Changing Control of the Open Drug Scenes in Oslo— Crime,Welfare, Immigration Control,or a Combination?

Over the last few years there has been a societal move away from a perception of drug users as criminals to a perception of the users as sick. Contrary to what one may expect from such a change, reported drug crimes against the penal code are at record-high levels. It is the contradictory inherent in these tendencies that will be emphasized and highlighted in this article. The open drug scenes in Oslo and the police control of the scenes have changed. During the last few years there has been a growing element of foreign citizens in the drug scenes, and the police control has focused on the foreigners. Could part of the explanation of the contradictions be that there is a differentiation of how the different users are handled? Are there different forms of social control employed toward Norwegian and foreign actors in the open drug scenes? This article puts forward arguments that this is actually the case, driven by a consistent association of foreign actors in the drug scene with organized crime, and a stricter Norwegian legislation and approach to immigration questions, with a tendency toward a conflation of immigration and criminal law.     

Living Conditions,Social Exclusion and Recidivism Among Prison Inmates

Swedish drug policy has according to official declarations been successful. The picture has recently been challenged through rising drug use and rising drug related mortality. This development has taken place in spite of the restrictive Swedish policy with further penalization of drug consumption, increasing number of police officers working with drug crime and rising number of persons sentenced to prison for drug offences. The question to be explored here is then what strategies the Swedish Government has chosen in the light of the development and how these strategies should be explained. The analysis is based on central Government documents as well as statements from Government ministers, public authorities and voluntary organizations. The picture that emerges is a denial of the failure of the old Swedish model but at the same time an alarmist stand with demands for increases of resources for information, treatment and control. The strategies chosen can be derived from two central themes in Swedish drug debate: ‘a drug‐free society’ and ‘total rehabilitation’. The two in turn seem to be aspects of an underlying vision—the vision of the good and integrative welfare society.     

Use of footwear impressions in crime scene investigations assisted by computerised footwear collection system

Crime scene footwear classification systems can be utilized to look for possible suspects, to get models and brand names for crime scene impressions and to link crime scenes. In this work a computerised footwear classification system is presented. The classification coding of the system has been designed especially for partial footwear impressions which are the most typical in crime scenes. The system is flexible because it is possible to agree within a crime scene investigation unit the way in which the system is to be applied. If outsole patterns are classified accurately in processing for the database, time will be saved in the search process and vice versa. The accurate classification coding is propounded by the fact that only a few experienced users are needed to perform the classification and data storage and all police officers returning from crime scenes are able to perform searches very easily. The users only have to follow the defined rules for geometric shapes. The crime scene investigation unit of the Turku police tested the system for a period of 1.5 years. The system has proved to be of valuable assistance in investigation when several of the hints lead to early solving of a crime. Practical experiences are described.     

Digital evidence and the crime scene

Many criminal investigations maintain an element of digital evidence, where it is the role of the first responder in many cases to both identify its presence at any crime scene, and assess its worth. Whilst in some instances the existence and role of a digital device at-scene may be obvious, in others, the first responder will be required to evaluate whether any ‘digital opportunities’ exist which could support their inquiry, and if so, where these are. This work discusses the potential presence of digital evidence at crime scenes, approaches to identifying it and the contexts in which it may exist, focusing on the investigative opportunities that devices may offer. The concept of digital devices acting as ‘digital witnesses’ is proposed, followed by an examination of potential ‘digital crime scene’ scenarios and strategies for processing them.     

Modelling public confidence of the police: how perceptions of the police differ between neighborhoods in a city

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a survey evaluating the views of 1322 residents of York, UK around their perceptions and attitudes towards crime, their local area, and the police with the aim of understanding the main factors affecting public confidence within the city. The study uses Structural Equation Modelling to develop several models which are evaluated to examine whether differences in public confidence in the police exist across disparate local communities with varying degrees of neighbourhood perceptions. The results indicate that even in a relatively small city such as York, the factors which most affect an individual’s views of the police can vary wildly depending on an individual’s perceptions regarding their local area. The results suggest that policing strategies aimed at improving public confidence must be altered depending on the views residents hold regarding their local communities.     

Social capital in Scottish and Danish neighbourhoods: paradoxes of a police–community nexus at the front line

Community-oriented social capital strategies and punitive-oriented policing approaches conflict. Establishing local networking initiatives with community-oriented policing at the centre lends itself to an assets-based policing approach, based on honouring, mobilizing and extending the assets of community members. Scholars argue about the need for comparative research on convergences and divergencies across subcultures on the streets and communities. Based on qualitative data gathered from working class communities in Scotland and Denmark in 2014, the article draws inspiration from community-generated theory of social capital to explore the micro-sociology of experiences and understandings about community–police integration policy initiatives. We use this perspective to argue that the building of positive inter-generational and police–community relationships is the result of social exchanges and officers’ use of what we call ‘constructive investment strategies’. Ironically, our insights from Scotland to Denmark also suggest what appear as positive achievements of community policing may instead intensify residents’ negative perceptions of police officers and organizations. In this way, the article illuminates the tangled and conflicted nature of these embedded symbolic interactions, social capital formations and the latter’s form as a potential positional and ‘tribal’ commodity.     

Punitive Restoration and Restorative Justice

Criminal justice policy faces the twin challenges of improving our crime reduction efforts while increasing public confidence. These challenges are exacerbated by the fact that at least some measures popular with the public are counterproductive to greater crime reduction. How to achieve greater crime reduction without sacrificing public confidence? While restorative justice approaches offer a promising alternative to traditional sentencing with the potential to achieve these goals, they suffer from several serious obstacles, not least their relatively limited applicability, flexibility, and public support. Punitive restoration is a new and distinctive idea about restorative justice modeled on an important principle of stakeholding, which states that those who have a stake in penal outcomes should have a say about them. Punitive restoration is restorative insofar as it aims to achieve the restoration of rights infringed or threatened by criminal offences. Punitive restoration is punitive insofar as the available options for this agreement are more punitive than found in most restorative justice approaches, such as the option of some form of hard treatment. Punitive restoration sheds new light on how we may meet the twin challenges of improving our efforts to reduce reoffending without sacrificing public confidence, demonstrating how restorative practices can be embedded deeper within the criminal justice system.     

School Shootings and Security Lock-downs: Myths,Positive School Climates,and Safer Campuses

School shooting tragedies and the juvenile justice system’s movement toward a retributive and punitive framework gravely impacted how primary and secondary school students, disproportionately urban districts, used security measures to lock down campuses and build “fortress-like” schools. This iteration of control on school campuses emerged in tandem with the most recent generation’s zero tolerance approach to student violence and problems; a policy widely regarded as ineffective in urban, suburban, and rural districts. As school shootings continue to impact state legislative action and public reactions to school management, this paper takes a critical approach to school security policies and reviews the evidence on the risk for school violence and how to move away from student control approaches that do not improve school safety. Instead, the incorporation of prosocial education and school engagement efforts finds that school and student safety is improved. These, and related approaches to student body management, decreases campus violence and may also minimize the risk of some school shootings - as rare as these tragic incidents are across the nation’s schools. The interplay of schools, students, and the juvenile and family courts is ongoing. Knowing how school districts can best approach their campus environments, safety, and learning is important for school social workers and court personnel because of how often these systems work, or do not work, together.     

TOWARD A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF POLITICIZED POLICING ATTITUDES: CONFLICTED CONSERVATISM AND SUPPORT FOR POLICE USE OF FORCE

America is in the midst of an extraordinary public debate about police policy. “Conflicted conservatives,” who are symbolically conservative but operationally liberal, may have a disproportionate influence on policy making. Specifically, conflicted conservatives may be more likely to vote across party lines because they attend more to utilitarian concerns about social conditions and government performance than to symbolic issues. Prior criminological research, however, typically has treated conservatives as a homogenous group. We use data from the General Social Survey to explore the extent and correlates of global and situational support for police use of force among conflicted conservatives and other political groups. The findings from logistic regression models estimated with two analytic samples (N = 11,119 and 2,069) indicate that conflicted conservatives’ attitudes about police use of force are distinct from those of “consistent conservatives” who are both symbolically and operationally conservative, but do not reflect a unique consideration of utilitarian concerns over symbolic beliefs. Two other notable findings emerged: 1) Racial attitudes predicted support for police use of excessive force invariably across political groups and 2) public support for excessive force increased substantially during the first decade of the twenty‐first century, sharply contrasting trends in general punitive sentiment.     

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.”     

Drug Globalization: Eventual Legalization of Beer in Iceland and Marihuana Decriminalization in the USA

This article discusses whether different motivations for and perceptions of the police role, either as ‘law and order‐oriented thrill‐seekers’ or as ‘social workers’ lead officers to adopt different approaches towards the public. The first category police rank‐and‐file officers' desire for action and excitement, causing them to perceive policing as a mission, also causes them to have a distorted view of reality whereby they perceive members of the public either as significant adversaries or as insignificant ones. For them, ‘real police work’ means chasing and catching villains, and this delusional picture of what policing is may lead them to enlarge and redefine ‘insignificant criminals’ and thus perceive them as ‘villains’ who merit and justify police targeting. However, as these insignificant criminals—beggars, drug addicts, vagrants, ethnic minority youths, and drunks—are not perceived as actually ‘significant adversaries’, the targeting of and encounters with them also produce fatigue in police officers as these activities fail to comply with many police officers' desire to ‘catch the villain’, and the encounters are repetitive and tedious. Police fatigue and stereotyping may entail cynicism due to the ways in which some groups respond to police targeting, such as accusing the police of racism or threatening them with complaints. It is argued that the first type of police officers to a larger degree will experience fatigue and cynicism than the second type of officers—‘the social workers’—who are motivated by a will to ‘help others’, and who receive more rewarding responses from the public.     

Police Use of Less Lethal Force: Does Administrative Policy Matter?

Scholars have long theorized that constraining police officer discretion via organizational policy improves decision-making. Empirically, prior research shows that more restrictive lethal force policies result in a reduction in the number of police shootings and in racial disparity. Yet, researchers have never examined the impact of less lethal force policies in relation to the full spectrum of less lethal force tactics. In addressing this research void, we examine 3,340 use of force incidents from three US agencies, each varying in terms of policy direction and restrictiveness. The results consistently show that officers working within the most restrictive policy framework used force less readily than officers who operated within more permissive policy environments. Hence, police administrators wishing to reduce coercion should consider the potential effect that a more restrictive policy may have on such behavior.     

Understanding Victim Support as Crime Prevention Work: The Construction of Young Victims and Villains in the Dominant Crime Victim Discourse in Sweden

Starting from the observation that a new victim category has emerged in the form of the ‘young crime victim’, this article explores the notion of support to young crime victims as crime prevention work, considering it as an important constituent of the dominant crime victim discourse among support professionals. In the context of the support work, the (young) ‘victim’ and the (young) ‘villain’ provide mutually necessary counterparts constructed in relation to each other. Corresponding to this division, two approaches in criminal and crime prevention policy and practice are then analysed using Garland's notions of ‘the criminology of the self’ and ‘the criminology of the other’. The first of these strategies is generally associated with rehabilitative measures (with the resulting normalization of the crime, its victims, and villains), while in the second punitive measures remain the norm (with the crime, its victims, and villains becoming ‘Otherized’). Yet, as shown within the context of rehabilitation organized as support to young crime victims, both of these (at first glance mutually contradictory) discourses are drawn upon and operationalized by the professional support staff constructing images of young victims and villains in their daily work. Help-seeking youths resistant to identifying as victims remain represented as (possible future) villains.     

BODY‐WORN CAMERAS AS A POTENTIAL SOURCE OF DEPOLICING: TESTING FOR CAMERA‐INDUCED PASSIVITY

Contentious debate is currently taking place regarding the extent to which public scrutiny of the police post‐Ferguson has led to depolicing or to a decrease in proactive police work. Advocates of the “Ferguson effect” claim the decline in proactive policing increased violent crime and assaults on the police. Although police body‐worn cameras (BWCs) are touted as a police reform that can generate numerous benefits, they also represent a form of internal and public surveillance on the police. The surveillance aspect of BWCs suggests that BWCs may generate depolicing through camera‐induced passivity. We test this question with data from a randomized controlled trial of BWCs in Spokane (WA) by assessing the impact of BWCs on four measures: officer‐initiated calls, arrests, response time, and time on scene. We employ hierarchical linear and cross‐classified models to test for between‐ and within‐group differences in outcomes before and after the randomized BWC rollout. Our results demonstrate no evidence of statistically significant camera‐induced passivity across any of the four outcomes. In fact, self‐initiated calls increased for officers assigned to treatment during the RCT. We discuss the theoretical and policy implications of the findings for the ongoing dialogue in policing.     

Prevention,Crime Control or Cash? Public Preferences Towards Criminal Justice Spending Priorities

We propose and test a new methodology to assess the public’s criminal justice spending priorities. Respondents are asked to trade‐off alternative crime prevention and control policies as well as a potential tax rebate. In a nationally representative sample, we found overwhelming support for increased spending on youth prevention, drug treatment for nonviolent offenders, and police. However, the median respondent would not allocate any new money to building more prisons and would not request a tax rebate if the money were spent on youth prevention, drug treatment, or police. At the margin, we estimate the public would receive $3.07 in perceived value by spending $1.00 on youth prevention; $1.86 in value for every dollar spent on drug treatment; and $1.76 for a dollar spent on police. However, the public would not spend more on prisons, deriving only 71 cents in value for every tax dollar spent.     

American Policing and the Danger Imperative

In spite of long‐term declines in the violent victimization of U.S. police officers, the danger of police work continues to structure police socialization, culture, and behavior. Existing research, though attentive to police behavior and deviance that negatively affects the public, analytically ignores how the danger of policing engenders officer behavior that harms police themselves. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews in three U.S. police departments, this article describes how police are informally and formally socialized into the danger imperative—a cultural frame that emphasizes violence and the need for officer safety—and its effect on officer behavior. As a result of perception mediated through the danger imperative, officers engage in policy‐compliant and policy‐deviant behaviors to protect themselves from violence. Unfortunately, policy‐deviant behaviors such as unauthorized highspeed driving and not wearing a seatbelt, though justified in the name of safety, lead to catastrophic car accidents that injure and kill both police and members of the public. This article concludes with discussion of how seemingly mundane policy deviant behaviors are a reflection of assumptions within police culture that undergird police practices that damage public wellbeing and perpetuate boarder inequalities in U.S. policing.     

Drug Recognition Evaluation and Chemical Confirmation of a 25C‐NBOMe‐Impaired Driver

This case report details an individual arrested for drug‐impaired driving after leaving the scene of multiple motor vehicle collisions and evading police. The driver was examined by a drug recognition expert and failed the drug recognition evaluation. The driver admitted to using cocaine, marijuana, an antidepressant medication and “N‐bomb,” a novel psychoactive substance that possesses hallucinogenic properties. Toxicological analyses at the Centre of Forensic Sciences’ Toronto laboratory revealed only the substance 2‐[4‐chloro‐2,5‐dimethoxyphenyl]‐N‐[(2‐methoxyphenyl)methyl]ethanamine (25C‐NBOMe) in the accused's urine. This is the first report in which 25C‐NBOMe was identified through DRE and toxicological analyses in a drug‐impaired driver.     

Punitive attitudes and causal attribution of crime among Israeli police officers: is there a gender gap?

Policy-makers and researchers have long been interested in the punitive attitudes and causal attribution of crime of police officers. Understanding the punitive attitudes and causal attribution of crime of those who enforce the law is necessary for both theoretical and practical reasons. The current study examines gender differences in punitive attitudes and causal attribution of crime among police officers at the beginning and at the end of their academic studies. One hundred and one police officers (47 policewomen and 54 policemen) participated in this study. The main results indicate that (a) policemen held more punitive attitudes than policewomen, (b) there were significant gender differences in the first year of academic study, with stronger support of classical theories (more punitive) among policemen compared with policewomen, but no gender differences were found in the last year, (c) police officers tended to attribute classical theories (more punitive) to the causes of crime regardless of gender and year of study, and (d) belief in individual positivism (less punitive) was greater among policemen than policewomen, and among the men, it was greater in the last year of studies than in the first year. The implications of these findings are discussed.