By Matthew Bonn, Chelsea Cox, Marilou Gagnon. et al.

The International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy recommend that States commit to adopting a balanced, integrated, and human rights-based approach to drug policy through a set of foundational human rights principles, obligations arising from human rights standards, and obligations arising from the human rights of particular groups. Following two years of consultation with stakeholders, including people who use drugs, NGOs, legal and human rights experts, UN technical agencies and Member States, the Guidelines “do not invent new rights. Rather, they apply existing human rights law to the legal and policy context of drug control to maximise human rights protections, including in the interpretation and implementation of the drug control conventions.” In respect of the Guidelines and its obligations under UN human rights treaties, Canada must adopt stronger and more specific commitments for a human rights-based, people centered and public health approach.3 This approach must commit to the removal of criminal penalties for simple possession and a comprehensive health-based approach to drug regulation.

Ottawa, ONT: Royal Society of Canada, 2024. 52p.

By Ben Grunwald and Jeffrey Fagan

In 2000, the Supreme Court held in Illinois v. Wardlow that a suspect’s presence in a “high-crime area” is relevant in determining whether an officer has reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop. Despite the importance of the decision, the Court provided no guidance about what that standard means, and over fifteen years later, we still have no idea how police officers understand and apply it in practice. This Article conducts the first empirical analysis of Wardlow by examining data on over two million investigative stops conducted by the New York Police Department from 2007 to 2012. Our results suggest that Wardlow may have been wrongly decided. Specifically, we find evidence that officers often assess whether areas are high crime using a very broad geographic lens; that they call almost every block in the city high crime; that their assessments of whether an area is high crime are nearly uncorrelated with actual crime rates; that the suspect’s race predicts whether an officer calls an area high crime as well as the actual crime rate; that the racial composition of the area and the identity of the officer are stronger predictors of whether an officer calls an area high crime than the crime rate itself; and that stops are less or as likely to result in the detection of contraband when an officer invokes high-crime area as a basis of a stop. We conclude with several policy proposals for courts, police departments, and scholars to help address these problems in the doctrine.

California Law Review 345-404 (2019

By Ralph B. Taylor

For close to a century, the field of community criminology has examined the causes and consequences of community crime and delinquency rates. Nevertheless, there is still a lot we do not know about the dynamics behind these connections. In this book, Ralph Taylor argues that obstacles to deepening our understanding of community/crime links arise in part because most scholars have overlooked four fundamental concerns: how conceptual frames depend on the geographic units and/or temporal units used; how to establish the meaning of theoretically central ecological empirical indicators; and how to think about the causes and consequences of non-random selection dynamics. The volume organizes these four conceptual challenges using a common meta-analytic framework. The framework pinpoints critical features of and gaps in current theories about communities and crime, connects these concerns to current debates in both criminology and the philosophy of social science, and sketches the types of theory testing needed in the future if we are to grow our understanding of the causes and consequences of community crime rates. Taylor explains that a common meta-theoretical frame provides a grammar for thinking critically about current theories and simultaneously allows presenting these four topics and their connections in a unified manner. The volume provides an orientation to current and past scholarship in this area by describing three distinct but related community crime sequences involving delinquents, adult offenders, and victims. These sequences highlight community justice dynamics thereby raising questions about frequently used crime indicators in this area of research. A groundbreaking work melding past scholarly practices in criminology with the field’s current needs, Community Criminology is an essential work for criminologists.

New York; London: New York University Press, 2015. 336p.