Stops and Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, and Race in the New Policing

The use of proactive tactics to disrupt criminal activities, such as Terry street stops and concentrated misdemeanor arrests, are essential to the “new policing.” This model applies complex metrics, strong management, and aggressive enforcement and surveillance to focus policing on high crime risk persons and places. The tactics endemic to the “new policing” gave rise in the 1990s to popular, legal, political and social science concerns about disparate treatment of minority groups in their everyday encounters with law enforcement. Empirical evidence showed that minorities were indeed stopped and arrested more frequently than similarly situated whites, even when controlling for local social and crime conditions. In this article, we examine racial disparities under a unique configuration of the street stop prong of the “new policing” – the inclusion of non-contact observations (or surveillances) in the field interrogation (or investigative stop) activity of Boston Police Department officers. We show that Boston Police officers focus significant portions of their field investigation activity in two areas: suspected and actual gang members, and the city’s high crime areas. Minority neighborhoods experience higher levels of field interrogation and surveillance activity net of crime and other social factors. Relative to white suspects, Black suspects are more likely to be observed, interrogated, and frisked or searched controlling for gang membership and prior arrest history. Moreover, relative to their black counterparts, white police officers conduct high numbers of field investigations and are more likely to frisk/search subjects of all races. We distinguish between preference-based and statistical discrimination by comparing stops by officer-suspect racial pairs. If officer activity is independent of officer race, we would infer that disproportionate stops of minorities reflect statistical discrimination. We show instead that officers seem more likely to investigate and frisk or search a minority suspect if officer and suspect race differ. We locate these results in the broader tensions of racial profiling that pose recurring social and constitutional concerns in the “new policing.”

Homicide Profiles Based on Crime Scene and Victim Characteristics

One of the current trends in homicide research includes developing works based on scientific study and empirical evidence, which offer conclusions that can be used in an operational manner during police investigations. The objective of this study was to identify homicide characteristics from behaviors carried out on the crime scene and victim characteristics associated with those of the perpetrators of these crimes in Spain. The sample consisted of 448 homicide cases from the database of the Homicide Revision Project led by the Office of Coordination and Studies of the Secretary of State and Security. After creating six classification tree models, it was found that the modus operandi of the aggressor and the victim characteristics may permit hypothesizing about the demographic characteristics of the perpetrator (gender, age, and country of origin), his/her criminal record, and the type of relationship with the victim. Furthermore, the importance of the study of victimology during a criminal investigation is highlighted, as it may indirectly offer information about the potential perpetrator. The findings of this study suggest that criminal profiling contributes notably to the decision-making process to establish more rigorous suspect prioritization, improve the management of human resources and materials, and increase the efficiency of criminal investigations

Behavior Based Threat Assessment As a tool for the Federal Protective Service in Mitigating Directed Violence

The popular culture behind law enforcement of protecting and serving is slightly misrepresented because the majority of law enforcement organizations do not have a protective mission but a responsive mission. Select organizations such as the Federal Protective Service (FPS) has more than a responsive, investigative responsibility to the community they police; they also have a responsibility to protect their community from potential criminal and terrorist acts that have not yet happened. Utilizing the newest research from the Department of Homeland Security and their partnership with mental health providers, the United States Attorney Ÿs Office and scholarly researchers this article provides the FPS a Critical Path To Violence model to better protect the government. This Critical Path To Violence analyzes an individual Ÿs psychology by observing their behavior through a well defined progression that has been proven to lead to violence. This progression once observed then can be very specifically disrupted to prevent violent attacks, while maximizing resources and increasing effectiveness of the FPS Special Agents and Inspectors

No Runs, Few Hits and Many Errors: Street Stops, Bias and Proactive Policing

Equilibrium models of racial discrimination in law enforcement encounters suggest that in the absence of racial discrimination, the proportion of searches yielding evidence of illegal activity (the hit rate) will be equal across races. Searches that disproportionately target one racial group, resulting in a relatively low hit rate, are inefficient and suggest bias. An unbiased officer who is seeking to maximize her hit rate would reduce the number of unproductive stops toward a group with the lower hit rate. An unbiased policing regime would generate no differences in hit rates between groups. We use this framework to test for racial discrimination in pedestrian stops with data from the contentious “Stop, Question and Frisk” (SQF) program of the New York City Police Department (NYPD). SQF produced nearly five million citizen stops from 2004–2012. The stops are regulated by both Terry (federal) and DeBour (New York) case law on reasonable suspicion. Stops are well-documented, including a structured format for reporting the indicia of reasonable suspicion that motivated the stop. We exploit these data to examine the Floyd court’s claim. We decompose stops on the basis of suspicion, as reported by officers at the time of the stop. We conduct five tests to assess whether racial discrimination characterizes SQF stops: the allocation of officers relative to crime and population in specific areas, the decision to sanction conditional on a stop, the decision to arrest or issue a summons conditional on the decision to sanction, the efficiency of stops in seizing contraband including weapons, and updating processes by officers in their search activity. In each test, we include the reasonable suspicion rationale that officers indicated as the basis of the stop. We find consistent evidence of disparities in police responses to Black, Hispanic, and Black Hispanic civilians, and significant differences by race in the use of specific indicia of reasonable suspicion that motivate stops. The higher error rates for specific indicia of suspicion suggest that rather than individualized bases of suspicion, officers may be activating stereotypes and archetypes to articulate suspicion and justify street seizures

Transportation, Terrorism and Crime: Deterrence, Disruption and Resilience

Abstract: Terrorists likely have adopted vehicle ramming as a tactic because it can be carried out by an individual (or “lone wolf terrorist”), and because the skills required are minimal (e.g. the ability to drive a car and determine locations for creating maximum carnage). Studies of terrorist activities against transportation assets have been conducted to help law enforcement agencies prepare their communities, create mitigation measures, conduct effective surveillance and respond quickly to attacks. This study reviews current research on terrorist tactics against transportation assets, with an emphasis on vehicle ramming attacks. It evaluates some of the current attack strategies, and the possible mitigation or response tactics that may be effective in deterring attacks or saving lives in the event of an attack. It includes case studies that can be used as educational tools for understanding terrorist methodologies, as well as ordinary emergencies that might become a terrorist’s blueprint

POLICE USE OF TECHNOLOGY TO FIGHT AGAINST CRIME

Traditionally, law enforcement agencies have had an unfriendly relationship with technology. However, there is no way one can ignore and/or resist the adoption of new technologies any longer since recent developments in information technology have changed the attitudes and perceptions of police forces as well as criminals. The technological advances over the years have provided law enforcement agencies new perspectives and considerations beyond the traditional methods and opportunities to utilize a wide range of innovations in different contexts. The recent innovations and implementations which increase the efficiency and effectiveness of policing including network analysis, GIS, crime mapping, biometrics, fingerprints, DNA research, facial recognition, speech recognition, social media policing, shotspotter detection system, and CCTV are detailed in this study