Taking advantage of new technologies: For and against crime

Advancement in the field of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) changes not only our society but also crime. It opens more opportunities for crime and draws people into committing crime, leading to an unprecedented growth in the crime rate. On the other hand, it has also been applied to criminal justice. Crime fighters use the ICTs to control crime and gain efficiency in their policing efforts to service the community. This has led to more effective police work. As both criminals and police benefit from ICTs, these new technologies create new pitfalls for both criminals and law enforcement. Use of technologies by criminals represents challenges and risks to the crime fighter and vice versa. This triggers a crime race and raises notable social concerns on the adverse use and potential abuse of ICTs. Proactive territorial-based regulations, although called for, do not always provide solutions. The borderless nature of ICTs may not allow for rigid regulations and instead challenges the principle of criminal laws. As such, international laws and regulations combined with reliance on technologies are crucial to counter the crime race.     

Racial profiling and searches: Did the politics of racial profiling change police behavior?*

Research Summary Scholarly research has documented repeatedly that minority citizens are disproportionately stopped, searched, and arrested relative to their baseline populations. In recent years, policymakers have brought increased attention to this issue as law‐enforcement agencies across the United States have faced allegations of racial profiling. In the 1990s, the politics generated by accounts of racially biased policing placed heightened pressure on law‐enforcement agencies. However, to date, few studies have explored whether the increased social and political scrutiny placed on police organizations influenced or changed their general pattern of enforcement among black and white citizens. Using data in the search and citation file from the North Carolina Highway Traffic Study, this research specifically examined whether the politics generated by the media coverage of racial profiling and racial profiling legislation in North Carolina influenced the search practices of officers of the North Carolina State Highway Patrol's drug interdiction team. The findings suggest that media accounts and the passage of new legislation were particularly powerful influences, which thereby reduced racial disparity in searches. Declines in the use of consent searches and an increased probability of finding contraband also were influenced by the politics of racial profiling. Policy Implications The results of this study suggest several important policy recommendations. First, law‐enforcement agencies must monitor the policing practices of their officers because such supervision can influence officer compliance with fair and unbiased policing policies. Next, supervisors need to familiarize themselves with enforcement data to identify potential problem officers and organizational practices. By doing so, police organizations will not only increase officer accountability but also will potentially improve communication with their local communities. Such communication can empower community members to file charges against officers who violate their civil rights. Next, the media and political effects documented in this study suggest that external oversight can be particularly influential on police practices. Therefore, police agencies should consider developing a citizen complaint board, which is an external oversight board that would be responsible for investigating allegations against officers who engage in racial profiling or other racially biased enforcement practices. Such a board could assist police administrators in identifying problem officers as well as in making recommendations for corrective action. Finally, external social and political pressure must continually be placed on police forces to improve equity in police behavior. These external forces can assist in creating opportunities for police to increase the overall quality and efficacy of policing.     

The Nature and Extent of Conservation Policing: Law Enforcement Generalists or Conservation Specialists?

Little is known about law enforcement agencies with responsibility for fish, wildlife, and natural resource protection. Traditional conceptions of fish and wildlife police associate these officers almost entirely with fishing and hunting activities. The relative scarcity of academic literature regarding fish and wildlife police agencies results in a lack of understanding about their role in the criminal justice system in general. The current study seeks to contribute to the limited existing literature by examining conservation policing in Florida, a state not yet studied in this context, by analyzing some 2,910 field events. Findings indicate that officers devote a considerable portion of their attention to traditional law enforcement activities in addition to the type of enforcement customarily associated with fish and wildlife law enforcement.     

Human trafficking and criminal investigation strategies in the Amsterdam Red Light District

The subject of human trafficking has recently received a lot of attention from society and the world of politics. The criminal-law approach to human trafficking has also been placed high on the agenda of law enforcers. Human trafficking is, however, a complex crime with several specific characteristics. For example, there is often a complex relationship between victims and perpetrators of human trafficking and victims are often too afraid to file a report. How do the police and the judicial authorities work in the investigation of human trafficking in view of the specific characteristics of human trafficking? What choices are made in practice and what different police investigative strategies can be distinguished? What opportunities and risks are inherent in the choices made? In this article we answer these questions on the basis of four large scale police investigations into human trafficking that we studied closely. The four criminal cases all focused on violent groups of human traffickers that operated in the Amsterdam window prostitution. All criminal cases have since been concluded (in first instance). It turned out that in each of the four investigations the relevant police team applied a different investigative strategy: one investigation focused primarily on the victim statements, one investigation focused on public nuisance, one investigation focused on the evidence against the criminal organisation and one investigation focused on the offences (evidence concerning the exploitation of prostitutes). In this article we compare the four strategies applied and consider the consequences of each strategy for the course of the investigation and the criminal prosecution and what dilemma’s are faced in each strategy. Although the various investigations cannot be easily compared and a uniform ‘best’ strategy cannot be designated, the comparison does show that some choices or decisions entail great opportunities or great risks as regards the successful investigation and prosecution of human trafficking. It concerns, for example, the choice of involving local investigative services (district police) or the choice for short-term or, as the case may be, longer-running investigations.     

The thin blue line meets the big blue sky: perceptions of police legitimacy and public attitudes towards aerial drones

Police departments across the United States are now integrating new visual monitoring technology (e.g. unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs or ‘drones’], body cameras) into routine police practices. Despite their potential use in multiple areas of proactive and reactive policing, public attitudes toward police use of UAVs, and visual monitoring technology overall, is mixed. As an extension of previous research, the current study uses a national survey to assess how well individuals’ perceptions about police legitimacy, effectiveness, and other criminal justice attitudes predict the level of public receptivity and opposition toward police UAV use in various contexts. The implications of these findings for public policy and law enforcement practices are discussed.     

Tennessee Citizen Police Academies: Program and Participant Characteristics

Citizen police academies (CPAs) are popular programs developed by police departments with the twin goals of educating the public about law enforcement and improving police-community relationships. Citizen police academies can help law enforcement agencies by providing them with graduates who may support police departments through volunteering, crime reporting, advocacy, and crime prevention. CPAs may aid citizens by providing them with opportunities to work with the police to make their communities safer. During the course of the citizen police academy, not only will participants have opportunities to learn more about the police depar'tment and their communities, but they may be given opportunities to patrol with police officers, solve mock crime scenes, or attend moot court. This study examines citizen police academies in Tennessee and provides an exploratory investigation of the programs and its participants. Data obtained from 31 police departments indicate CPA programs with more than a 20 year history in Tennessee. Results of a pretest and posttest of 4 citizen police academies’ participants found that attending these programs significantly and positively changed participants’ familiarity with the police chief, local law enforcement, community crime, and the criminal justice system.     

Human trafficking and police governance

Abstract

Human trafficking in its various forms continues to offer significant challenges for law enforcement agencies. There is a growing body of research that addresses some of the police governance and management issues associated with the prevention and control of human trafficking and the protection of victims of this type of crime. This article reviews the literature on the implementation of effective detection, investigation, prosecution, and victim protection strategies; the need for more effective international cooperation; and, the struggle to keep up with the illusive criminal organizations and networks that often defy law enforcement tactics. It also considers some of the specific challenges that result from the frequent conflation of human trafficking enforcement with immigration control strategies. It offers a few suggestions on how these issues may be addressed from a police governance standpoint and concludes with a call for better data on human trafficking and the relative effectiveness of different law enforcement strategies.     

Transformation of Macau policing: from a Portuguese colony to China’s SAR

This study examines policing in Macau and identifies major forces that have shaped its transformation over past decades. Prior to 1999, Macau was a Portuguese colony. Its criminal justice system inherited key features of the Continental system, including two independent law enforcement agencies: the Judiciary Police and the Public Security Police. In the colonial era, expatriate commanders drawn from the military or legal professions headed both departments, while the rank-and-file was composed mainly of local Chinese. This policing mechanism, together with the ‘laissez-faire’ policing philosophy adopted by colonial leaders, created segregation between policing agencies and the community. Citizens preferred minimal interaction with police, since they were skeptical about their professionalism, capability, and reliability. Macau became part of the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1999. The de-monopolization of the gaming industries in 2002 brought huge GDP growth, but generated internal social conflict. Growing public demand for accountable governance motivated a series of governmental reforms, some of which have extended to policing. These reforms have improved the transparency of policing, but it remains to be seen if they will ultimately succeed in generating public trust in the police forces.     

Construction of the problem of Latin gangs in Spain and response of the law enforcement system

Recently, since their official recognition as criminal organizations by Spanish law enforcement authorities, stricter prosecution of Latin street gangs has been observed. The toughening of legal regulations, new models of police conduct and the increasingly active role of prosecutors have contributed to greater punitive pressure on the gangs. This article has two main objectives: first, to describe changes in Spanish criminal policies for the treatment of Latin American street gangs; second, to analyse to what extent these changes are in consonance with empirical findings on criminal involvement and the organizational nature of these groups. The results show that despite the recent increase in criminal activity these groups cannot be viewed as the only parties to blame for local street crime. The opinion of the law enforcement authorities that Latin American street gangs are a form of organized crime is far from reality. These groups do not have the required combination of characteristics inherent to criminal organizations, and their purposes are not always exclusively criminal.     

Resilience of a corrupt police network: the first and second jokes in Queensland

Resilient organised crime groups survive and prosper despite law enforcement activity, criminal competition and market forces. Corrupt police networks, like any other crime network, must contain resiliency characteristics if they are to continue operation and avoid being closed down through detection and arrest of their members. This paper examines the resilience of a large corrupt police network, namely The Joke which operated in the Australian state of Queensland for a number of decades. The paper uses social network analysis tools to determine the resilient characteristics of the network. This paper also assumes that these characteristics will be different to those of mainstream organised crime groups because the police network operates within an established policing agency rather than as an independent entity hiding within the broader community.     

The Reconstitution of Law in Local Settings: Agency Discretion, Ambiguity, and a Surplus of Law in the Policing of Hate Crime

An important yet poorly understood function of law enforcement organizations is the role they play in distilling and transmitting the meaning of legal rules to frontline law enforcement officers and their local communities. In this study, we examine how police and sheriff's agencies in California collectively make sense of state hate crime laws. To do so, we gathered formal policy documents called “hate crime general orders” from all 397 police and sheriff's departments in the state and conducted interviews with law enforcement officials to determine the aggregate patterns of local agencies' responses to higher law. We also construct a “genealogy of law” to locate the sources of the definitions of hate crime used in agency policies. Despite a common set of state criminal laws, we find significant variation in how hate crime is defined in these documents, which we attribute to the discretion local law enforcement agencies possess, the ambiguity of law, and the surplus of legal definitions of hate crime available in the larger environment to which law enforcement must respond. Some law enforcement agencies take their cue from other agencies, some follow statewide guidelines, and others are oriented toward gaining legitimacy from national professional bodies or groups within their own community. The social mechanisms that produce the observed clustering patterns in terms of approach to hate crime law are mimetic (copying another department), normative (driven by professional standards about training and community social movement pressure), and actuarial (affected by the demands of the crime data collection system). Together these findings paint a picture of policing organizations as mediators between law‐on‐the‐books and law‐in‐action that are embedded in interorganizational networks with other departments, state and federal agencies, professional bodies, national social movement organizations, and local community groups. The implications of an interorganizational field perspective on law enforcement and implementation are discussed in relation to existing sociolegal research on policing, regulation, and recent neo‐institutional scholarship on law.     

Law Enforcement and the Rights of the Accused: Are the Police Getting a Bad Rap?

Nationwide, law enforcement professionals have endured increasing scrutiny regarding their treatment of custodial suspects and their alleged abridgement of suspects’ Constitutional rights. At the same time, in the interests of community safety, many members of the public fully expect police officers to function efficiently in arresting and facilitating the prosecution of likely perpetrators. These perspectives reflect due-process and crime-control models respectively. Very little is known, however, about how law enforcement professionals actually view the rights of the accused when not acutely immersed in the cross-currents of public opinion. Using an anonymous survey, the current investigation addresses both Miranda rights as well as the European Union’s (EU) much more comprehensive approach to the rights of the accused. In general, this sample of 209 urban police officers favored protections of criminal suspects that went considerably beyond Miranda safeguards.     

Correlates of the endorsement of two competing policing styles among police cadets in China

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to investigate police cadets’ endorsement of the law enforcement style and the community policing style of policing at a time when both styles of police practices have received significant attention in China. The data used in the analysis were collected from a national police university in China featuring a large sample of 900+ cadets. The first research objective concerns the dimensionality of sentiments toward the two styles of policing among police cadets. The second is the identification of key factors associated with these styles. The principal findings are that police cadets do see the law enforcement style and the community policing style as two distinctive conceptual dimensions. Moreover, different factors are associated with endorsement of each of the two styles of policing. Policy implications of these findings are discussed in some detail.     

行政执法与刑事司法衔接机制研究

行政执法与刑事司法衔接机制的发展过程,乃是检察机关法律监督作用不断加强的过程。这一机制的建设已取得显著成效,但并未根本上解决问题,其症结在于行政执法权与法律监督权的强弱反差。从我国的国家权力体系看,能够有效钳制行政权的只能是检察机关。因此,要健全衔接机制,必须克服检察权的体制性、机制性和保障性三方面障碍。     

Stop and Risk: Policing,Data, and the Digital Age of Discrimination

Predictive policing is the newest innovation in the field of law enforcement. Predictive policing programs use algorithms to analyze existing crime data in an attempt to make predictions about future crimes: What crimes are likely to be committed, where crimes are likely to be committed, and a list of potential victims and offenders. Proponents of predictive policing champion the practice as an effective, proactive form of law enforcement that is free from bias due to its data-driven nature. However, as a matter of justice policy, predictive policing is just as discriminatory as traditional police practices, such as stop and frisk: Both are relatively ineffective; both have the potential to disproportionately target minorities; both are challenging forms of surveillance that create several important ethical and legal issues; and both are presented as objective, impartial, and equitable. This article has three primary goals: Highlight the potential and problematic similarities between stop and frisk and predictive policing; present the problems associated with predictive policing, including its questionable effectiveness, biased foundation, and faulty legal and ethical footing; and discuss the ways in which discriminatory criminal justice programs, such as stop and frisk and predictive policing, are presented to the public as objective, non-discriminatory policies.

     

Organizational structure as predictor of intelligence strategy implementation in policing

Barriers to strategy implementation are often found in the organizational structure in law enforcement. Strategy implementation is important because failure to carry out strategy can cause lost opportunities and leave police officers reluctant to do strategic planning. Lack of implementation creates problems in maintaining priorities and reaching organizational goals. Yet, strategy implementation suffers from a general lack of academic attention. This research paper makes a contribution to police strategy implementation literature by developing a research model to study the extent of intelligence strategy implementation caused by organizational structure in policing.     

DETERRENCE,CRIMINAL OPPORTUNITIES,AND POLICE

In this article, we join three distinct literatures on crime control—the deterrence literature, the policing literature as it relates to crime control, and the environmental and opportunity perspectives literature. Based on empirical findings and theory from these literatures, we pose a mathematical model of the distribution of criminal opportunities and offender decision making on which of those opportunities to victimize. Criminal opportunities are characterized in terms of the risk of apprehension that attends their victimization. In developing this model, our primary focus is on how police might affect the distribution of criminal opportunities that are attractive to would‐be offenders. The theoretical model we pose, however, is generalizable to explain how changes in other relevant target characteristics, such as potential gain, could affect target attractiveness. We demonstrate that the model has important implications for the efficiency and effectiveness of police deployment strategies such as hot spots policing, random patrol, and problem‐oriented policing. The theoretical structure also makes clear why the clearance rate is a fundamentally flawed metric of police performance. Future research directions suggested by the theoretical model are discussed.     

Policing in small town America: Dogs, drunks, disorder, and dysfunction

A handful of researchers examined the activities of law enforcement in rural areas. Much of the research on rural policing activities involved well-constructed ethnographic methodologies including observational studies, case studies, and in-depth interviews. These studies demonstrated that rural police officers faced a number of problems that their urban counterparts did not. Building on this past research, this article reports the results of a content analysis of law enforcement activity in one rural community over a two-year timeframe. In all, 948 police calls as described in one community's published media crime reports were analyzed. Results of the analysis suggested that rural policing requires officers who are trained as generalists and able to respond to an assortment of departmental and social/community needs. Implications are provided.