A thin-slice of institutionalised police brutality: a tradition of excessive force in the Chicago Police Department

In the Chicago Police Department, a sustained tradition of tolerating violent conduct has contributed to the fostering of a police culture in which the use of force is celebrated. Evidence suggests that there has been a historical reluctance to take action to discipline officers accused of misconduct – many of whom are highly decorated veterans of the Chicago Police Department. It is the contention of this article that the long-standing endorsement of excessive force in Chicago policing has compromised officers’ ability to thin-slice, a psychological process in which people are able to draw on their experiences and socio-cultural context to make quick decisions under pressure. Instead, officers are instinctively drawn to engage in misconduct as a means to an end, with the confidence that their actions will not attract the sanction of their superiors

Axiomatic based decomposition for conceptual product design

This paper describes a structured methodology for decomposing the conceptual design problem in order to facilitate the design process and result in improved conceptual designs that better satisfy the original customer requirements. The axiomatic decomposition for conceptual design method combines Alexander's network partitioning formulation of the design problem with Suh's Independence Axiom. The axiomatic decomposition method uses a cross-domain approach in a House of Quality context to estimate the interactions among the functional requirements that are derived from a qualitative assessment of customer requirements. These interactions are used in several objective functions that serve as criteria for decomposing the design network. A new network partitioning algorithm is effective in creating partitions that maximize the within-partition interactions and minimize the between-partition interactions with appropriate weightings. The viability, usability, and value of the axiomatic decomposition method were examined through analytic comparisons and qualitative assessments of its application. The new method was examined using students in engineering design capstone courses and it was found to be useable and did produce better product designs that met the customer requirements. The student-based assessment revealed that the process would be more effective with individuals having design experience. In a subsequent assessment with practicing industrial designers, it was found that the new method did facilitate the development of better designs. An important observation was the need for limits on partition size (maximum of four functional requirements.) Another issue identified for future research was the need for a means to identify the appropriate starting partition for initiating the design

Value focused thinking for community-based organizations: Objectives and acceptance in local development

A multi-site case study applies value-focused thinking methods in a community engaged research framework within three organizations. All three organizations are community development corporations (CDCs), a type of community based organization (CBO) who direct assets and efforts toward housing stock and neighborhood improvement. Objectives hierarchies were developed for the three sites. A set of common aspects of these structures suggest ways to operationalize the generic mission of CDCs. Other aspects which vary across sites can be related to specific characteristics of the organizations and the communities in which they operate. The process of applying value-focused thinking is also compared across the organizations. The organizations made judgments about which modeling efforts would be useful at different stages of the study. These judgments are interpreted with respect to the technology acceptance model. They suggest that community based operations research practitioners will find organizations similar to those in the study to be especially receptive to qualitative construction of objectives hierarchies