A note on crime and punishment

The models developed here are intended to convince the reader that Tsebelis' results — that increased punishment leaves the equilibrium level of crime unchanged — is an example of what is possible rather than a general result. To recap the argument in words: it is true that raising the penalty on a crime may cause the enforcing agency to divert attention away to other matters, so that theexpected penalty facing the prospective criminal is not as high as it would have been had the agency not adjusted; but it is not generally true that enforcing agencies will choose to lower their probabilities of enforcement just enough to exactly offset the increased penalty, leaving the expected penalty unchanged, hence the equilibrium level of crime unchanged.⁸ this result sounds unusual when stated in words and it is when modelled using the theory of games too.This work was supported by NSF grant SES-9022882.     

Separated Powers in the United States: The Ideology of Agencies,Presidents, and Congress

Government agencies service interest groups, advocate policies, provide advice to elected officials, and create and implement public policy. Scholars have advanced theories to explain the role of agencies in American politics, but efforts to test these theories are hampered by the inability to systematically measure agency preferences. We present a method for measuring agency ideology that yields ideal point estimates of individual bureaucrats and agencies that are directly comparable with those of other political actors. These estimates produce insights into the nature of the bureaucratic state and provide traction on a host of questions about American politics. We discuss what these estimates reveal about the political environment of bureaucracy and their potential for testing theories of political institutions. We demonstrate their utility by testing key propositions from Gailmard and Patty's (2007) influential model of political control and endogenous expertise development.     

Police Performance As Symbolic Politics? Public Recognition and the Value of Awards

Abstract

What constitutes “good” performance in a law enforcement agency, who decides, and how does public recognition of that performance change how an agency performs? This study uses a quasi-experimental design and propensity-score matching model to assess the impact of a law enforcement agency’s status as a finalist for the annual Cisco/International Chiefs of Police Association (IACP) Community Policing Award on performance in future years, as measured by crime clearance rates. It is found that after comparing the treated group (finalist agencies) with the untreated group (non-finalist nearest-neighbor agencies), there is no meaningful difference in crime clearance rates. This unexpected finding establishes that the public recognition of finalist status by the Department of Justice, which promotes finalist agencies as exemplars of best practices in community policing, does not impact the subsequent performance of those agencies. Additionally, the results of the model suggest that the impact of symbolic politics and social construction on the award finalist selection process and the choice by DOJ to promote the practices of those agencies should be explored. Questions are also raised as to the utility of crime clearance rates as a performance measure, and future avenues for research in each area are proposed.     

Leeds on trial: soap opera,performativity and the racialization of sports-related violence

ABSTRACT

Several recent court cases involving the ‘off-field’ activities of professional sportsmen have revealed the ways in which the public performance, media representation and regulation of ‘crime’ is played out in the public imagination. Blackshaw and Crabbe explore how notions of ‘race’ are performatively staged and consumed through the spectacles of celebrity, and discuss the significance of the CCTV evidence used in such cases. In doing so they highlight the ways in which ‘race’ operates discursively to undermine the position of the racialized Other.     

A Capacity for Central Coordination: The Case of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

For the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) the year 1987 can now be seen as pivotal in marking a clear end to a period of transition in coordinating structures in the Australian Public Service (APS) that had lasted roughly 20 years. The abolition in 1987 of the Public Service Board, formerly a powerful coordinating agency, is the most obvious marker of the change. The PSB's departure left the Secretary of PM&C with a role that is now often described as ‘head of the public service’. More broadly, the 1987 changes to the machinery of government both formalised and enabled a sea‐change in PM&C's role. Before 1987 a large policy initiation and development project would usually have been considered as beyond PM&C's scope. Since then, extensive and direct policy development work by PM&C has become common. The continuing debates have been over whether PM&C actually delivers in these roles (an empirical question) and how far it should play them (a normative issue). In this article we itemise the capacity, both continuing and developing, which PM&C has to support policy development. Traditional coordination mechanisms are an important part of this armoury and PM&C has long experience of most of them. However policy initiation and development calls for other tools which PM&C has had to develop over the past few decades. There is scope for conflict between the coordination and initiation/development roles. Understanding how a central agency like PM&C carries out each of them and balances the two can potentially contribute to debates on organisational design. We also address the normative issue: whether the growth of prime ministerial impact is a result of an increase in public service support or a cause of its increase ( Walter and Strangio 2007 ) and whether it should be restrained. We accept that the new developments give prime ministers the capacity to oversee policy arenas where once they could not, but regard this as a consequence as much of demand from above as of ambition within the department.     

Government Communication Effectiveness and Satisfaction with Police Performance: A Large‐Scale Survey Study

For the last two decades, performance management theories and practices have focused on outcome‐oriented management but have paid little attention to the role of public communication. Using multiple large data sets from Kansas City, Missouri, for 2009–14, this research suggests that the perceived effectiveness of public communication has a more substantial impact on public satisfaction with police protection and crime prevention than neighborhood crime rates and broken windows factors and that perceived effectiveness moderates the negative impact of crime rates. After controlling for residents’ demographic characteristics, the authors find that the perceived effectiveness of communication is associated with public satisfaction with the content and quality of the city website and the government television channel. The implications for public safety management and police–citizen relations as well as directions for future research on public communication strategies and public performance management are presented.     

Federal and State Public Forest Administration in the New Millennium: Revisiting Herbert Kaufman's The Forest Ranger

Herbert Kaufman's 1960 investigation of federal forest rangers provided important insights into administrative discretion, agency culture, and natural resource policy making. Subsequent studies of Forest Service administration have documented that agency's change over time, mirroring broad changes in federal public administration. But little is known about state forest administration. This article describes results from a survey of line officers in 48 state forest agencies, as well as state forest statute analysis. Results indicate systematic state–federal differences in legal constraints, citizen interactions, and the forest administrators themselves. Though these differences foster state administrator decision making based on professional expertise, they do not encourage the incorporation of stakeholder views into agency policy making, nor do they yield a bureaucracy that represents a diverse constituency. State forest administrators perceive substantial external challenges to their professional discretion, but it remains to be seen whether state forest agencies will change to more closely resemble their federal counterpart.     

Penal Populism and the Public Thermostat: Crime,Public Punitiveness,and Public Policy

This article makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics—between crime rates, public opinion, and public policy—can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognize and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated into patterns of imprisonment. This contributes to debates over the crime–opinion–policy connection, unpacking the dynamic processes by which these relationships unfold at the aggregate level. This uses the most extensive data set ever assembled on aggregate opinion on crime in Britain to construct a new over‐time measure of punitive attitudes. The analysis first tests the thermostatic responsiveness of punitive attitudes to changes in recorded crime rates as well as self‐reported victimization, and then examines the degree to which changes in mass opinion impact on criminal justice policy.     

Homeowners Associations as Private Governments: What We Know,What We Don’t Know,and Why It Matters

Homeowners associations (HOAs) are private governments that are reshaping urban governance and service delivery in large parts of the United States. Despite the fact that millions of Americans are HOA members, the field of public affairs has paid scant attention to these new governance entities. The essays in this symposium call attention to HOAs’ potential effects on urban services and civic life in the hope of sparking interest among scholars and public managers to include HOAs in our understanding, research, and teaching of contemporary urban governance.     

The Effect of Problem Severity,Managerial and Organizational Capacity,and Agency Structure on Intergovernmental Collaboration: Evidence from Local Emergency Management

Like most public managers nowadays, local emergency managers operate within complex, uncertain environments. Rapid changes in the scope and severity of the issues increase the extent of intergovernmental collaboration necessary to address such challenges. Using a large data set of county emergency management agency directors, variations in intergovernmental collaboration reflect influences from problem severity, managerial capacity, and structural factors. The results demonstrate that public managers who perceive problems as severe, possess specific managerial skills, lead high‐capacity organizations, and operate in less complex agency structures collaborate more often and more effectively across governmental boundaries.     

In search of a governance institution model for Jakarta Metropolitan Area (JMA) under Indonesia's new decentralisation policy: old problems,new challenges

This study explores a possible governance model for Jakarta Metropolitan Area (JMA) under Indonesia's new Decentralisation Policy. At present the management of JMA development is coordinated by Badan Koordinasi Pembangunan Jabodetabekjur (BKSP) —Coordinating Board for JMA Development, but this agency is ineffective and powerless to perform its tasks because of lack of authority and power. The establishment of JMA governance model should take into account the existence of the BKSP which has been politically accepted by all provincial and local governments in the region. Involvement of central government in JMA governance is very important. A mixed model of urban governance is most suitable for the JMA. Thereunder the central government should have authority to plan and develop major physical infrastructure for the whole JMA, while the provincial and local governments retain their respective general administrative functions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evaluating Urban Public Schools: Parents,Teachers, and State Assessments

Among the most contentious questions in public administration is how the performance of public organizations should be evaluated, and nowhere is this issue more salient than in urban public schools. While significant attention has been devoted to studying administrative measures of public organizations, the views of citizens concerning performance have been widely criticized and are not frequently gathered by schools. How these assessments relate to each other is central to many questions in education policy (e.g., choice, equity) and has important implications for democracy, bureaucratic professionalism, and public performance. This debate can be viewed as focusing on the distinction between convergent validity and discriminant validity. Using data from New York City's public school system with a cross‐sectional time‐series approach, parent and teacher evaluations are compared to government records of schools’ characteristics and performance. The findings suggest that parents and teachers are able to conduct intelligent, meaningful evaluations of school quality.     

The FBI,A Hundred‐Year Retrospective

No civilian government agency in the United States has received as much attention from authors as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Much of the early writing consisted of laudatory pieces that parroted the output of the agency’s extensive public relations apparatus. This was followed by a reactive era of critical literature following the Watergate scandal and the death of J. Edgar Hoover. This article surveys the key literature on this controversial agency, including both perspectives and insider memoirs, Hoover biographies, and recent scholarly works.     

当前银行卡违法犯罪的新特点

当前,银行卡违法犯罪对社会的危害越来越严重,犯罪手段呈现多样化趋势,综合起来可归纳为银行卡盗刷、银行卡伪造、银行卡恶意套现三大类。银行卡违法犯罪新特点是:以盗卡号为目的的犯罪手段多样化,不断翻新,防不胜防;采用高科技手段,犯罪手法趋向智能化;借助互联网盗取银行卡资金,并在网上消费或洗钱;利用异地取现,雇佣取现,团伙和网络虚拟团伙作案;利用信用卡大量恶意违规套现。面对新的银行卡违法犯罪活动,持卡人、银行、银监局以及公安机关等部门,都应该从各自的职责范围内防范银行卡诈骗行为,共同营造良好的金融环境。     

Comparing Urban Citizenship,Sanctuary Cities,Local Bureaucratic Membership,and Regularizations

Irregular migrants tend to live in dense urban settings. Cities respond to this phenomenon with a variety of urban immigration and citizenship policies in support of irregular migrants. These urban policies produce a disparity between local inclusion and national exclusion. This article describes and compares such urban policies, namely, urban citizenship, sanctuary cities, local bureaucratic membership, and regularizations. Urban citizenship serves as the normative foundation of these policies because it claims membership for all people who inhabit a city. Regularization programs confer national residency status on irregular migrants. Pro‐immigration actors favor this policy; however, when regularizations are not possible, cities can turn to sanctuary city and local bureaucratic membership policies. It is important for practitioners to comprehend and engage with these types of urban policies since they are likely to travel to cities worldwide.     

Citizen,Customer, Partner: Rethinking the Place of the Public in Public Management

Scholars and practitioners have long debated what role the public should play in public management. When members of the public interact with the administrative side of government, should they be treated as customers, as citizens, or in some other manner? This article takes as its premise that members of the public assume three principal roles relative to public management: as customers, as partners, and as citizens. After placing these roles in the context of the history of public administration, the article draws from recent research to recommend guidelines for how public managers can work effectively with the public in these several capacities.     

Impossible Jobs or Impossible Tasks? Client Volatility and Frontline Policing Practice in Urban Riots

Various public administration jobs are described as “impossible,” meaning that they have an unpopular or illegitimate client base, stakeholders have conflicting values, and leaders and their agency's mission are continually questioned. Although this framework is widely used, it has also become overgeneralized. The authors propose three theoretical extensions to understanding impossible jobs based on findings from a three‐year multimethod study of riot policing. First, a distinction can be drawn between impossible jobs and impossible tasks. Second, the relationship between impossible jobs and street‐level bureaucracy is clarified; the case of riot police shows that some street‐level bureaucrats face impossible tasks. Third, the authors show that the conceptualization of the client base has been overly static—in some situations, the client base fractures, or grows rapidly, and legitimacy can change in real time.     

Crime Story: The role of crime and immigration in the anti-immigration vote

Some scholars have found that mass immigration fuels the success of anti-immigration parties, whereas others have found that it does not. In this paper, we propose a reason for these contradictory results. We advance a set of hypotheses that revolves around a commonly ignored factor, crime. To test these hypotheses, we examine a setting where an anti-immigration party, the LPF, participated in simultaneous elections in all Dutch municipalities, which form a single constituency. According to our results, the impact of immigration rates on the individual vote for the LPF only manifests itself among those voters who are very ‘tough on crime’. In addition, we demonstrate that high local crime rates make an anti-immigration vote more likely, but only among voters who are very ‘tough on immigration’. This suggests that immigration and crime rates do not make all citizens more likely to cast an anti-immigration vote, but only those who perceive a link between the two issues. Thus, if one wishes to reduce anti-immigration leaders’ electoral support, countering their criminalization of immigrants may be a more fruitful strategy than trying to stop immigration – if at all possible.     

Housing Choice Vouchers and Crime in Charlotte,NC

Recent media attention and research have focused on the effect of housing vouchers on crime, with different conclusions. The purpose of this study is to bring further evidence to the voucher–crime debate, using annual data from 2000 to 2009 for Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. We study the relationship between crime counts and housing vouchers with quantile regression models with year and census tract fixed effects. We found that voucher households are associated with increased crime, controlling for past crime levels. Estimates vary, however, with the concentration of vouchers in the neighborhood, with little impact in areas with low concentrations. Estimates also vary with the neighborhood crime level. We extend the literature by examining the effect of different voucher family types, finding no evidence that elderly households or nonelderly households without disabilities and without children are associated with more crime. However, we found a very significant positive association for nonelderly households without disabilities with children. Our results indicate that significant crime reductions could be accomplished by focusing U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, local housing agency, and criminal justice resources on the types of places and voucher families most at risk for crime problems when a family uses a voucher to move into a new neighborhood.     

Where Have All The Workers Gone? Exploring Public Sector Workforce Planning

Governments undertake extensive planning of many services and functions, but tend to neglect planning of public service workforces. Disruptions to public service delivery, such as shortages of nurses and doctors, have rejuvenated interest in workforce planning, but many organisations struggle to do it effectively. This historical study examines the capacity of central personnel agencies to predict workforce risks and support workforce planning, using a study of the Queensland public service. It identifies lack of workforce data as a barrier to effective workforce planning, as a result of factors such as changes in the direction of the central personnel agency, lack of appreciation for the value of comprehensive central workforce data, and limited agency human resource (HR) skills or capacity.