Police Misconduct:Mapping its location, seriousness and theoretical underpinning

Police misconduct and the location of street crimes and deviance have received much research attention. The location of police misconduct, by contrast, has not. Taking the case of Ireland, where policing underwent significant reform in 2007, police oversight data are mapped to determine the location and nature of complaints and any clustering of police misconduct, particularly in areas of greatest deprivation usually associated with people coming into most frequent contact with police. The implications of the findings for police, police oversight, and existing theories by which geography of deviance is framed are discussed

Tracking America's Unsolved Homicides

More than half of America's major police departments are struggling to solve homicides at the same level of success they enjoyed a decade ago, according to a study of federal crime records by the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project.The study focused on the nation's 160 police departments that investigate at least 10 homicides a year and that also faithfully report crime data to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. Of these, 86 departments (54 percent) reported less success in solving murders committed during the 10-year period 2006-2015 than in the preceding decade of 1996-2005, while 74 police agencies (46 percent) reported improving clearance rates.The study found most departments with declining murder clearance rates also experienced rising numbers of homicides. These departments often are located in states or counties with declining tax bases or facing other kinds of fiscal challenges.The purpose of MAP's study was to learn which law enforcement jurisdictions in the United States generally have improved homicide clearance rates and which jurisdictions experienced declines. Under U.S. Justice Department definitions, a homicide is "cleared" if at least one person is arrested, formally charged and handed over for prosecution.The study identified the 10 police agencies that reported the most improvement in homicide clearances and the 10 departments reporting the worst decline in solving murders.The law enforcement agencies with the most improved homicide clearance rates were: Mesa Police Department, Arizona; Tulare County Sheriff's Office, California; Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, DC; North Little Rock Police Department, Arkansas; East Orange Police Department, New Jersey; Fresno Police Department, California; Winston-Salem Police Department, North Carolina; Richmond Police Department, Virginia; Santa Anna Police Department, California; Oxnard Police Department, California.These agencies increased their clearance rates by a range from 36 percentage points in the case of Mesa Police down to 21 percentage points in the case of Oxnard Police.The 10 law enforcement agencies reporting the largest declines in homicide clearance were: Newark Police Department, New Jersey; Little Rock Police Department, Arkansas; Trenton Police Department, New Jersey; Pine Bluff Police Department, Arkansas; Chester Police Department, Pennsylvania; Elizabeth Police Department, New Jersey; Flint Police Department, Michigan; Camden City/County Police Department, New Jersey; City of Yonkers Police Department, New York; Stanislaus County Sheriff's Office, California

Race, Expectations and Evaluations of Police Performance: An Empirical Assessment

The purpose of the current study is two‐fold. First, using data obtained from a sample of crime victims (n = 122), this study empirically assesses the effect that police officer race has on evaluations of the police. Second, this study provides a greater specification of the effect that expectations regarding police performance have on evaluations of the police. ANOVA and Ordered Probit analyses indicate that police officer race does not influence victim evaluations of police performance. However, expectations do significantly influence evaluations of the police and furthermore, expectations of police performance differ across racial lines. Possible explanations for these findings and directions for future research are offered

The Relationship Between Demographic Characteristics, Types of Contact with Police, and Perceptions of Police

Police officers play a very important role in their communities, considering they need to interact with the public in order to carry out their duties. For that reason, the relationship between the public and police officers has been the focus of many studies. The current study analyzed data from the 2011 Police-Public Contact Survey (n= 49,246). The study was conducted in three separate parts - the relationship between individual demographic characteristics and type of contact with the police, individual demographic characteristics and perceptions of police, and type of contact with the police and perceptions of the police. The results from this study were consistent with previous findings from studies that used smaller populations, as it was found that women were more likely to have voluntary contact with police than men, non-Hispanics had more voluntary contact with police than those of Hispanic Origin, women reported more positive perceptions of police, there was a positive relationship between age and perception of the police, and those who had voluntary contact had a more positive perception of police officers than those who had involuntary contact

Algorithm design for grip-pattern verification in smart gun

The Secure Grip project1 focuses on the development of a hand-grip pattern recognition system, as part of the smart gun. Its target customer is the police. To explore the authentication performance of this system, we collected data from a group of police officers, and made authentication simulations based on a likelihood-ratio classifier. This smart gun system has been proved to be useful in the authentication of the police officers. However, its authentication performance needs some further improvement, especially when data for training and testing were collected with some time in between. We present and analyze the simulation results of the authentication experiment. Based on the analyses, we propose some methods to improve the system¿s authentication performance

Final-Offer Arbitration and Salaries of Police and Firefighters

[Excerpt] Did final-offer arbitration have a discernible impact on the salaries of police and firefighters in Massachusetts during the 3-year trial period which ended June 30, 1977? To analyze this question, we collected information on the maximum salary paid to police patrolmen, police sergeants, firefighters, and fire lieutenants for a large sample of Massachusetts municipalities. We integrated these data with police and fire impasse experiences and added several economic and environmental characteristics for each Massachusetts municipality. Then we performed several tests of the economic impact of final-offer arbitration

The Utilization of Mobile Technology for Crime Scene Investigation in the San Francisco Bay Area

The research presented aims to explore factors affecting the decision to adopt a mobile crime scene investigation application in police departments throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. To accomplish this goal, the mobile technology acceptance model was used in designing a survey for data collection. This model utilizes four categories to interpret the factors that influence a police officer’s decision to accept or reject mobile technologies: performance, security and reliability, management style, and cognitive acceptance. Nine police departments were sampled through a series of in-person and over-the-phone interviews to obtain data regarding factors affecting the adoption of a mobile crime scene investigation application. Results suggest that if a mobile crime scene investigation application were made available, a vast majority of the police departments in the Bay Area would implement this new technology

UK open source crime data: accuracy and possibilities for research

In the United Kingdom, since 2011 data regarding individual police recorded crimes have been made openly available to the public via the police.uk website. To protect the location privacy of victims these data are obfuscated using geomasking techniques to reduce their spatial accuracy. This paper examines the spatial accuracy of the police.uk data to determine at what level(s) of spatial resolution – if any – it is suitable for analysis in the context of theory testing and falsification, evaluation research, or crime analysis. Police.uk data are compared to police recorded data for one large metropolitan Police Force and spatial accuracy is quantified for four different levels of geography across five crime types. Hypotheses regarding systematic errors are tested using appropriate statistical approaches, including methods of maximum likelihood. Finally, a “best-fit” statistical model is presented to explain the error as well as to develop a model that can correct it. The implications of the findings for researchers using the police.uk data for spatial analysis are discussed

Testing procedural justice theory in Belgium and Sweden

Procedural justice theory assumes that trust in procedural justice and in the effectiveness of the police are important issues for building the legitimacy of the aforementioned institution. Additionally, the perception of police legitimacy, as a result of public trust, is necessary for the recognition of police authority. When citizens recognize the right of the police to determine authority, they are assumed to feel the obligation to obey the police and ultimately comply with the law and cooperate with the police. This theoretical framework is mainly tested in Anglo-Saxon countries. Hence, the purpose of this contribution is to test the key assumptions of procedural justice theory in the Belgian and Swedish context using data of the European Social Survey (ESS). Attention is paid not only to the role of procedural justice, but also to the role of deterrence and the role of personal morality to explain the willingness to cooperate with the police and compliance with the law. This allows us to compare the impact of procedural justice with the impact of other possible determinants. We used Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to do the analyses. The results suggest that the reason why people cooperate with the police is different in both countries

Retaining the Thin Blue Line: What shapes workers' willingness not to quit the current work environment?

The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of police officers' willingness to quit their current department. For this purpose, we work with US survey data that covers a large set of police officers for the Baltimore Police Department in Maryland. Our results indicate that more effective cooperation between units, a higher trust in the work partner, a higher level of interactional justice and a higher level of work-life-balance reduces police officers' willingness to quit the department substantially. On the other hand, higher physical and psychological stress and the expereicene of traumatic events are not, ceteris paribus, correlated with the willingness to leave the department. It might be that police officers accept stress as an acceptable factor in their job description.Willingness to Quit the Job; Turnover Rates: Job Satisfaction; Stress; Police Officers; Work-Life Balance; Fairness; Acceptance.