are homeless are 11 times more likely to be arrested, nationwide, than those who are housed.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2020. 19p.

By Christopher Herring

This report details the effects of criminalization on the homeless residents of San Francisco. Since 1981, San Francisco has passed more local measures to criminalize sleeping, sitting, or panhandling in public spaces than any other city in the state of California.1 During this same period, the United States has experienced the greatest expansion of its jail and prison system under any democracy in history. This expansion has primarily affected the poorest members of this society.2 This report documents and analyzes the impacts of the rising tide of anti-homeless laws in our era of mass incarceration on those experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. This portrait of the impact of criminalization on homelessness in San Francisco is based on a citywide survey of 351 homeless individuals and 43 in-depth interviews carried out by volunteers at the Coalition on Homelessness and supervised by researchers at the UC Berkeley Center on Human Rights. It also analyzes data on policy, citations, and arrests received from the San Francisco Police Department, the Sheriff ’s Office, the Human Services Agency, and the Recreation and Park Department. The report provides an in-depth analysis of each step in the criminalization of homelessness—from interactions with law enforcement, to the issuance and processing of citations, to incarceration and release.

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  The study makes evident how criminalization not only fails to reduce homelessness in public space, but also perpetuates homelessness, racial and gender inequality, and poverty even once one has exited homelessness. The aim of this study is to provide sound empirical data on the impacts of the criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco, while also giving voice to the experiences of those whose housing status results in their regularly being processed through the city’s criminal justice system. Our hope is that these findings will inform public discussions and provide the basis for thoughtful policy approaches to these issues.

San Francisco: Coalition on Homelessness, 2015. 86p.

By Christopher Herring

Over the past thirty years, cities across the US have adopted variants of “quality-of- life” policing. Central to these efforts have been local ordinances aimed at curbing visible poverty, suppressing “anti-social behavior,” and removing the homeless from public space. My dissertation examines the causes, practices, and consequences of criminalizing homelessness in the contemporary metropolis. By relating ethnographic observations in the political and bureaucratic fields with those between interactions of state officials and homeless individuals, the dissertation reveals novel forms of the criminalization of poverty, tracing how homelessness is turned into a criminal activity by state classifications, institutional transformations, and populist politicization thanks to, rather than in-spite of, provisions of welfare and rhetoric of assistance. It also uncovers novel forms of the penalization of poverty, disclosing how policing can be directed by urban change, economic organizations, community groups, and agencies of poverty governance tangential to the criminal justice system. Expanding the conception of the criminalization of poverty, which is often centered on incarceration or arrest, the study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of move- along orders, citations, and threats that dispossess the poor of property, create barriers to services and jobs, and increase vulnerability to violence and crime.

Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 2020. 142p.