An Evidential Review of Police Misconduct: Officer versus Organization

This paper explores the critical societal issue of police misconduct. Though a vast amount of literature surrounds the issue of police misconduct, conclusions regarding the correlates of police misconduct remain inconclusive. Previous research that attempts to explain police misconduct has consistently shown to be divided based on either individual or organizational correlates. Thus, the crux of the debate has become whether police misconduct is the product of a bad apple (individual or micro-level correlates), or a bad barrel (organizational or macro-level correlates). The aim of this paper is to explore existing empirical evidence, and discover which factors most strongly correlate to police misconduct. Specifically, the author aims to determine which side of the theoretical debate is most supported by empirical evidence. Though empirical evidence abounds for both sides of the debate, the author concludes that the macro-level evidence is much stronger. In contrast to the inconsistencies and contradictions of the micro-level evidence, the macrolevel evidence is consistent and builds upon itself. Though the study is not an exhaustive review of the empirical evidence, the analysis demonstrates that organizational, structural, and social forces are powerful predictors of police misconduct. The findings of this study offers important insight as to where future research is warranted, as well as policies and strategies that could potentially be implemented

The Dialogue Between Forensic Scientists, Statisticians and Lawyers about Complex Scientific Issues for Court

Since DNA analysis became part of forensic science in the mid-1980s, its impact on investigation of crime and at court has been immense. In a few years the technique became the gold standard for evaluative evidence, overtaking some other evidence types, and replacing others completely. Part of this impact was due to formal statistical calculations, replacing subjective opinions, on the weight of evidence provided for the prosecution and defence views. The technology has improved quickly with ever more sensitive tests being introduced; the statistical interpretation of increasingly complex DNA results has not been as swift. The absence of a forum for inter-disciplinary discussion between developers and end users has led to methods being developed by statisticians, with little input from the working forensic scientists. It is forensic scientists who will be using the software, and typically have little opportunity to discuss with lawyers the data impact and presentation for non-scientific audiences such as Judges, magistrates and juries. There is a danger for courts in these interpretations — which are produced by a black box — where the reporting forensic scientist has little input and less understanding. It is time for a dialog between the scientists producing the DNA results, the statisticians developing the calculation methods and software and, the lawyers who present the findings to the court

Sophie's story: writing missing journeys

'Sophie’s story' is a creative rendition of an interview narrative gathered in a research project on missing people. The paper explains why Sophie’s story was written and details the wider intention to provide new narrative resources for police officer training, families of missing people and returned missing people. We contextualize this cultural intervention with an argument about the transformative potential of writing trauma stories. It is suggested that trauma stories produce difficult and unknown affects, but ones that may provide new ways of talking about unspeakable events. Sophie’s story is thus presented as a hopeful cultural geography in process, and one that seeks to help rewrite existing social scripts about missing people

Towards an understanding of the HRM bundle for lean service in the UK

Applying the principles of lean enables service organisations to improve service delivery processes and provide customers with better value. A growing body of evidence suggests that without a proper utilisation of enabling human resource management (HRM) practices, service organisations fail to orient their employees to conduct lean projects and support its practices. Enabling HRM practices provide supportive activities that assist organisations to direct their workforce to support lean practices. How service organisations utilise enabling HRM practices for that purpose has, as yet, not received significant attention in the existing literature. This study sets out to explore enabling HRM practices to support lean service. It is a scholarly attempt to thoroughly understand how service organisations utilise these practices to support their lean programmes. In doing so, it attempts to answer how relevant enabling HRM practices are to lean service and what those practices are. It also answers how and why these practices are utilised to support lean service. The research is based on five case studies directed towards answering an exploratory research question. Such a question grants the choice of a case study as an appropriate research strategy to collect contextual qualitative data through naturalistic data collection techniques. Purposive sampling is utilised to select the case studies and cross comparison is conducted for in-depth analysis. The case study organisations were adjudged to be at four lean maturity stages according to S-curve theory (Netland and Ferdows, 2016): Beginner , In-transition , Advanced and Cutting-edge , thus providing a richness of data reflecting variety of similar and different service activities and lean maturity stages. A total of thirty-one semi-structured interviews including four to eight interviews from each organisation were conducted. The interviews were supplemented with observation during site visits and multiple sources of secondary data. The data was coded by means of the NVIVO 10 software package. Rigorous thematic analysis was conducted with reference to Braun and Clark s (2006) six-stage approach of theme generation and 15-point checklist for good thematic analysis. As a main contribution, the analysis identifies 18 enabling HRM practices to support lean service: recruitment and selection, role profiling, capacity planning, absence management, retention and release, succession planning, training, career development, performance management, reward and recognition, groups and teamwork, employee voice, employee communication and collaboration, labour relations, employee motivation, employee involvement, employee empowerment and employee health and safety. The novelty of the research lies in providing a comprehensive list of practices which is rooted in contextual data and reflects the real-world context. The identified 18 enabling HRM practices lead to the development of a novel HRM bundle that covers seven areas of activities of people management to support lean service: (i) employee resourcing, (ii) training and development, (iii) performance management, (iv) reward and recognition, (v) employee relations, (vi) employee behaviour and (vii) employee health and safety. Furthermore, the lean-specific HRM bundle is used to develop a PDCA (plan-do-check-act), based on the Deming Cycle (Deming, 2000), showing lean service planning, provision and monitoring. Moreover, the bundle theory, contingency and configuration theories are used to explain bundling HRM practices and justify the findings. Borrowing bundle theory (Casullo, 1988) to justify bundling HRM practices serves as another novelty of this research. It is evidently clear from the findings that this study provides an empirical and grounded understanding of enabling HRM practices to support lean service. The theoretical contribution of the thesis is therefore elaborating, refining and extending the existing understanding of enabling HRM practices to support lean service. In addition, the practical contribution is increasing the awareness of service organisations of the 18 enabling HRM practices, a lean-specific HRM bundle of seven areas of activities of people management and a continuous improvement model that they can utilise to orient their employees to support lean programmes

The ParaDNA® Screening System - a case study in bringing forensic R&D to market.

The creation of new technologies and their application to forensic science is key to the field's development. Rapid DNA profiling is one such area of research which has grown in response to a desire from enforcement authorities for in-house forensic DNA processing and rapid access to forensic genetic intelligence. However, introducing novel technologies into the forensics market must be carefully monitored and controlled as the success or failure of any technology ultimately has long standing implications for victims, suspects, and also to Police and forensic practitioners. This article outlines the research, development, validation and implementation of the ParaDNA® Screening System as a case study in taking forensic research and development to market