Prisoners\u27 Right of Access to Courts: Planning for Legal Aid

The civil rights movement has reached into prisons and jails, directing public attention to the fact that prisoners are also beneficiaries of the rights and privileges that the Constitution extends to all citizens. After a discussion of the development of prisoners\u27 rights, this article will survey the major cases establishing prisoners\u27 rights of access to courts and legal assistance. It will summarize previous research dealing with prisoners and their legal problems on a national scale, and extend that research by presenting the findings of a recent research project conducted in the Washington State prison system evaluating the legal needs of prisoners. On the basis of these studies, suggestions are offered for increasing the effectiveness of delivery of legal services to prisoners

Police Accountability and Early Warning Systems: Developing Policies and Programs

The identification of police officers who have potential problems has emerged as a popular approach for curbing police misconduct and achieving accountability. Early warning (EW) systems are data-driven programs whose purpose is to identify officers whose behavior is problematic and to subject those officers to some kind of intervention, often in the form of counseling or training. Because of their potential for providing timely data on officer performance and giving police managers a framework for correcting unacceptable performance, early warning systems are consistent with the new demands for performance evaluation raised by community policing and the effective strategic management of police departments. This article identifies essential components of EW systems and explains the characteristics, structure, and processes of a model program

Toward the Development of a Pursuit Decision Calculus: Pursuit Benefits Versus Pursuit Cost

To make unbiased decisions about whether to pursue a fleeing vehicle, officers must understand both the costs and the potential benefits of a pursuit. This manuscript describes an approach that identifies and assesses the impact of pursuit characteristics on pursuit costs. Data from official pursuit forms generated by officers in the Miami-Dade police department were used as a basis of the study. Log-linear models were used to identify direct and interactive effects of the pursuit characteristics. Upon finding significant effects, odds ratios were calculated. The findings indicate that there are certain pursuit characteristics, including number of units and speed, that significantly increase the likelihood of pursuits resulting in a cost to society including personal injury or property damage

How Reasonable is the Reasonable Man?: Police and Excessive Force

The authority of the police to use force represents one of the most misunderstood powers granted to representatives of government. Police officers are authorized to use both psychological and physical force to apprehend criminals and solve crimes. This Article focuses on issues of physical force. After a brief introduction and a review of current legal issues in the use of force, the Article discusses reasonableness and the unrealistic expectation which is placed on police to understand, interpret, and follow vague reasonableness guidelines. Until the expectations and limitations on the use of force are clarified, in behavioral terms, police officers will be required to adhere to the vague standards of the reasonable person

How Reasonable Is the Reasonable Man: Police and Excessive Force

The authority of the police to use force represents one of the most misunderstood powers granted to representatives of government. Police officers are authorized to use both psychological and physical force to apprehend criminals and solve crimes. This Article focuses on issues of physical force. After a brief introduction and a review of current legal issues in the use of force, the Article discusses reasonableness and the unrealistic expectation which is placed on police to understand, interpret, and follow vague reasonableness guidelines. Until the expectations and limitations on the use of force are clarified, in behavioral terms, police officers will be required to adhere to the vague standards of the reasonable person

Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks

Racial disparities in officer-involved shootings have dominated the national discourse recently. Unfortunately, we have yet to identify an appropriate benchmark, or at-risk population, to put these observed racial disparities into context. In this article, we use seven benchmarks—based on population data from the US Census, police-citizen interaction data from the Police-Public Contact Survey, and arrest data from the Uniform Crime Report—to compare OIS fatality rates for black and white citizens from 2015 to 2017. Using population, police-citizen interactions, or total arrests as a benchmark, we observe that black citizens appear more likely than white citizens to be fatally shot by police officers in both years. Using violent crime arrests or weapons offense arrests, we observe that black citizens appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers. We discuss why population data is a fundamentally flawed benchmark, and elaborate the strengths and weaknesses of using police-citizen interaction or arrest benchmarks