DEADLY FORCE AS A POLICY PROBLEM IN LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT: DO ADMINISTRATIVE PRACTICES MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

This article examines the impact of six administrative practices on the use of deadly force by police officers in American cities with a population greater than 50,000. Generally, departmental policies demonstrate little association with the frequency of shooting incidents per police officer, or in the number of incidents resulting in fatalities or injuries. It does appear that police departments which issue more traditional sidearms tend to experience fewer incidents than departments which issue heavier firearms. This same lack of association between administrative practices and the use of deadly force is discovered when controlling for city population size arid state legal codes. Notwithstanding that some of the relationships are in the expected direction, their lack of statistical significance suggests that the use of deadly force has its antecedents in sources other than the administrative policies of local police departments.     

Selecting trial court administrators an alternative approach

A number of suggestions have been advanced about how trial court administrators should be selected. Few, if any, have been guided by organization and management theory. Two major alternatives offered in the literature are examined and a proposal on how they should ideally be chosen is presented. Empirical research undertaken in the state of Florida served as the major source from which the author drew his examples.     

Exploring Some Analytical Characteristics of Finite Mixture Models

Finite mixture models have become increasingly prevalent in criminology over the past two decades. Yet there is no consensus about the appropriate criterion for model selection with finite mixture specifications. In this paper, we use simulation evidence to examine model selection criteria. Our focus is on mixture models for event count data like those often encountered in criminology. We use two indices to measure model selection performance. First, we examine how often each criterion chooses the correct specification. Then, we investigate how closely the finite mixture models selected by these criteria approximate the true mixing distribution used to simulate the event count data. We consider three sets of simulations. In the first set, the underlying model is itself a three component Poisson-based finite mixture model. In the two other sets of simulations, the underlying distribution of the Poisson rate parameter follows a continuous distribution. The analysis shows that both AIC and BIC perform well under certain sets of circumstances likely to be encountered by criminologists.