The Confucian ethic and the spirit of East Asian police: a comparative study in the ideology of democratic policing

This paper is an empirical study in comparative police ideology. It describes cultural qualities that distinguish Taiwan’s idea of democratic policing from comparable ideas in other places. I examine the historical process by which Taiwan’s police came to be organized around the population registry (the hukou). This process has institutionalized a Confucian understanding of civic virtue as an organizing principle in Taiwanese policing. Based on these historical and cultural observations, I formulate an ideal typical model of Taiwanese “policing through virtue” that can be compared to other stereotypical national policing styles such as Britain’s “policing by consent,” America’s discretionary policing, and France’s formalist emphasis on division of power and rule of law.     

Viewing Things Differently: The Dimensions of Public Perceptions of Police Legitimacy

Legitimacy (or “the right to exercise power”) is now an established concept in criminological analysis, especially in relation to policing. Substantial empirical evidence shows the importance of legitimacy in securing law‐abiding behavior and cooperation from citizens. Yet adequate theorization has lagged behind empirical evidence, and there has been a conflation of legitimacy with the cognate concepts of “trust” and of “obligation to obey the law.” By drawing on the work of Beetham (1991) and others (e.g., Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012 ), this study tests the hypothesis that the contents of the multiple dimensions of police legitimacy comprise procedural fairness, distributive fairness, lawfulness, and effectiveness. The study also investigates the relative influence of legitimacy and feelings of obligation on citizens’ willingness to cooperate with the police. Using data from London, the results substantiate the hypothesized dimensions of police legitimacy. In addition, legitimacy was found to exhibit both a direct influence on cooperation that is independent of obligation and an indirect influence that flows through people's felt obligations to obey the police. Implications for future research are discussed.     

转轨经济法学:西方范式与中国现实之抉择

当下中国经济法学的逻辑假设建立在西方经济法范式的基础之上,无法与中国现实达成和谐。提出“转轨经济法学”的概念可以使中国的经济法学研究回归到转轨中国的社会现实中来,解决改革现实中的真问题,自觉区别于西方范式,消解中国经济法学严重的正当性危机。转轨经济法的历史使命不是要通过政府来弥补市场缺陷而是要培育市场;转轨经济法的核心任务是反行政干预而不是反垄断;转轨经济法的基本功能是控权而不是授权;转轨经济法应以公平为第一价值取向。     

Beyond the Ghetto: Police Power,Methamphetamine and the Rural War on Drugs

Viewing police as important cultural producers, we ask how police power fashions structures of feeling and social imaginaries of the “war on drugs” in small towns of the rural Midwest. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a collection of interviews focusing on police officers’ beliefs about the causes of crime and drug use, we locate a narrative of rural decline attributed to the producers and users of methamphetamine. We argue this narrative supports punitive and authoritarian sensibilities and broader narcopolitical projects more generally and ignores long-standing social inequalities observed in rural communities. As such, the cultural work of rural police provides important insight to the shape and direction of late-modern crime control beyond the familiar terrains of the city and its “ghetto.”     

Race, urban governance, and crime control: creating model cities

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city of Seattle received federal Department of Housing and Urban Development “Model cities” funds to address issues of racial disenfranchisement in the city. Premised under the “Great Society” ethos, Model cities sought to remedy the strained relationship between local governments and disenfranchised urban communities. Though police-community relations were not initially slated as an area of concern in the city's grant application, residents of the designated “model neighborhood” pressed for the formation of a law and justice task force to address the issue. This article examines the process and outcome of the two law-and-justice projects proposed by residents of the designated “model neighborhood”: the Consumer Protection program and the Community Service Officer project. Drawing on the work of legal geographies scholars, I argue that the failure of each of these efforts to achieve residents' intentions stems from the geographical imagination of urban problems. Like law-and-order projects today, the geographical imagination of the model neighborhood produced a discourse of exceptionality that subjected residents to extraordinary state interventions. The Model cities project thus provides an example of a “history of the present” of mass incarceration in which the geographical imagination of crime helps facilitate the re-creation of a racialized power structure.     

Is the Effect of Procedural Justice on Police Legitimacy Invariant? Testing the Generality of Procedural Justice and Competing Antecedents of Legitimacy

Objectives

This study tests the generality of Tyler’s process-based model of policing by examining whether the effect of procedural justice and competing variables (i.e., distributive justice and police effectiveness) on police legitimacy evaluations operate in the same manner across individual and situational differences.

Methods

Data from a random sample of mail survey respondents are used to test the “invariance thesis” (N = 1681). Multiplicative interaction effects between the key antecedents of legitimacy (measured separately for obligation to obey and trust in the police) and various demographic categories, prior experiences, and perceived neighborhood conditions are estimated in a series of multivariate regression equations.

Results

The effect of procedural justice on police legitimacy is largely invariant. However, regression and marginal results show that procedural justice has a larger effect on trust in law enforcement among people with prior victimization experience compared to their counterparts. Additionally, the distributive justice effect on trust in the police is more pronounced for people who have greater fear of crime and perceive higher levels of disorder in their neighborhood.

Conclusion

The results suggest that Tyler’s process-based model is a “general” theory of individual police legitimacy evaluations. The police can enhance their legitimacy by ensuring procedural fairness during citizen interactions. The role of procedural justice also appears to be particularly important when the police interact with crime victims.

     

The Characteristics of Relapsed Drug Users in Contemporary Urban China

The present study is aimed at exploring the characteristics of Chinese relapsed drug users associated with their treatment experience in police mandatory treatment centers. The exploration is based on a comparison of Chinese drug users who received the police mandatory treatment for multiple times (the “relapse” group) with those who had the treatment for the first time (the “first-time” group). The comparative analysis is conducted using data collected from a 2009 survey of 177 drug users in several police mandatory treatment centers in a large city of China. The data indicate that both the “relapse” and the “first-time” groups have similar demographic characteristics except age. However, respondents in the “relapse” group were more likely to be heroin users, have a high level of drug dependence, have prior treatment, experience a high level of mental disorder, and have drug-use friends than those in the “first-time” group. The findings imply that relapse among Chinese drug users are likely to have multiple factors which is comparable to that discovered in Western research.     

对行政法学基础理论的思考

我们究竟需要构建一门什么样的行政法学科?当今我国行政法学界对这个命题的回答形成了不同的观点。笔者认为,行政法的基本价值取向应当是“控权”和“服务”。行政法是一部“控权法”加“服务法”,是控制行政权的法,是服务于社会、服务于民的法。控权和服务是双向的,共同构成了行政法学理论基础的两个支点。     

Command-level Police Officers’ Perceptions of the “War on Cops” and De-policing

Policing has been the subject of intense public scrutiny for the better part of two years after several high-profile police killings of unarmed African Americans across the United States. The scrutiny has been so extreme that some contend there is currently a “war on cops”—whereby citizens are emboldened by protests and negative media coverage of the police, and are lashing out by assaulting police officers more frequently. In response, it is argued that officers are de-policing (i.e. avoiding proactive stops). We surveyed command-level police officers from a southeastern state about their attitudes concerning the war on cops and de-policing. The majority of our sample believed there has been a war on cops over the last two years. Moreover, officers who felt strongly about the existence of a war on cops were more likely to believe that de-policing is common among officers in today’s world of law enforcement.     

Organized crime, the militarization of public security, and the debate on the “new” police model in Mexico

After the recognition in Mexico of a situation characterized by violence involving both non-state actors (mainly drug lords) and the state apparatus, the present research critically analyzes both the national security strategy adopted by President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006–2012), which is based on the process of the militarization of public security, as well as the “new” police model proposed by the executive power that seeks to professionalize law enforcement agencies.     

Brokering Access Beyond the Border and in the Wild: Comparing Freedom of Information Law and Policy in Canada and the United States

Contributing to literature on jurisdictional variation in freedom of information (FOI) law and policy, we draw from accounts of experiences of FOI requests submitted to police agencies in nine Canadian provinces and ten US states. We conceptualize these experiences using notions of “brokering access,” “law in the wild,” and “feral law.” Our findings demonstrate key differences in how public police agencies store, prepare, and disclose information at municipal and provincial/state levels in Canada and the US, meaning that FOI‐related feral lawyering in Canada and the United States differs and fluctuates because of the variation in the mode of contact with FOI coordinators, fee estimate practices, and procedures for and responsiveness to appeals. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings for methodological and sociolegal literature about FOI requests and for provincial/state FOI policies in both countries.     

Constructing Achievement in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars. As the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set up after WWII, the ICTY has attracted immense interest among legal scholars since its inception, but has failed to garner the same level of attention from researchers in other disciplines, notably linguistics. This represents a significant research gap, as the Tribunal’s public discourse (notably its case law and Annual Reports) can open up interesting avenues of analysis to researchers of law, language, and legal discourse alike. On its official website, the Tribunal claims that it has “irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law” and lists six specific achievements: “Holding leaders accountable; bringing justice to victims; giving victims a voice; establishing the facts; developing international law and strengthening the rule of the law”. While a number of legal scholars have studied and critiqued the level of ‘achievement’ actually attained by the Tribunal against these metrics and others, of interest to linguists is the ways in which this work might be conveyed discursively. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods from the linguistic field of corpus-based critical discourse analysis can be utilised to explore the discursive construction of such achievements in the language of the ICTY.     

Promoting Whole-Process People’s Democracy Following the Rule of Law

Whole-process people’s democracy profoundly reflects the features of socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics, and comprehensively and systematically reveals the concept of people’s democracy as providing important mechanisms of national and social governance. Based on the traditional democratic understanding of democracy as majority rule, whole-process people’s democracy emphasizes the universality and extensive range of democratic governance, but also has the natural value defects of democratic value itself. Therefore, we must organically combine democracy with the values of the rule of law and human rights, to build a well-defined governance order based on people’s democratic value. The whole process in the “whole-process people’s democracy” has really resolved the situation of people’s “absence” from many links of state power operation caused by over-emphasizing the election-democracy in the Western capitalist democratic system. Through the people’s extensive participation and effective supervision, the state power operation mechanism based on the fundamental political system, the people’s congress system, has been ensured to be always in the framework of people’s democratic governance. This effectively realizes the people’s sovereignty and is consistent with the declaration that “all power in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) belongs to the people,” stipulated in the Constitution of China. To improve the governance efficiency of whole-process people’s democracy in practice, we must bring it onto the rule of law, and use the rule of law philosophy and methods to reasonably and effectively resolve all kinds of theoretical and practical problems.     

DEVELOPMENT AND FRACTURE OF A DISCIPLINE: LEGACIES OF THE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY AT BERKELEY

In the early twentieth century, the University of California—Berkeley opened its doors to police professionals for instruction in “police science.” This program ultimately developed into the full‐fledged School of Criminology, whose graduates helped shape American criminology and criminal justice until well into the 1970s. Scholarship at the School of Criminology eventually fractured into three distinct traditions: “Administrative criminology” applied scientific methods in pursuit of refining law enforcement practices, “law and society” coupled legal scholarship with social scientific methods, and “radical criminology” combined Marxist critiques of the state with community activism. Those scientific traditions relied on competing epistemic premises and normative aspirations, and they drew legitimacy from different sources. Drawing on oral histories and archival data permits a neo‐institutional analysis of how each of these criminological traditions emerged, acquired stability, and subsided. The Berkeley School of Criminology provides fertile ground to examine trends in the development of criminal justice as a profession, criminology as a discipline and its place in elite universities, the uncoupling of criminology from law and society scholarship, and criminal justice policy's disenchantment with the academy. These legacies highlight how the development of modern criminology and the professionalization of American law enforcement find precedent in events that originate at Berkeley.     

The Effect of Paramilitary Protest Policing on Protestors' Trust in the Police: The Case of the “Occupy Israel” Movement

The use of paramilitary methods in civil policing tasks has become common in Western police agencies. Despite propositions that such methods should undermine the relationship between the police and the public, the effect of paramilitary policing on public trust in the police has not been empirically tested. In the present study, we examine this question in the context of protest policing, which has become a major concern for Western police agencies. Using a survey of 470 protesters who participated in “Occupy” protest events in Israel in 2012, we find that the perceived use of paramilitary methods has an independent and negative effect on trust, stronger than that of police effectiveness and the “neutrality” component of procedural justice. In‐depth interviews suggest that the significance of paramilitarism may be the result of a sense of alienation and criminalization it elicits among protesters who generally perceive themselves as law‐abiding citizens.     

需要何种法律信任

"法律信任"对"法律信仰"概念的修正,实质走向了一个韦伯式概念,其理论本身在很大程度上也是韦伯命题的理论映照。这一韦伯式的"法律信任"概念,无论是在理论上还是在现实上都面临着巨大的困难,这种双重困难指向同一问题:"法律信任"如何可能?由此,立基于韦伯式的形式法律理论之上,不可能产生真正的"法律信任"。"法律信任"概念要想有意义,就必须建立在一种更具实质性的法律理论之上。     

Civil Asset Forfeiture Laws and Equitable Sharing Activity by the Police

Research Summary

For several decades, critics have argued that civil forfeiture laws create incentives for law enforcement to increase departmental revenue by “policing for profit.” By using data on federal equitable sharing payments to nearly 600 local law enforcement agencies between 2000 and 2012, we examine the relationship between the characteristics of state forfeiture laws and equitable sharing payments to local agencies. Our results indicate that agencies in states with state laws that are more restrictive or less rewarding to police collect more in federal equitable sharing. This finding supports the critics’ argument that police behavior in regard to forfeiture activities is influenced by the financial rewards and burdens involved.

Policy Implications

Our results reveal that the findings of investigative journalism and case study research, that is, that police forfeiture activities are influenced by financial rewards, may be more generalizable to law enforcement than previously thought. Despite recent state‐level reforms, federal equitable sharing and most state forfeiture laws provide limited due process protections and have minimal accountability or reporting requirements. Concerns about the impact of civil forfeiture practices on perceptions of procedural justice and police legitimacy are discussed, and possible policy reforms are reviewed.     

乡村基层执法的空间制约与机制再造

中国的基层执法深受政治体制和社会生态的影响和塑造,“治理空间”可以同时容纳这两种因素,是理解中国基层执法的新视角。乡村治理空间为基层执法提供具体场景,其“拥挤社会”特性和“权力分散”特性,严重制约着基层执法能力。空间区域化机制通过建立综合治理(执法)体系,实现了执法机构的统合和区域化;通过将村级组织、村干部、网格员等纳入执法体系,实现了执法空间的分界和局部化;通过对时间和资源进行情境化配置,实现了时空分区。区域化机制重构着乡村治理空间,回应了基层执法权薄弱和执法能力不足的问题,通过再造基层执法,提高了基层执法效度。     

“法律人”建构论纲

立足于法学学科基点的设定,必须提炼“法律人”的人学模式。所谓法律人,即参与法律生活的普通民众,他们依存于法律、参与法律及受制于法律。法学体系、法律基础、法律分析及法律发展方面的需要,为法律人模式的构建奠定了坚实基础,而人类行为的常态、法律制度中人的观念的引入及法学流派有关人的模式的竞争,使法律人模式的构建得以可能。至于法律人的具体特性,论文以“拟制人”、“一般人”、“正常人”、“复合人”进行了概括。     

The “thinning” blueline: a Bourdieuian appreciation of police subculture

The notion of a recalcitrant “police subculture” is pervasive in the literature on policing, often invoked to explain many of the ills linked to police misconduct and corruption. This article argues that the failure of reform efforts is the result of interventionist strategies which had sought to change police subculture “head-on” without a corresponding change in the structural conditions in which the policing role is so located, and that these efforts, theoretically, have been informed by a conceptualisation of police subculture as homogenous, monolithic, and static. Using the Bourdieuian concepts of the “habitus” and “field”, the view of a “recalcitrant” subculture will be challenged in this article. Using the Singaporean experience as a case in point, it will be shown how changes in the field of policing can bring about changes, intended or otherwise, in the occupational habitus of the police: refashioning the informal repository of knowledge guiding police work.