SWAT in the Commonwealth: Trends and Issues in Paramilitary Policing

Movies and television shows depicting a future where law enforcement officers look like military soldiers may not be wholly inaccurate. In the last ten years, SWAT teams, or police paramilitary units (PPC\u27s) have become an influential force in contemporary policing. Academic research and the news media have recently taken note of this development and have highlighted several important trends and issues related to paramilitary policing. These include the rapid growth of PPU\u27s, their movement into mainstream police functions and the potential negative consequences of such a shift. This study overviews national trends in paramilitary policing using two national surveys. It then examines trends and issues relevant to the state of Kentucky using both mail survey data and in-depth telephone interviews

Policing Kentucky\u27s School Children: Issues and Trends

The purpose of this research bulletin is to document the scope and nature of an important dimension of the school safety movement--the degree to which schools in Kentucky are being policed by public police agencies. A shift toward having an active police presence in our public schools, an unprecedented and significiant development, should be examined carefully

Fast Mapping onto Census Blocks

Pandemic measures such as social distancing and contact tracing can be enhanced by rapidly integrating dynamic location data and demographic data. Projecting billions of longitude and latitude locations onto hundreds of thousands of highly irregular demographic census block polygons is computationally challenging in both research and deployment contexts. This paper describes two approaches labeled "simple" and "fast". The simple approach can be implemented in any scripting language (Matlab/Octave, Python, Julia, R) and is easily integrated and customized to a variety of research goals. This simple approach uses a novel combination of hierarchy, sparse bounding boxes, polygon crossing-number, vectorization, and parallel processing to achieve 100,000,000+ projections per second on 100 servers. The simple approach is compact, does not increase data storage requirements, and is applicable to any country or region. The fast approach exploits the thread, vector, and memory optimizations that are possible using a low-level language (C++) and achieves similar performance on a single server. This paper details these approaches with the goal of enabling the broader community to quickly integrate location and demographic data.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 55 references; accepted to IEEE HPEC 202

MLSys: The New Frontier of Machine Learning Systems

Machine learning (ML) techniques are enjoying rapidly increasing adoption. However, designing and implementing the systems that support ML models in real-world deployments remains a significant obstacle, in large part due to the radically different development and deployment profile of modern ML methods, and the range of practical concerns that come with broader adoption. We propose to foster a new systems machine learning research community at the intersection of the traditional systems and ML communities, focused on topics such as hardware systems for ML, software systems for ML, and ML optimized for metrics beyond predictive accuracy. To do this, we describe a new conference, MLSys, that explicitly targets research at the intersection of systems and machine learning with a program committee split evenly between experts in systems and ML, and an explicit focus on topics at the intersection of the two

Criminal Justice and Criminology Research Methods

Criminal Justice and Criminology Research Methods, Third Edition, is an accessible and engaging text that offers balanced coverage of a full range of contemporary research methods. Filled with gritty criminal justice and criminology examples including policing, corrections, evaluation research, forensics, feminist studies, juvenile justice, crime theory, and criminal justice theory, this new edition demonstrates how research is relevant to the field and what tools are needed to actually conduct that research. Kraska, Brent, and Neuman write in a pedagogically friendly style yet without sacrificing rigor, offering balanced coverage of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. With its exploration of the thinking behind science and its cutting-edge content, the text goes beyond the nuts and bolts to teach students how to competently critique as well as create research-based knowledge. This book is suitable for undergraduate and early graduate students in US and global Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Justice Studies programs, as well as for senior scholars concerned with incorporating the latest mixed-methods approaches into their research.https://encompass.eku.edu/fs_books/1042/thumbnail.jp

Criminology’s Theoretical Incarceration: Qualitative Methods as Liberator

Despite illustrious origins dating to the 1920s, qualitative crime research has long been overshadowed by quantitative inquiry. After decades of limited use, there has been a notable resurgence in crime ethnography, naturalistic inquiry, and related forms of fieldwork addressing crime and related social control efforts. The Routledge Handbook of Qualitative Criminology signals this momentum as the first major reference work dedicated to crime ethnography and related fieldwork orientations. Synthesizing the foremost topics and issues in qualitative criminology into a single definitive work, the Handbook provides a first-look reference source for scholars and students alike. The collection features twenty original chapters on leading qualitative crime research strategies, the complexities of collecting and analyzing qualitative data, and the ethical propriety of researching active criminals and incarcerated offenders. Contributions from both established luminaries and talented emerging scholars highlight the traditions and emerging trends in qualitative criminology through authoritative overviews and lived experience examples. Comprehensive and current, The Routledge Handbook of Qualitative Criminology promises to be a sound reference source for academics, students and practitioners as ethnography and fieldwork realize continued growth throughout the 21st Century

Interview with Dr. Peter Kraska [video]

Dr. Peter Kraska, Professor in the School of Justice Studies, also coordinates the graduate program in that department. He has published numerous books and journal articles since coming to EKU in 1994. His scholarship has most recently focused on developing criminal justice theory and examining trends in crime control. He continues to pursue his interest in the blurring of U.S. military and police forces, particularly in light of recent terrorist activities. This work has been featured heavily in the media, including news pieces featuring his research in The Economist, Washington Post, New York Times, National Public Radio, Peter Jennings\u27s World News Tonight, and the Jim Lerher News Hour