Public confidence in policing: a neo-Durkheimian perspective

Public confidence in policing has received much attention in recent years, but few studies outside of the United States have examined the sociological and social–psychological processes that underpin trust and support. This study, conducted in a rural English location, finds that trust and confidence in the police are shaped not by sentiments about risk and crime, but by evaluations of the values and morals that underpin community life. Furthermore, to garner public confidence, the police must be seen first to typify group morals and values and second to treat the public with dignity and fairness. All these findings are consistent with the perspective that people are Durkheimian in their attitudes towards crime, policing and punishment—a perspective developed here in this paper

'Leaves and Eats Shoots': Direct Terrestrial Feeding Can Supplement Invasive Red Swamp Crayfish in Times of Need

PMCID: PMC3411828This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

On the dual motivational force of legitimate authority

In this chapter I consider two ways by which the legitimacy of legal authorities might motivate people to abide by the law. Following recent criminological research I define legitimacy along two different dimensions: the first is the public recognition of the rightful authority of an institution, and the second is a sense among citizens that the institution is just, moral and appropriate. Data from a randomized controlled trial of procedurally just policing provide further support for the idea that justice systems can secure compliance by (a) instilling in citizens a sense of deference and obligation, and (b) showing to citizens that they represent a requisite sense of moral appropriateness. While prior work has tended to focus on the idea that legitimacy shape compliance through felt obligation, the current analysis shows that compliance is predicted by both duty to obey and moral endorsement. Consistent with a good deal of existing evidence, the findings also indicate the importance of procedural justice and group identification in the production of institutional legitimacy. I conclude with the idea that legitimacy may be able to shape compliance through shape content-free obligation and shared moral appropriateness

Norms, normativity and the legitimacy of justice institutions: international perspectives

This article reviews the international evidence on the nature, sources and consequences of police and legal legitimacy. In brief, I find that procedural justice is the strongest predictor of police legitimacy in most countries, although normative judgements about fair process may – in some contexts – be crowded out by public concerns about police effectiveness and corruption, the scale of the crime problem, and the association of the police with a historically oppressive and underperforming state. Legitimacy tends to be linked to people’s willingness to cooperate with the police, with only a small number of national exceptions, and there is fair amount of evidence that people who say they feel a moral duty to obey the law also tend to report complying with the law in the past or intending to comply with the law in the future. The main argument is, however, that international enthusiasm for testing procedural justice theory is outpacing methodological rigor and theoretical clarity. On the one hand, the lack of attention to methodological equivalence is holding back the development of a properly comparative cross-national analysis. On the other hand, the literature would benefit from (a) greater delineation between legitimation and legitimacy, (b) stronger differentiation between police and legal legitimacy, and (c) more attention given to isolating the mechanisms through which legitimacy motivates cooperation and compliance

Interactionz: Engaging Lgbtq+ Youth Using Theatre For Social Change

Theatre for social change is a term used to describe a wide range of theatre-based techniques and methods. Through implementation of performance techniques, participants are encouraged to creatively explore and communicate various ideas with the specific intention of eliciting a societal or political shift within a given community. Through this thesis, I will explore the impact of applying theatre for social change in a youth-centered environment. I will discuss my journey as creator, facilitator, and project director of interACTionZ, a queer youth theatre program in Orlando, FL formed through a partnership between Theatre UCF at the University of Central Florida and the Zebra Coalition®. I will give specific focus throughout this project to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ+) youth and straight advocates for the LGBTQ+ community

Free adjustment of a triangulation net

It is often useful to determine the measures of precision of the directly observed quantities in a triangulation net. Provided the net is not strained these measures are unique to a particular set of observations and weights. Unique measures for the precision of the indirectly observed quantities cannot be found by classical means although several ad hoc approaches can be used to approximate to this measure of the 'inherent strength' of a net. Bjerhammar's theory of generalised matrix inverses can be used to derive measures of precision for the indirectly observed quantities, which may be interpreted as reflecting the inherent strength of the net. The theory of adjustment of a triangulation net by the method of variation of co-ordinates is described, followed by an explanation of the theory bf generalised inverses. Methods for the practical derivation of particular inverses are described, following Mittermayer. The characteristics of Normal, Transnormal and Stochastic Ring inverses in solution of Normal equations BX = R, are described

Monopolizing force?: police legitimacy and public attitudes towards the acceptability of violence

Why do people believe that violence is acceptable? In this paper we study people’s normative beliefs about the acceptability of violence to achieve social control (as a substitute for the police, for self-protection and the resolution of disputes) and social change (through violent protests and acts to achieve political goals). Addressing attitudes towards violence among young men from various ethnic minority communities in London, we find that procedural justice is strongly correlated with police legitimacy, and that positive judgments about police legitimacy are associated with more negative views about the use of violence. We conclude with the idea that police legitimacy has an additional, hitherto unrecognized, empirical property – by constituting the belief that the police monopolise rightful force in society, legitimacy has a ‘crowding out’ effect on positive views of private violence

Rememory

Rememory, coined in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, refers to the psychological action of placing forgotten or misplaced memories into a narrated context within the self. Rather than directly “remembering,” the characters in Morrison’s novel, like their author, rely on a web of socially produced or shared memories as a way to understand their past. This essay catalogs an on-going performance of rememory in my photographic work. Through an interrogation of physical archives, I remap the historic presences of Black life in New England. This research based practice takes me to the preserved homes and to the workplaces of my real ancestors and fictive kin: African, European, and Indigenous peoples who collided in the port towns of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I search for and “inhabit” house museums that claim a Black history as a way to challenge the imperatives of traditional preservation. Regionally these specific preservationist traditions shroud and stage a space to contemplate the complex forms of violence constituted in colonial America. Using still photography, sound design, and language, I transform the preserved house and the landscape of the region into zones where Blackness, and the rememory of slavery, is central to acquisition of historical knowledge. In each of these zones, I engage a practice of slow looking and listening mediated through the large format camera. In this essay, I think through my photographs as they facilitate the sensorial action of rememory. In addition to Morrison, I explore shared theoretical frames between W.E.B. Du Bois, Michel Rolph Trouillot, Hortense J. Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman to situate my work within an ongoing dialogue of how Blackness functions in and outside of historical narrative