By Michael Gennaco, Stephen Connolly and Julie Ruhlin

In the summer of 2019, Vallejo officials were responding to a time of transition for the City’s Police Department. The chief was newly retired, and the search for a new leader was underway against a backdrop of recent incidents – including fatal officer-involved shootings – that had prompted public concern and even demonstrations. It seemed as if a number of individual encounters were fitting all too well into larger, troubling narratives about American law enforcement: deadly force under disputed circumstances that affected minority subjects to a disproportionate extent, and strained relationships with residents that arose from and contributed to that reality while raising issues of trust and public confidence. Leadership within Vallejo’s city government decided that the time was right to take a step back and to assess the Department’s strengths, challenges, and opportunities in a new way. The City engaged an outside consultant to conduct this assessment.

This report is the product of that review. It was prepared by OIR Group, a team of private consultants that specializes in police practices and the civilian oversight of law enforcement. Since 2001, OIR Group has worked exclusively with government entities in a variety of contexts related to independent outside review of law enforcement, from investigation to monitoring to systems evaluation. Our members have provided oversight in jurisdictions throughout California, as well as in several other states.

Playa del Rey, CA:  OIR Group, 2020. 74p.

By The Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science

 In 2019, the Chicago Police Department, in partnership with the Policing Project at New York University (NYU), implemented the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative (CNPI). This initiative is composed of two interrelated goals: To measure CNPI’s impact, CORNERS built a multi-method research design capturing perspectives of residents and police in CNPI districts through in-depth interviews, systematic observations at police and community meetings and events, quasi-experimental statistical analyses, and analysis of key documents detailing CNPI activities.

Chicago: The Center, Northwestern University, 2023. 66p.

By The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

This document was developed through efforts by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC or Council) Intelligence and Information Sharing Working Group, to develop guidelines for local and state agencies in relation to the collection, analysis, and dissemination of terrorism-related intelligence (i.e., the fusion process). Those efforts laid the foundation for the expansion of the Fusion Center Guidelines to integrate the public safety and private sector entities. The guidelines are intended to ensure that fusion centers are established and operated consistently, with enhanced coordination efforts, strengthened partnerships, and improved crime-fighting and antiterrorism capabilities. Key elements include: sector-specific information and sharing plans; identification of goals for the fusion center; creation of a representative governance structure and collaborative environment for intelligence sharing among local, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies, public safety agencies, and the private sector; utilization of memoranda of understanding (MOUs), non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), and other agency agreements, as appropriate; leveraging of databases, systems, and networks to maximize information sharing; creating environments that promote communication among entities; development and publication of privacy and civil liberties policies; ensuring appropriate security measures for the facility, data, and personnel; integration of technology, systems, and people; achievement of a diversified representation of personnel based on the needs and functions of the center; ensuring adequate personnel training; provision of multitiered educational program for intelligence-led policing and information sharing; offering a variety of intelligence services and products to customers; developing and adhering to a policies and procedures manual; defining expectations and performance measurement for determining effectiveness; establishing and maintaining the center based on funding availability and sustainability; and the development and implementation of a communications plan among personnel, officers, and the general public. The eighteen guidelines provided reflect those key concepts; the document includes eight appendices.

Washington, DC: DHS, 2023. 104p..

By The Center for Public Safety Management

The Center for Public Safety Management, LLC (CPSM) was commissioned to review the operations of the Little Rock Police Department. While our analysis covered all aspects of the department’s operations, particular areas of focus of this study included: identifying appropriate staffing of the department given the workload, community demographics, and crime levels; the effectiveness of the organizational structure; and efficiency and effectiveness of division/unit processes. We analyzed the department workload using operations research methodology and compared that workload to staffing and deployment levels. We reviewed other performance indicators that enabled us to understand the implications of service demand on current staffing. Our study involved data collection, interviews with key operational and administrative personnel, focus groups with line level department personnel, on-site observations of the job environment, data analysis, comparative analysis, and the development of alternatives and recommendations. Based upon CPSM’s detailed assessment of the Little Rock Police Department, it is our conclusion that the department, overall, provides quality law enforcement services. The staff is professional and dedicated to the mission of the department. Through this report, we will strive to allow the reader to take a look inside the department to understand its strengths and its challenges. We sincerely hope that all parties utilize the information and recommendations contained herein in a constructive manner to make a fine law enforcement agency even better. As part of this Executive Summary, we offer general observations that we believe identify some of the more significant issues facing the department. Additionally, we also list key recommendations for consideration; we believe these recommendations will enhance organizational effectiveness. Some of these recommendations involve the creation of new job classifications; others involve the reassignment/repurposing of job duties to other sections and units. Oftentimes these types of recommendations require a substantial financial commitment on the part of a jurisdiction. In the case of the Little Rock Police Department, some may be accomplished by a realignment of workload and/or reclassification of job descriptions. It is important to note that in this report we will examine specific sections and units of the department and will offer a discussion of our observations and recommendations for each.

• More...

  The list of recommendations is extensive. Should the Little Rock Police Department choose to implement any or all recommendations, it must be recognized that this process will not take just weeks or even months to complete, but perhaps years. The recommendations are intended to form the basis of a long-term improvement plan for the city and department. It is important that we emphasize that this list of recommendations, though lengthy, is common in our operational assessments of agencies around the country and should in no way be interpreted as an indictment of what we consider to be a fine department. While all of the recommendations are important, we suggest the Little Rock Police Department in conjunction with other city departments, the city council, the city manager, and members of the community decide which recommendations should take priority for implementation.   

Washington, DC: Center for Public Safety Management, 2022. 212p.

By Sara B. Heller, Benjamin Jakubowski, Zubin Jelveh & Max Kapustin   

  This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 128 times higher than the average Chicagoan. A central concern is that algorithms may “bake in” bias found in police data, overestimating risk for people likelier to interact with police conditional on their behavior. We show that Black male victims more often have enough police contact to generate predictions. But those predictions are not, on average, inflated; the demographic composition of predicted and actual shooting victims is almost identical. There are legal, ethical, and practical barriers to using these predictions to target law enforcement. But using them to target social services could have enormous preventive benefits: predictive accuracy among the top 500 people justifies spending up to $134,400 per person for an intervention that could cut the probability of being shot by half. 

Unpublished Paper, 2023. 64p.

By Brenden Beck

Between 2016 and 2021, more than 400 unarmed people were killed by police during traffic stops. In addition, metropolitan areas that rely more on revenue from fines and fees experience more police killings. This study analyzed over 2,700 U.S. municipalities from 2009 to 2018 to describe the type of municipalities that collect the most money in monetary sanctions and investigate whether killings by police are more frequent in places that rely on fines and fees revenue. The author found that suburbs with larger Black populations rely the most on revenue from monetary sanctions and that municipalities that rely on such revenue have more police killings. This suggests municipalities’ fiscal landscape not only influences police contact with the public but also influences police violence. 

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences February 2023, 9 (2) 161-181

By Carmen L. Diaz, Michelle Yang,  Miriam Northcutt Bohmert , Jessica Meckes, Mitchell Farrell,

Cash bail payments are generally imposed to ensure an individual appears in court after arrest. Lesser known is the practice of bond conversion, wherein bond money is held to pay for legal financial obligations if the individual is found guilty. Procedural justice theory is a useful framework for understanding bail processes. Individuals subject to bond conversion may experience distrust towards a system whose policies are not transparent, potentially reducing compliance with the law. We conduct an assessment of statutes relevant to bond conversion for all 50 states and the US Code. Nearly half of all states and the US Code permit bond conversion via statute; statutes most often authorize conversion to pay for fines, costs, and restitution; most do not require the depositor be given notice, do not include language making exceptions for low-income individuals, and do not exclude third parties.

Federal Sentencing Reporter, 34(2-3):119-127

By Keith Finlay, Elizabeth Luh, Matthew Gross and Michael Mueller-Smith.

  We estimate the causal impact of financial sanctions in the U.S. criminal justice system. We utilize a regression discontinuity design and exploit two distinct natural experiments: the abrupt introduction of driver responsibility fees (DRF) in Michigan and Texas. These discontinuously imposed additional surcharges ($300–$6,000) for criminal traffic offenses. Although the policies generated almost $3 billion of debt, we find consistent evidence that the DRFs had no impact on recidivism, earnings, or romantic partners’ outcomes over the next decade. Without evidence of a general or specific deterrence effect and modest success with debt collection, we find little justification for these policies.

Unpublished paper, 2022. 47p.

By Ram Subramanian, Jackie Fielding, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Hernandez Stroud, and Taylor King    

Financial incentives throughout the criminal justice system encourage punitive enforcement and sustain mass incarceration. Realigning them will require action from municipalities to the federal government.

New York Brennan Center for Justice, 2022. 73p.

By Daniel C.K. Chow 

The proliferation of counterfeits for sale on e-commerce sites has created new and more dangerous challenges to brand owners than counterfeits sold through brick and mortar establishments. Most brand owners are currently focusing their efforts on simplifying and streamlining Notice and Takedown (“NTD”) procedures set up by ecommerce platforms to remove illegal listings. The shortcomings of these efforts are that NTDs do not directly reach the counterfeiter who remains free to conduct its illegal activities with impunity and that NTDs do not prevent delisted counterfeiters from reappearing in short order under a new fictitious name and identity. Brand owners should seek to induce China to rigorously enforce its recently enacted Electronic Commerce Law (“ECL”), which was designed by China’s lawmakers to create a “choke point” that excludes counterfeiters and other unscrupulous merchants from gaining access to online accounts. The ECL requires multiple layers of government review and approval that were designed so that they can be satisfied only by legitimate and economically viable business entities. To date, e-commerce sites in China do not strictly comply with the ECL, and U.S.-based ecommerce sites do not require any compliance whatsoever with the ECL. Rigorous enforcement of the ECL should result in preventing counterfeiters from gaining access to e-commerce sites based in China and the United States and should lead to a decrease in sales of counterfeits on the internet. 

Ohio State Legal Studies Research Paper No. 676. 52 Seton Hall Law Review 1053 (2022)

By Liberty, et al.

Whatever our postcode or the colour of our skin, we all deserve to grow up in communities where we are cared for and given the tools we need to flourish in life. But instead of investing in young people or providing support to deal with the causes of social problems, the government has given the police more powers to try and tackle the symptoms of these issues. This has led to more and more people being treated unfairly by the police, rather than being given the help they need. Our communities need investment, so that together we can create spaces and services that we know will give our young people the best chance in life. And we need to roll back the powers of the police so no-one faces harsh and traumatising treatment at the hands of police. That’s why a coalition including Liberty, have launched a groundbreaking report calling for a new approach to tackling serious youth violence, with the powers of the police rolled back and more funding and support given for young people to thrive., 

London?: 2023,Liberty, 133p.

By Kevin Petersen, David Weisburd, Sydney Fay, Elizabeth Eggins and Lorraine Mazzerole 

Police stops are associated with reductions in crime but also a broad range of negative individual-level outcomes.

Police stop interventions produce meaningful and significant reductions in crime without evidence of spatial displacement. However, people subject to stops are associated with significantly less desirable mental and physical health outcomes, attitudes toward police, and self-reported crime/delinquency. For some outcome measures, the negative effects of pedestrian stops are considerably more pronounced for youth, though the data did not permit a comparison of individual effects by race.

What is this review about?

Police stops have become one of the most controversial yet widely-used crime prevention strategies in modern policing. This intervention involves the police-initiated stop of an individual (or group of individuals) on the street, for the purpose of investigation and/or questioning. Police stops have been commonly used as a tactic to combat violent and gun-related crime.

Campbell Systematic Reviews. 2023;1

By Ranae Jabri

  Predictive policing algorithms are increasingly used by law enforcement agencies in the United States. These algorithms use past crime data to generate predictive policing boxes, specifically the highest crime risk areas where law enforcement is instructed to patrol every shift. I collect a novel dataset on predictive policing box locations, crime incidents, and arrests from a major urban jurisdiction where predictive policing is used. Using institutional features of the predictive policing policy, I isolate quasi-experimental variation to examine the causal impacts of algorithm-induced police presence. I find that algorithm-induced police presence decreases serious property and violent crime. At the same time, I also find disproportionate racial impacts on arrests for serious violent crimes as well as arrests in traffic incidents i.e. lower-level offenses where police have discretion. These results highlight that using predictive policing to target neighborhoods can generate a tradeoff between crime prevention and equity.

 Unpublished paper, 2021. 44p.  

By The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Washington Advisory Committee

The Washington Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights submits this briefing report regarding barriers to accountability for use of excessive force by law enforcement officers. The Committee submits this report as part of its responsibility to study and report on civil-rights issues in the state. The contents of this report are primarily based on testimony the Committee heard during public meetings held via video-conference from March to June 2021

Washington, DC: USCCR, 2022. 32p.-

By Richard A. Berk

  There are widespread concerns about the use of artificial intelligence in law enforcement. Predictive policing and risk assessment are salient examples. Worries include the accuracy of forecasts that guide both activities, the prospect of bias, and an apparent lack of operational transparency. Nearly breathless media coverage of artificial intelligence helps shape the narrative. In this review, we address these issues by first unpacking depictions of artificial intelligence. Its use in predictive policing to forecast crimes in time and space is largely an exercise in spatial statistics that in principle can make policing more effective and more surgical. Its use in criminal justice risk assessment to forecast who will commit crimes is largely an exercise in adaptive, nonparametric regression. It can in principle allow law enforcement agencies to better provide for public safety with the least restrictive means necessary, which can mean far less use of incarceration. None of this is mysterious. Nevertheless, concerns about accuracy, fairness, and transparency are real, and there are tradeoffs between them for which there can be no technical fix. You can’t have it all. Solutions will be found through political and legislative processes achieving an acceptable balance between competing priorities.  

  Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021. 4:209–37  

By Liz Campbell, Nessa Lynch, Joe Purshouse, Marcin Betkier

  The use of automated facial recognition technology (FRT) is becoming commonplace globally and in New Zealand. FRT involves the use of an algorithm to match a facial image to one already stored in a system, is used in automated passport control and other border control measures, as a biometric identifier in the banking, security and access contexts, and on social media platforms and various other consent-based applications

  This report contributes to the understanding of how and when this rapidly emerging hnology should be used and how it should be regulated. It is centred in what has been described as the ‘second wave’ of algorithmic accountability – While the first wave of algorithmic accountability focuses on improving existing systems, a second wave of research has asked whether they should be used at all—and, if so, who gets to govern them.3 This project seeks to address the regulation gap through ascertaining how FRT can and should be regulated in New Zealand. While the benefits that might be offered by FRT surveillance are increasingly observable, its effect on civil liberties is subtler, but certainly pernicious. Given the potential for FRT to be used as a key identity and access management tool in the future, there are pertinent questions around how images are being collected and stored now by the private sector. Where are these images being stored? Who has access to this data? What else might the images be used for? Without a detailed appraisal of the benefits of state FRT surveillance, and an understanding of the ethical issues raised by its use, any framework for the regulation of this activity cannot hope to engender public confidence that its use is fair and lawful.

Monash University, 2020. 118p.   

By Cameron Holley, Tariro Mutongwizo, and Clifford Shearing

  This review explores past and future shifts in policing and criminology scholarship that have shaped, and been shaped by, what is done to enhance safety within political domains. Investigating established policing conceptualizations, the review demonstrates how the ideal of state-delivered safety as a public good was challenged by a sizeable policing industry, giving rise to debates about legal context, service provision, and conceptualizations of policing and security nodal arrangements. This review argues that these understandings are now confronted by new harms and new conceptualizations of social institutional affairs. Interrogating these claims through an examination of the Anthropocene and technologies of cyberspace, we canvass debates and show that a shared focus of attention for the future of policing will be a decentralization of security and an expansion of private security governance professionals (both human and nonhuman)  

Annual Review of Criminology,  3:341-358, 2020

By Rachel Harmon

Coercive policing is conducted mostly by means of commanding officers usually cannot use force unless they have first issued an order. Yet, despite widespread concern about force and coercion in policing, commands are both underregulated and misunderstood. Officers have no clear legal authority to give many common commands, almost no departmental guidance about how or when to issue them, and almost no legal scrutiny for many commands they give. Scholars rarely study commands, and when they do, they get them wrong. As a result of vague law and inadequate analysis, basic questions about police commands—what role they play, where officers get authority to issue them, and how law regulates them—remain unanswered. Instead, officers interact with the public in a legal gray zone, a recipe for illegitimacy and conflict. This Article offers initial answers to these questions. First, it explains the constitutivecommands play in policing: Long-standing law dictates that officers usually cannot compel people, including by stop or arrest, without issuing commands that impose new legal duties. Second, it contends that although statutes sometimes authorize specific commands, officers’ authority to issue many orders comes from—and is limited by—officers’ authority to stop, search, and arrest suspects. Third, the Article argues that the legal functions commands serve—namely, generating and communicating legal duties—dictate that lawful orders must satisfy three constraints: They must be authorized by state law; they must obey constitutional limits; and they must provide adequate notice and opportunity for individuals to comply. These constraints are embedded in the law, but few avenues exist for challenging commands. Courts have therefore not defined or enforced limits on command authority well, except when commands violate constitutional rights. Courts can easily do better, and legislative and departmental action could clarify, extend, and enforce appropriate limits on police authority.

Rachel Harmon, Law and Orders, 123 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (2023).

By Amos Irwin and Betsy Pear

Today, a significant portion of 911 calls are related to quality-of-life and other low-priority incidents that may require a time-sensitive response but are better suited to civilian responders, rather than armed police officers. Some 911 calls may not require a time-sensitive response at all. Recent original analysis conducted by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) examined 911 police calls for service from eight cities and found that 23 to 39 percent of calls were low priority or nonurgent, while only 18 to 34 percent of calls were life-threatening emergencies. While many 911 calls do merit an emergency police response, unnecessarily dispatching armed officers to calls where their presence is unnecessary is more than just an ineffective use of safety resources; it can also create substantially adverse outcomes for communities of color, individuals with behavioral health disorders and disabilities, and other groups who have been disproportionately affected by the American criminal justice system.

Center for American Progress (CAP) and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP): 2020. 33p.

By The Treatment Advocacy Center

Approximately 8.3 million Americans have a severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, severe bipolar disorder or major depression with psychotic features.1 Almost half of these people are untreated on any given day.2 Without proper treatment, people with severe mental illness are at risk of experiencing negative outcomes that seriously impact them and the people around them. Faced with limited community treatment options and a dire shortage of psychiatric inpatient beds, those in need of mental health treatment may not receive it until a crisis occurs and law enforcement intervenes. Approximately one-third of individuals with severe mental illness have their first contact with mental health treatment through a law enforcement encounter.3 Law enforcement officers are thus often on the front lines of psychiatric care, charged with responding to, handling and even preventing mental illness crisis situations. The predictable results have been criminalization of severe mental illness and extreme overrepresentation of people with mental illness in jails and prisons.4 Research indicates that persons with serious mental illness are most often arrested for misdemeanor crimes.5 They are also four times more likely to be incarcerated for low-level charges than individuals without psychiatric disease.6 People with mental illness are more likely to be arrested if they live in communities with limited treatment options.7 Officers sometimes even resort to “mercy bookings” (using low-level misdemeanor charges) to get individuals in psychiatric crisis off the street and into treatment.8 Studies have found that in some parts of the country psychiatric treatment is more accessible in jail than in the community.9 Police officers and sheriffs’ deputies with little or no medical or mental health training are now regularly required to recognize conduct as symptomatic of psychiatric illness while in the midst of a chaotic encounter and to strike a balance between upholding public safety and serving the needs of the person in crisis.,,,  

Arlington, VA: Treatment Advocacy Center, 2019. 41p.