Citizen police academies: Community policing or community politics?

Citizen police academies (CPAs) have become common in the United States. These programs have a great deal of potential to enhance community-policing efforts in two ways. First, they provide a setting where citizens can learn more about the operations of their local law enforcement agencies. Second, they allow participants to enter into an open and ongoing dialogue with agency representatives. This paper reports findings from a national survey of CPA coordinators. It questions the current status of CPAs as an element of community policing, as opposed to public or political relations. A draft of this paper was presented at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Toronto, Ontario. Data collection for this project was supported by a Florida State University Dissertation Research Grant.     

Homicide by asphyxia--yes or no? On the use of muscle histology

In two cases of death autopsy revealed large hemorrhages in the muscles of the neck, which lead to the conclusion of a murder by strangulation, e.g. with a soft tool. Histologic examination of the injured muscles didn't show any sign of vital reaction, which means, that they had developed post mortem. There was no reason for further suspicion of a violent crime. Later it became obvious, that neck lesions resulted from inadequate recovery and transport of the corpses. "Vital" type of muscular alteration is characterized by segmental or disk-like fragmentation of muscle fibres, loss of sarcoplasmatic cross-striation and appearance of pathologic longitudinal fibrillar structures. These signs are missing in case of a postmortal injury, whereas the cross striation is intact. The slides should be stained with PTAH. With these two cases we would like to demonstrate the importance of histologic examination of injured muscles, when question for intravital or postmortal injury rises.     

Arsenic poisoning: acute or chronic? Suicide or murder?

The case of the death by arsenic poisoning of a 62-year-old white man is presented. One year prior to death, he developed intermittent bouts of severe gastroenteritis with vomiting and diarrhea, hyperpigmentation and keratosis of the skin, neutropenia, and Guillain-Barré-like neuropathy for which he was hospitalized several times. Urine test results 6 months prior to death indicating 36 mg/L arsenic were believed to be in error. At the patient's last admission, he appeared in the emergency room with severe gastroenteritis, hypotension, and dehydration. He died 3 days later. Antemortem as well as autopsy specimens revealed elevated arsenic concentrations. Arsenic micrograms/g analysis by neutron activation of hair pulled from the man's head revealed by centimeter segmental analysis proximal to distal: 226, 104, 28, 56, 41, 40, and 74. The wife of the decedent was charged with murder by arsenic poisoning of this, her fifth, husband. The defense alleged that the decedent had committed suicide. The judge awarded a directed verdict of "not guilty." Particulars of the medical, toxicological, and investigative findings are presented.     

Rural Identity in the Twenty‐first Century: A Community of Crofters or Crofting Communities?

Crofting has been subjected to a specific regulatory regime in Scots law since the introduction of the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act in 1886. The Act, introduced in response to the devastation caused by the Highland clearances, provided for security of tenure and associated rights and now provides for full ownership on both individual and collective bases. Consequently, the legal framework incorporates two distinct forms of crofting identity: one based on the crofting function and the other on a broader, place‐based definition incorporating all who live within crofting communities. Used as a basis for policymaking, each definition gives rise to different outcomes. In this paper, we use empirical research to show how such distinctions are manifested in specific conflicts of interest within contemporary crofting communities. This analysis is intended to inform the current debate surrounding the future of crofting as well as to contribute to the wider literature on the use of identity in the process of resource allocation.     

Assessing Jail Inmates' Proneness to Shame and Guilt: Feeling Bad About the Behavior or the Self?

This study of 550 jail inmates (379 male and 171 female) held on felony charges examines the reliability and validity of the Test of Self Conscious Affect -Socially Deviant Version (TOSCA-SD; Hanson & Tangney, 1996) as a measure of offenders' proneness to shame and proneness to guilt. Discriminant validity (e.g., vis-à-vis self-esteem, negative affect, social desirability/impression management) and convergent validity (e.g., vis-à-vis correlations with empathy, externalization of blame, anger, psychological symptoms, and substance use problems) was supported, paralleling results from community samples. Further, proneness to shame and guilt were differentially related to widely used risk measures from the field of criminal justice (e.g., criminal history, psychopathy, violence risk, antisocial personality). Guilt-proneness appears to be a protective factor, whereas there was no evidence that shame-proneness serves an inhibitory function. Subsequent analyses indicate these findings generalize quite well across gender and race. Implications for intervention and sentencing practices are discussed.     

Community Crime Prevention and the ‘Partnership Approach’: A Safe Community for Everyone?

If creating a safer community is merely reduced to controlling and disciplining the most vulnerable groups, their opportunities for participation and emancipation are blocked. Installing such a crime prevention model leads to the further exclusion of these groups. Starting from research that focuses on the interagency relationships within community crime prevention, this article offers a model of creating some possibilities to create a safer community on the one hand and that holds back the dynamics of social exclusion on the other. It focuses on the relations between (community oriented) welfare agencies on the one hand and police agencies on the other hand. Starting from the empirical data, two polarising models are put forward in order to analyse the evaluate this co-operation: a consensus model and a conflict model. Referring to a normative framework, it will be argued that a conflict model has to be preferred in order to develop a socially just crime prevention model.     

The European Community and the Member States in the Dispute Settlement Understanding of the WTO: United or Divided?

Opinion 1/94 of the European Court of Justice determined the competence of the European Community and the Member States to conclude and implement WTO Agreements. Whilst the European Community enjoys exclusive competence to implement the Multilateral Agreements on Trade in Goods, it shares joint competence with the Member States in respect of the General Agreement on Trade in Services and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. However, the Court’s recognition of a division of competences between the Community and the Member States in WTO agreements has given rise to many fears that such a division would greatly complicate Community and Member State participation in WTO Agreements, would create many problems for them in doing so and, as a result, would greatly impede their successful participation in the WTO. Given the benefit of a number of years’ experience in the WTO, this paper focuses on the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) of the WTO and addresses the extent to which the division of competences between the Community and the Member States has affected their participation in the DSU. Primarily, it aims to examine the extent to which the provisions of the DSU affect Community and Member State participation in dispute settlement within the WTO. It then analyses the duty of co-operation imposed on the Community and on Member States by the Court of Justice in Opinion 1/94 in the implementation of the WTO Agreements and the degree to which this duty influences their pursuit of dispute settlement. Finally, the paper examines the manner in which Community and Member State dispute settlement proceedings have evolved in practice, the extent to which the division of powers has penetrated dispute settlement proceedings and the manner in which the Community, the Member States and other WTO members have addressed it. In essence, the paper attempts both to highlight some of the more obvious consequences and effects that the internal division of powers between the Community and the Member States has for their participation in the DSU and to suggest some ways in which these consequences may be manipulated for their mutual and successful settlement of disputes.     

Employers: passive purchasers or provocateurs?

This article addresses the potential role of business leadership in diverse efforts to reform health care financing: exploring managers efforts to alter health care markets in their role as large purchasers of health insurance, their potential contributions to future national policy proposals, and their involvement with community-level activities to control local health costs and quality. I argue that managers' leadership in market restructuring and community health initiatives will be difficult to reproduce in the realm of major national health policy initiatives due to constraints related to ideas, interests, and organization.     

Air guns: toys or weapons?

Air guns and blank guns may appear relatively harmless at first glance, but they are, in fact, potentially destructive, even lethal, weapons. Approximately 2 to 2.5 million nonpowder firearms are sold annually, and again approximately 12.9 per 100,000 population are treated for such injuries in hospital emergency departments each year in the United States. Unfortunately, these guns are considered to be a toy for children. Therefore, incidents of air gun injuries are gradually increasing. Although such injuries may initially be considered trivial, it may signify severe internal tissue pathologies. These apparently trivial injuries may have catastrophic consequences if unnoticed. In this study, we report 4 cases with head injury due to a shot by these guns. The cases indicate that these people had used the guns belonging to their parents for the purpose of suicide. The cases also show that these machines are not innocent.