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 Alissa Pollitz Worden,  Beau Holladay,  Morgan Madison,  James Miller,  Kaitlin Moloney

In April 2019 the New York State Legislature passed a suite of criminal justice that went into effect on January 1, 2020. The reforms included significant changes in police officers’ discretion to make custodial arrests, which lead people to be detained for up to 24 hours by law (and longer for those arrested on weekends or holidays in some counties). In almost all misdemeanors and many Class E felonies, the new law directed police to issue desk appearance tickets (DATs), which allow people to return home and appear for their arraignment at a later date. The same set of reforms also restricted judges’ discretion in setting bail or detaining people at arraignment; they were directed to release people under recognizance, supervision, or conditions on most cases involving misdemeanor and non-violent felony charges. In this report we examine the implementation and impact of DAT reform in a sample of New York’s Town and Village Justice Court jurisdictions. The state’s approximately 1,200 Justice Courts were established in counties’ suburban and rural towns outside incorporated cities. Justice Courts perform the same functions as City Courts: arraignment of felony, misdemeanor, and violation charges arising within their geographic boundaries, bail and release decisions in those cases, and adjudication and sentencing in misdemeanor and violation charges. This report investigated the use of DATs in sample of arrests made in Justice Courts located in six counties: two largely suburban counties that include mid-sized cities, and four largely rural counties that are each home to one or two small cities. Our analysis of arrests and DAT issuance rates from 2018 to 2022 suggests the following. Contextual Changes in Arrests and the Composition of Charges • Declining Arrests in the 6 Counties Studied: The numbers of arrests in all classes of offenses declined from 2018 to 2022. The decline in arrests during 2020 was followed by a rebound in 2021; yet when arrest rates largely stabilized in 2021 and 2022, they did so at levels significantly lower than in 2018. This decline was most marked in misdemeanor arrests. • Small Number of Common Charges: A small number of specific offense charges (13) account for about 75% of all arrests. Among misdemeanors in particular, the most common arrest charges in these suburban and rural jurisdictions were driving while intoxicated (40%), drug possession (16%), and petty larceny (9%). Changes in DAT Issuance • Lack of Apparent Changes Linked to Reform: Despite the intent of DAT reform, there is little evidence of an overall increase in DAT issuance in misdemeanor arrests – about 75% resulted in a DAT across all 6 counties throughout the 2018-to-2022 study timeframe. However, DAT rates in Class E felonies (a target of reform) and Class D felonies (not a target of reform) both increased substantially over time. These increases in DAT use in E and D felonies appear to have begun prior to January 2020 – raising the possibility that pre-existing trends of fewer custodial arrests, and not the DAT reforms per se, may largely explain these patterns. • Results Varied by County: Context matters. The six counties demonstrated different patterns of DAT usage. In misdemeanor arrests, DAT rates increased (albeit modestly) in three counties, decreased in one county, and remained stable in the other two counties. Overlapping Policy Changes Ensuring Access to Counsel in Justice Courts: DAT reform took effect in the midst of another statewide reform: ensuring the presence of counsel at arraignment in all courts. Prior to 2016, and as a result of their often non-regular, impromptu scheduling of arraignments, many and perhaps most custodial arrest arraignments in Justice Courts were conducted without the presence of a defense lawyer, a prosecutor, or both. In 2015, the final settlement of the landmark case Hurrell-Harring v. State of New York established the principle that the 6th Amendment right to counsel includes the right to an attorney at arraignment. The result was an imperative that courts find ways to ensure not only that arrested persons were arraigned in a timely fashion, but also that they had access to counsel at first appearance (CAFA). In principle, that imperative applied to all arraignments, whether they occurred in the aftermath of a custodial arrest or a DAT. In Justice Courts, right to counsel reforms and DAT reforms may work at cross-purposes. From 2016 to 2022, Justice Courts in 26 counties established centralized arraignment parts, which meet daily in a single location to arraign custodial arrest cases from all Justice courts, with defense lawyers deployed to each arraignment session. For security reasons, these sessions are typically held in the visiting rooms of county jails. While these sessions safeguard the constitutional right to representation at first appearance in court, they may also result in several hours of detention for people who must wait in the jail until the court session convenes. Notably, these people may include individuals for whom bail reform prescribes pretrial release in lieu of detention. Thus, centralized arraignment courts are a novel strategy to advance   the right to counsel in rural areas, but they may inadvertently result in pre-arraignment detention. Summary The findings in this report indicate that DAT reform produced some of the outcomes that were expected in some counties. However, overall misdemeanor DAT rates did not change consistently across Justice Courts in the six counties studied. Class E and especially D felony DAT rates began to steadily increase months before DAT reform went into effect. Moreover, had DAT reforms produced its intended larger effect on DAT rates, it may have had unintended consequences. For example, county strategies to ensure legal representation at Justice Court arraignments, begun several years before the 2020 reforms, may inadvertently result in pretrial detention as individuals must wait for centralized arraignment sessions in detention. But these same county strategies represent a solution to what had previously been the inconsistent provision of counsel. Further research is needed to (1) expand the scope of data collection in sampled counties to follow trends beyond the early implementation and pandemic time periods, (2) further assess the magnitude of detention associated with centralized arraignment parts, and (3) investigate the adaptations that local practitioners have made to optimize the impact of the reforms.

Albany, NY: John J. Finn Institute for Public Safety, Inc., 2024. 36p.

By Robert E. Worden,  Sarah J. McLean,  Robin S. Engel,  Hannah Cochran,  Nicholas Corsaro,  Danielle Reynolds,  Cynthia J. Najdowski Gabrielle T. Isaza

 In February of 2018, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) began in service training on implicit bias for its 36,000 sworn personnel, using the Fair and Impartial Policing (FIP) curriculum. A team of researchers from the John Finn Institute for Public Safety and the IACP/UC Center for Police Research and Policy partnered with the NYPD to conduct evaluation research on the impacts of the training. The evaluation concentrated on the effects of the training among patrol officers assigned to commands in the Patrol Services Bureau, Transit Bureau, and Housing Bureau, whose training commenced in May, 2018 and concluded in April, 2019. We assessed the immediate effects of the training on officers’ beliefs and attitudes: their knowledge about the science of implicit bias and the potential implications for policing, and their attitudes about the salience of bias and discrimination as a social problem, and the importance of policing without prejudice. A survey was administered on the day of FIP training, either prior to or following the training on alternating days. We drew inferences about immediate training effects from the differences in pre- and post-training survey responses. The effect of the training on officers’ knowledge about implicit bias was of moderate magnitude, though many officers’ comprehension of the science of bias was limited. The effects of the training on officers’ attitudes toward discrimination, and their motivation to act without prejudice, were fairly small, though prior to the training, most officers considered discrimination a social problem and felt individually motivated to act without bias. Officers regarded the training as beneficial: 70 percent reportedly gained a better understanding of implicit bias and more than two-thirds reportedly learned new strategies and skills that they expected to apply to their work. Nearly half rated the likelihood of using all five bias management strategies as either a 6 or 7 on a 7-point scale anchored at 7 as ‘very likely.’ We conducted a follow-up survey about officers’ beliefs and attitudes and their actual utilization of FIP strategies, which was administered from June through August of 2019, ranging from 2 to 13 months following the training. Asked whether they attempted “to apply the FIP training in your duties over the last month,” 42 percent said they had not, 31 percent said they attempted to use the bias-management strategies sometimes, and 27 percent said they attempted using them frequently. Comparing the follow-up survey responses to those on the days of training, we also detected some decay in the immediate effects of the training on officers’ comprehension of the science of implicit bias. The impact of police training is likely to be greater when it is supported by other organizational forces, of which immediate supervisors may be the most important. We surveyed sergeants post-training. We found that most sergeants view monitoring for bias as one of their responsibilities, and that they are willing to intervene as needed with  individual officers. One-quarter reported that they had intervened with an officer whose performance warranted intervention. Slightly more than half of the sergeants reportedly address issues of implicit bias during roll calls, thereby reinforcing the training. Insofar as officers’ unconscious biases may influence their enforcement decisions, and to the extent that officers apply their training in FIP strategies to manage their unconscious biases, we hypothesized that the training would lead to reductions in racial/ethnic disparities in enforcement actions, including stops, frisks, searches, arrests, summonses, and uses of force. We examined enforcement disparities at multiple levels of analysis – at the aggregate level of commands and the level of individual enforcement events. To isolate the effect of the training from other factors, the NYPD adhered to a protocol for a randomized controlled trial that provided for grouping commands into clusters scheduled for training by random assignment. This experimental control was supplemented by statistical controls in the analytical models. Overall, we found insufficient evidence to conclude that racial and ethnic disparities in police enforcement actions were reduced as a result of the training. It is very difficult to isolate the effects of the training from other forces that produce disparate enforcement outcomes. Training impacts might be a signal that is easily lost in the noise of everyday police work. Estimating the effect of a single training curriculum on officers’ decisions to invoke the law or otherwise exercise police authority may well be akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Furthermore, it has been presumed but not demonstrated that enforcement disparities stem, at least in part, from officers’ implicit biases. Though research has shown that police officers, like the general public, hold unconscious biases, no scientific evidence directly links officers’ implicit bias with enforcement disparities. To the contrary, the evidence – which is thin, to be sure – suggests that officers practice controlled responses even without implicit bias training. If disparities stem from forces other than implicit bias, then even a well designed training that is flawlessly delivered cannot be expected to alter patterns of police enforcement behavior.   

Albany, NY: The John F. Finn Institute, 2020.   188p.

By Jedidiah L. Knode, Travis M. Carter

There is ongoing debate over the latitude of discretion police officers have when conducting stops and searches. While necessary due to resource limitations and need for individualized justice, discretion involves subjective characteristics of suspicion formation, such as race and ethnicity, which could perpetuate disparities in traffic enforcement. Research has yet to explore other marginalizing characteristics of suspicion formation, such as drivers’ social class. This study draws on over 550,000 stops conducted by a large state police agency in 2022 and 2023 to explore how vehicle values serve as class signals influencing officers’ discretion. We found disparities, whereby lower value vehicles were more likely to be searched than higher value vehicles after matching based on when, where, and under what circumstances stops occurred. However, searches of lower value vehicles were less likely to result in contraband recovery. Our findings highlight potential avenues for officer training and research analyzing inequalities in policing.

Justice Quarterly, September,  2024.

By: Sudeep Dasgupta

In Television Studies: A Short Introduction, Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz argue for ‘television studies as an approach to studying media’ rather than as ‘a field for the study of a singular medium’. The critique of ‘Quality TV’, I argue, furthers the disciplinary lure of medium singularity by recourse to essentializing notions of ‘the people’ and by extension ‘popular culture’. A simplistic equation between aesthetics, audiences, and programs produces an imaginary construction of both television and the people. Interrogating television studies and the policing of the people is crucial for developing a critical and historically nuanced mode of approaching a shifting cross-medial landscape as well as the politics of culture in general. Given the Leavisite-inspired hostility to ‘mass culture’ and the accompanying discourse of elitism, sexism, and class disapproval, television studies and its recourse to the people was both necessary and critically important. However, the actual construction of the popular in television studies as a concept forecloses on the critical study of television, first of all through the risk of essentializing a static, simplified, and often patronizingly benevolent notion of popular culture; and second, by responding defensively rather than proactively to the historical shifts in programming, genre-hybridization, and television production.

NECSUS – European Journal of Media Studies (2012) Volume 1/1

By: ANTHONY A. BRAGA, DAVID L. WEISBURD, ELIN J. WARING, LORRAINE! GREEN MAZEROLLE, WILLIAM SPELMAN & FRANCIS GAJEWSKI

Over the past decade, problem-oriented policing has become a central strategy for policing. In a number of studies, problem-oriented policing has been found to be effective in reducing crime and disorder. However, very little is known about the value of problem-oriented interventions in controlling violent street crime. The National Academy of Sciences’ Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior suggests that sustained research on problem-oriented policing initiatives that modify places, routine activities, and situations that promote violence could contribute much to the understanding and control of violence. This study evaluates the effects of problem-oriented policing interventions on urban violent crime problems in Jersey City, New Jersey. Twenty- four high-activity, violent crime places were matched into 12 pairs and one member of each pair was allocated to treatment conditions in a randomized block field experiment. The results of the impact evaluation support the growing body of research that asserts focused police efforts can reduce crime and disorder at problem places without causing crime problems to displace to surrounding areas.

CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME 37 NUMBER 3 1999

By: Timothy J. Hope

The problem-oriented approach to policing and the situational approach to crime prevention have much in common, both arising from the search for more effective means of crime control. They share a common perspective in being targeted at specific crime problems and locations. This paper describes three case studies of problem-oriented policing carried out by officers of the St Louis (MO) Metropolitan Police Department, each concerned with reducing crime and disorder at locations where drugs were being sold. In each case, the individual officers played a pivotal role as catalysts in stimulating actions by the community and city agencies, and in achieving reductions in crime and disorder at the problem locations. The cases suggest that at the localized level at which it operates, problem-oriented policing can achieve the kind of coordinated action which may not be so easy at a broader level of community and organizational aggregation.

CRIME PREVENTION STUDIES, VOLUME 2, P 5-31, 1994

By: Fedor Gal and Pavol Fric

Problem-oriented participative forecasting (POPF) is an autonomous and evolving concept. It aims not only to provide early signals of threats to development or to identify opportunities for development, but also to articulate interests and mobilize different social groups to act in a manner conducive to the elimination of such threats and exploitation of such opportunities. This concept of the function of forecasting has major factual and methodological implications. The focus of this article is primarily on the forecasting process as a way of active social learning and anticipatory behavior. It attempts to synthesize the problem-oriented and participative approaches to forecasting into a single methodology, which it documents by a specific example of its application in science forecasting in the Slovak Socialist Republic.

Futures, Volume 19, Issue 6, December 1987, Pages 678-685

By: Lorraine Green Mazerolle, Justin Ready, William Terrill, & Elin Waring

This paper examines the impact of a problem-oriented policing project on serious crime problems in six public housing sites in Jersey City, New Jersey. Representatives from the police department and the local housing authority, social service providers, and public housing tenants formed six problem-solving teams. using systematic documentation of the teams’ activities and calls for police service, we examine changes in serious crime both across and within the six sites over a 2 1/2-year period. We find that problem-oriented policing, as compared with traditional policing strategies used before the problem-oriented policing project, led to fewer serious crime calls for service over time and that two public housing sites in particular succeeded in reducing violent, property, and vehicle-related crimes.

JUSTICE QUARTERLY, Vol. 17 No. 1, March 2000

By: Lorraine Green Mazerolle & William Terrill

Finding effective methods for controlling crime and disorder problems in public housing has been a principal concern for policy makers, researchers, and local agency representatives for many years. Nonetheless, research continues to show that rates of drug and non-drug crime are considerably higher in public housing sites than in other areas of a city (Dunworth and Saiger, 1994; Weisburd and Green, 1995). In Jersey City, for example, public housing sites are chronically identified as being the worse drug markets (Weisburd and Green, 1994, 1995; Weisburd, Green and Ross, 1994) and having the highest levels of violent crime problems in the city (see Center for Crime Prevention Studies, 1994).

Efforts to make public housing safer places to live date back to the 1960s when policy makers found that high-rise public housing projects built in the late 1950s were social and security disasters (see Annan and Skogan, 1992). Since this time, a wide variety of strategies have been implemented to target the persistent crime and social problems that characterize public housing sites. These strategies have included traditional enforcement tactics (Skogan and Annan, 1994; Weisel, 1990a) and changing the physical design of public housing with security issues in mind (Newman, 1973). More recently local police departments, in partnership with local housing authorities, have started to implement problem-oriented policing programs to reduce drug and crime problems (see Dunworth and Saiger, 1994; Gajewski, Green, and Weisburd, 1993; Weisel, 1990b).

Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Vol. 20 No. 2, 1997, pp. 235-255.

By: Terry L. Whiting

Simple Summary: In any federation of states, societal oversight of farm animal welfare (agriculture policy arena, prevention) is more difficult to achieve than providing punishment of individuals abusing of companion animals (post injury). The constitutional division of powers and historical policy related to animal agriculture and non-government organization policing cruelty of companion animals may be entrenched. With changing societal expectations of agriculture production, each level of government may hesitate to take the lead, due to financial or ideological beliefs and simultaneously, obstruct the other government level from taking the lead, based on constitutional grounds. The tradition of private policing of companion animal abuse offences may be unworkable in the provision of protection for animals used in industrial production.

Abstract: In recent European animal welfare statutes, human actions injurious to animals are new “offences” articulated as an injury to societal norms in addition to property damage. A crime is foremost a violation of a community moral standard. Violating a societal norm puts society out of balance and justice is served when that balance is returned. Criminal law normally requires the presence of mens rea, or evil intent, a particular state of mind; however, dereliction of duties towards animals (or children) is usually described as being of varying levels of negligence but, rarely can be so egregious that it constitutes criminal societal injury. In instrumental justice, the “public goods” delivered by criminal law are commonly classified as retribution, incapacitation and general deterrence. Prevention is a small, if present, outcome of criminal justice. Quazi-criminal law intends to establish certain expected (moral) standards of human behavior where by statute, the obligations of one party to another are clearly articulated as strict liability. Although largely moral in nature, this class of laws focuses on achieving compliance, thereby resulting in prevention. For example, protecting the environment from degradation is a benefit to society; punishing non-compliance, as is the application of criminal law, will not prevent the injury. This paper will provide evidence that the integrated meat complex of Canada and the USA is not in a good position to make changes to implement a credible farm animal protection system.

Animals 2013, 3, 1086-1122; doi:10.3390/ani3041086

By: GARY CORDNER & ELIZABETH PERKINS BIEBEL

Interviews and surveys were used to measure the extent of problem-oriented policing (POP) by individual police officers in the San Diego Police Department. Officers tended to engage in small-scale problem solving with little formal analysis or assessment. Responses generally included enforcement plus one or two more collaborative or nontraditional initiatives.

VOLUME 4 NUMBER 2 2005 PP 155–180

By: Michael J. DeValve and Elizabeth Quinn

This essay argues for a more formal relationship between policing and mindful practice as taught by the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The paper explores the value of Nhat Hanh’s teachings for improving the daily implementation of police services by individual officers, and the transformation of the suffering witnessed and experienced by those officers. Practical tools for the cultivation of mindfulness for officers are provided.

Contemporary Justice Review, 13: 2, 191 — 205

By: William Spelman and John E. Eck

Many calls to police are repeated requests for help. They have a history and a future-sometimes tragic. Rather than treat the call as a 30-minute event and go on to the next incident, police need to intervene in the cycle and try to eliminate the source of the problem. A wealth of research sponsored by the National Institute of Justice has led to an approach that does just that. The problem-solving approach to policing described in this Research in Brief represents a significant evolutionary step in helping law enforcement work smarter not harder. Rather than approaching calls for help or service as separate, individual events to be processed by traditional methods, problem-oriented policing emphasizes analyzing groups of incidents and deriving solutions that draw upon a wide variety of public and private resources. Careful followup and assessment of police performance in dealing with the problem completes the systematic process.

But problem-oriented policing is as much a philosophy of policing as a set of techniques and procedures. The approach can be applied to whatever type of problem is consuming police time and resources. While many problems are likely to be crime-oriented, disorderly behavior, situations that contribute to neighborhood deterioration, and other incidents that contribute to fear and insecurity in urban neighborhoods are also targets for the problem-solving approach. In devising research to test the idea, the National Institute wanted to move crime analysis beyond pin-maps. We were fortunate to find a receptive collaborator in Darrel Stephens, then Chief of Police in Newport News, Virginia. The National Institute is indebted to the Newport News Police Department for serving as a laboratory for testing problem-oriented policing. The results achieved in solving problems and reducing target crimes are encouraging. Problem-oriented policing integrates knowledge from past research on police operations that has converged on two main themes: increased operational effectiveness and closer involvement with the community. The evolution of ideas will go on.

Under the Institute's sponsorship, the Police Executive Research Forum will implement problem-oriented policing in three other cities. The test will enable us to learn whether the results are the same under different management styles and in dealing with different local problems. This is how national research benefits local communities by providing tested new options they can consider. The full potential of problem-oriented policing still must be assessed. For now, the approach offers promise. It doesn't cost a fortune but can be developed within the resources of most police departments. Problem-oriented policing suggests that police can realize a new dimension of effectiveness. By coordinating a wide range of information, police administrators are in a unique leader- ship position in their communities, helping to improve the quality of life for the citizens they serve.

National Institute of Justice, January 1987

By Marleen Stelter,  Iniobong Essien, Carsten Sander, and Juliane Degner

Racial disparities in policing are well documented, but the reasons for such disparities are often debated. In the current research, we weighed in on this debate using a regional-level bias framework: We investigated the link between racial disparities in police traffic stops and regional-level racial bias, employing data from more than 130 million police traffic stops in 1,413 U.S. counties and county-level measures of racial bias from more than 2 million online respondents. Compared with their population share in county demographics, Black drivers were stopped at disproportionate rates in the majority of counties. Crucially, disproportionate stopping of Black drivers was higher in counties with higher levels of racial prejudice by White residents (rs = .07-.36). Furthermore, county-level aggregates of White people's threat-related stereotypes were less consistent in predicting disproportionate stopping (rs = .00-.19). These observed relationships between regional-level bias and racial disparities in policing highlight the importance of the context in which police operate.

Psychological Science Volume 33, Issue 4Apr 2022 Pages 483-668

By Patricio Domínguez and Carlos Scartascin

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 to 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. While we document an 11 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 respondents about the actual level of crime. We also show that exposing respondents to crime-related news increases their willingness to pay by 5 percent. On average, our estimates suggest that households are willing to contribute around $152 per year for a 20 percent reduction in homicide, representing an increase in security spending between 15 and 65 percent in Latin American countries (up to 0.5 percent of GDP).

Journal of Public Economics 239, 2024

By: Graham Farrell

What follows proposes a means by which to improve and accelerate police work so that it has an emphasis upon the rights and needs of victims. Using a term such as victim-oriented policing sounds like a proposal to compete with community policing or problem-oriented policing, but it is not. As proposed here, it would be entirely the fact that the concerns of victims should underpin a great deal of police work - more so than they do at present. it would be a complement to, rather than a substitute for, such approaches to policing.

The main proposal of this paper is that a simple means to promote victim-oriented policing (the term is broadly defined later) may be via an emphasis upon the policing and prevention of repeat victimization. For present purposes, repeat victimization is defined as the repeated criminal victimization of a person or place, or a target however defined. it is now well known that a small proportion of victims experience a significant proportion of all crime because they experience repeat victimization (see e.g. Skogan 1999; Friedman and Tucker 1997; Davis, Taylor, and Titus 1997; Pease 1998). Hence, to cut a long story short, preventing repeat victimization holds the potential to prevent crime. it helps victims in a practical and fundamental manner: Ezzat Fattah suggests that “Healing, recovery, redress, and prevention of future victimization are the primary objectives of most crime victims” (Fattah 1997: 270)

The focus here is upon the implications for police work with victims. While the phenomenon of repeat victimization presents a potentially wide range of implications for research and practice, for different areas of the criminal justice system, the work of community agencies and individuals, these areas are not the focus here.

International Symposium on Victimology, pp. 196-212

By: Michael S. Scott

Police agencies have, for the most part, not yet integrated the principles and methods of problem-oriented policing into their routine operations. This is so for several reasons. First, many police officials lack a complete understanding of the basic elements of problem-oriented policing and how problem-solving fits in the context of the whole police function. Second, the police have not yet adequately developed the skill sets and knowledge bases to support problem-oriented policing. And third, the police have insufficient incentives to take problem-oriented policing seriously. This paper begins by articulating what full integration of problem-oriented policing into routine police operations might look like. It then presents one framework for integrating the principles and methods of problem-oriented policing into the whole police function. The paper then explores the particular skill sets and knowledge bases that will be essential to the practice of problem-oriented policing within police agencies and across the police profession. Finally, it explores the perspectives of those who critically evaluate police performance, and considers ways to modify those perspectives and expectations consistent with problem-oriented policing.

Crime Prevention Studies, vol. 15 (2003), pp. 49-77