Hiring Teams,Firms, and Lawyers: Evidence of the Evolving Relationships in the Corporate Legal Market

How are relationships between corporate clients and law firms evolving? Drawing on interview and survey data from 166 chief legal officers of S&P 500 companies from 2006–2007, we find that—contrary to standard depictions of corporate client‐provider relationships—(1) large companies have relationships with ten to twenty preferred providers; (2) these relationships continue to be enduring; and (3) clients focus not only on law firm platforms and lead partners, but also on teams and departments within preferred providers, allocating work to these subunits at rival firms over time and following “star” lawyers, especially if they move as part of a team. The combination of long‐term relationships and subunit rivalry provides law firms with steady work flows and allows companies to keep cost pressure on firms while preserving relationship‐specific capital, quality assurance, and soft forms of legal capacity insurance. Our findings have implications for law firms, corporate departments, and law schools.     

Consequences of Undercover Operations in Law Enforcement: a Review of Challenges and Best Practices

Undercover (UC) assignments are among the most stressful faced by law enforcement officers. Undercover work features isolation from colleagues and family, the necessity to adopt behaviors and false personal characteristics frequently opposite to the given officer’s beliefs and personality, and negative attention from members of the public and even from fellow officers while in the undercover role. Because of all of these factors, undercover work is frequently associated with problems in mental and physical health, and with difficulties in post-assignment social adjustment with family, community, and department. Undercover work is inherently difficult to research, but as the present review indicates, there is significant overlap between the symptomatology typical of undercover work and of that typical of non-UC police work, normally an area of greater research accessibility. These issues will be addressed below. In addition, this review identifies current best psychological practices in dealing with the undercover officer client; these include reliable, supportive, frequent contact with officer clients, psychoeducation in the areas of coping mechanisms, reframing of undercover work in terms of the overall corpus of the given officer’s career, and mechanisms of reintegration of the undercover officer into the realm of more typical, and frequently more mundane, regular police duties.     

Police officers' perceptual distortions during lethal force situations: Informing the reasonableness standard*

Research Summary In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court held that determinations about the constitutional appropriateness of police force usage—deadly or not—must be “judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” Although the Court's ruling established a clear standard for judging officers' actions (i.e., the perspective of a reasonable police officer on the scene), we know little about the sorts of factors that might frame the perspective of reasonable police officers during situations in which they apply force. This article presents the results of a study that examined 80 police officers' detailed accounts of how they perceived what transpired during 113 incidents in which they shot citizens. Respondents reported experiencing a wide range of sensory distortions, with the vast majority of officers reporting two or more distinct sorts. This study takes these findings as a point of departure to expand our understanding of what constitutes a reasonable officer's perspective during the tense, uncertain moments during which he or she makes the decision to employ deadly force. Policy Implications Given that officers are likely to experience multiple distortions during shootings, the findings have implications for civilian and police oversight policies. In particular, those responsible for reviewing police shooting incidents should take into consideration that officers' behavior will not always be based on the objective reality of what is occurring at the time they decide to pull the trigger, but rather an altered conception of it. Such an understanding is crucial to improving the image of police in certain communities and positively impacting citizen trust of, and satisfaction with, the police.     

Understanding how police officers think about mental/emotional disturbance calls

Police officers frequently respond to calls involving persons with mental illnesses and in doing so, they are key gatekeepers of access to mental health treatment as well as entry into the criminal justice system. Programs such as Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) are being implemented across the United States and elsewhere to train officers to respond more effectively and facilitate access to mental health services when appropriate. These programs would benefit from a thorough understanding of these encounters from the perspective of police officers. We take as a premise that officers develop frames of reference or “schema” for understanding and responding to these encounters that are shaped by socialization, training, and their experience as police officers. In this study, we examine police officer schema of mental/emotional disturbance (M/EDP) calls. Qualitative interviews provided the foundation to develop the Needs on the Street Interview (NOSI) to tap officer schema of four types of M/EDP scenarios. The NOSI was administered to 147 officers in Chicago and Philadelphia. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) was conducted separately for each scenario to examine groups of officers with different schema as well as predictors of schema group. For three of the four scenarios, officers were classified into a two category or schema model, for the fourth (crime reported) a three category model was supported. Schema groups tended to be differentiated by ratings of level of resistance/threat and substance use. Contrary to our expectations, CIT and law enforcement experience did not predict officer schema group. While the CIT model emphasizes de-escalation skills to reduce resistance and the need for officers to use force, CIT and other training programs may want to consider increasing content related to factors such as co-occurring substance use and managing resistance.     

Gender Differences in Officer Attitude and Behavior

Abstract

Historically, research on gender differences in police work has focused on whether women can “hold their own” in the male-dominated profession of policing. This body of research has undergone a shift from examining whether women can do the job, to how women do the job differently. This topic is intertwined with the increased use of community policing and recognition of the importance of officers having strong “people” skills and the ability to work with citizens. This paper focuses on how male and female officers respond to citizens differently in terms of providing comfort. Results from this analysis indicate that neither officer attitude nor behavior is dictated by officer sex. Rather, other important variables interact with sex to explain attitude and behavior. In addition, situational factors are most important in determining officer behavior. Officer attitude about citizens is not related to officers providing comfort to citizens.     

Emotion Regulation in Police Officers Following Distress: Effects of Tenure and Critical Incidents

This study focuses on the functionality of emotion regulation of police officers who have or have not experienced a work-related critical incident. Traumatic events experienced by police officers may have long-lasting and significant consequences, including health concerns, emotional difficulties, impairment in social functioning, and they may have an impact on work performance. The hypotheses outline the expected results to include higher scores for officers who had been involved in one or more critical incidents in emotional well-being concerns and more difficulties with emotion regulation as compared to officers who had not experienced a critical incident. The research design employs written instruments including the General Health Questionnaire-30 to measure general emotional well-being, the Impact of Events Scale to measure the impact of a past traumatic event, and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale to measure current problems with emotion regulation. Participants consist of 76 full-time police officers assigned to patrol in two police agencies. The findings, analyzed through analysis of variance, did not include significant differences between those groups as expected; however, there were unexpected findings. These findings were that although newer officers were less likely to have experienced one or more work-related critical incidents, they measured higher in measures of emotion regulation difficulties and concerns regarding emotional well-being than did the more tenured officers. The social implications of this study include increased officer and agency awareness and increased use of effective intervention. Implications for future study include the need to further explore emotional challenges that may be experienced by new police officers.     

Lessons for parents,teachers, and juvenile probation officers: seven ideal criteria for constructively evaluating discipline

By delineating a basic set of terms, this paper seeks to enhance the appreciation, understanding, and discussion of constructive discipline. Advocating initiative by our nation's juvenile probation officers, the author views this cadre of some 18,000 JPOs as an important catalyst in the never-ending task of delinquency prevention. In an era of growing harshness toward youthful offenders, we must remain cognizant that much of the chronic violence which we justly abhor has roots in prior parental malpractice. Our approach provides a model to place three major role-players — parents, teachers, JPOs — all “on the same page,” to borrow a popular metaphor. We focus on seven criteria for evaluating discipline by each participant, while furnishing a supplementary framework to amplify task awareness. Despite already having excessive caseloads, JPOs are encouraged to serve as outreach agents in a common cause. The tables seek to provide officers a basic set of “handouts” for distribution at panels, workshops, seminars, school visits, and parent conferences. Parents should especially appreciate that the seven criteria give guidelines not only for their disciplinary practices, but also for those of teachers and JPOs     

Empathy and Expertise: Case Workers and Immigration/Asylum Applicants in London

Under recent reforms, the UK government has eroded state funding for civil legal aid. Funding cuts affect asylum and immigration law as produced, practiced, and mediated in the course of interactions between case workers and their clients in legal‐aid‐funded Law Centers in South London. The article explores the contradictory character of one‐on‐one relationships between case workers and clients. Despite pressure to quantify their work in “value for money” terms, the empathy that often motivates case workers drives them to provide exceptional levels of aid to their clients in facing an arbitrary bureaucracy. Such personalized commitment may persuade applicants to accept the decisions of that bureaucracy, thus reinforcing a hegemonic understanding of the power of the law. The article, however, challenges the assumption that, in attempting to shape immigrant/refugees as model—albeit second‐class—citizens, case worker/client interactions necessarily subscribe to the categories and assumptions that underpin UK immigration and asylum law.     

An Improved Version of a Tool Mark Comparison Algorithm

Chumbley et al. (2010) described a statistically based algorithm for comparing pairs of tool marks. They presented empirical evidence that the algorithm produces well‐separated similarity score values for “matching” and “non‐matching” pairs of tool marks. However, the algorithm has two substantial weaknesses. First, it is “uncalibrated” in the sense that error rates can be determined only through empirical investigation. Second, it relies on a randomized test and can lead to different similarity scores when the algorithm is repeatedly applied to the same pair of tool marks. We present an improved version of the procedure, which eliminates the randomized scores and yields more consistent and predictable error rate control. This is accomplished by replacement of a random sampling step from the original algorithm with a deterministic process. We demonstrate the improved algorithm and compare its performance to the original by applying to known “matching” and “non‐matching” pairs of tool marks.     

Contemporary Modes of Probation Officer Supervision: The Triumph of the “Synthetic” Officer?

This article considers the continued relevance of law enforcement and social worker roles to probation officer practice, a central motif in community corrections scholarship. It also considers how these traditional functions are integrated into community-oriented supervision practices, increasingly emphasized in policy circles. Using Latent Class Analysis of data from a national community corrections survey, a four-class typology of probation officers was developed, based on their supervision practices. While classes vary according to the intensity of supervision, particularly in the engagement of third parties (family, community, and the police), there are no classes that correspond either to law enforcers or to social workers. Rather, officer classes are all “synthetic”—combining law enforcement and social work functions together in the same strategy. The analysis identifies a number of predictors of membership in more intensive supervision classes. These relate to ideological orientations, caseload characteristics, officer demographics, and agency progressiveness.     

Job burnout among narcotics investigators: An exploratory study

In exploring the relationship between narcotics investigators and job burnout in the United States, a sample of 115 East San Francisco Bay police officers from five law enforcement departments was drawn. Three subgroups (current narcotics investigators, former narcotics investigators, and patrol officers) were used in the survey. The findings indicate that current narcotics investigators had significantly higher burnout scores than the comparison groups on most dimensions of burnout. Both former narcotics officers and patrol officers had similar burnout scores. Conclusions reached were that: (1) narcotics officers experienced a greater degree of job burnout while in the assignment; (2) this burnout was directly attributed to the working environments of the narcotics officers; and (3) burnout decreased once an officer left the assignment. Administrative and managerial implications for dealing with job burnout are discussed along with suggested techniques for dealing with, and minimizing, job burnout among narcotics officers. Future research issues are identified.     

Perceptions of self-legitimacy and audience legitimacy among prison officers in Ghana

Criminological research on legitimacy has focused almost exclusively on citizens’ normative assessment of legal authorities. However, this line of research neglects power-holders’ own assessment of their legitimacy or self-confidence in their moral validity of their claims to power. This paper examines the conditions on which prison officers as power-holders base their legitimacy claims. Data from semi-structured interviews and observation of prison officers in Ghana shows that prison officers in Ghana exude high power-holder legitimacy underpinned by favourable assessment of their “self-” and “perceived audience” legitimacy in the eyes of prisoners. While officers’ self-legitimacy was underpinned in their legal status (e.g., legality) and the uniforms (e.g., state insignia), perceived legitimacy was anchored in officers’ maintenance of authority via self-discipline, good and close officer–prisoner relationships, respect for prisoners as humans, and professional competence or making a difference in the lives of prisoners.     

Prison Visitation and Recidivism

Scholars and policymakers have called for greater attention to understanding the causes of and solutions to improved prisoner reentry outcomes, resulting in renewed attention to a factor—prison visitation—long believed to reduce recidivism. However, despite the theoretical arguments advanced on its behalf and increased calls for evidence-based policy, there remains little credible empirical research on whether a beneficial relationship between visitation and recidivism in fact exists. Against that backdrop, this study employs propensity score matching analyses to examine whether visitation of various types and in varying amounts, or “doses,” is in fact negatively associated with recidivism outcomes among a cohort of released prisoners. The analyses suggest that visitation has a small to modest effect in reducing recidivism of all types, especially property offending, and that the effects may be most pronounced for spouse or significant other visitation. We discuss the implications of the findings for research and policy.     

Service v. Security Focus in Training Assessments

ABSTRACT

As jails have moved to professionalize their staffs the role of the correctional officer has become broader in scope and now encompasses both service and security functions. However, some research suggests that female correctional staff may have more of a “service” orientation than males. In our analysis of one dataset from exclusively women's jail facilities we investigate correctional officer preferences for training (service v. security) to see if they differ by gender. We find that both male and female correctional officers generally rank service type training over security and that they differ little in their overall assessment of initial training provided and usefulness of in-service training. We also find that minority officers may be more likely to value service training than their nonminority counterparts.     

“It's Just Black,White, or Hispanic”: An Observational Study of Racializing Moves in California's Segregated Prison Reception Centers

This article takes as its launching point a 2005 U. S. Supreme Court case, Johnson v. California (543 U.S. 499), which ruled that the California Department of Corrections' unwritten practice of racially segregating inmates in prison reception centers is to be reviewed under the highest level of constitutional review, strict scrutiny. Relying on observational data from two California prison reception centers, this research is grounded in an interactionist perspective and influenced by Smith's work on “institutional ethnography.” I examine how racialization occurs in carceral settings, arguing that officers and inmates collaborate to arrive at a “negotiated settlement” regarding housing decisions. They do so working together (but not always in agreement) to shape how an inmate is categorized in terms of ‘race’/ethnicity and gang/group affiliation, within a framework established by official Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation paperwork and related institutional understandings of housing needs. The findings demonstrate that administrators, officers, and inmates alike have influence over the process by which people are categorized and ‘race’ is produced, even as they derive their power from different sources and are both enabled and constrained by the relationship between them. I conclude that California prisons are, as Wacquant has put it, “the main machine for ‘race making’” (2005:128), and that the fuel for that machine—a series of patterned, negotiated settlements—happens in real time, “on the ground,” and with important consequences for inmates, officers, and administrators.     

The “war on cops,” retaliatory violence,and the murder of George Floyd*

The police murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests in the summer of 2020 and revived claims that public outcry over such high-profile police killings perpetuated a violent “war on cops.” Using data collected by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) on firearm assaults of U.S. police officers, we use Bayesian structural time series (BSTS) modeling to empirically assess if and how patterns of firearm assault on police officers in the United States were influenced by the police murder of George Floyd. Our analysis finds that the murder of George Floyd was associated with a 3-week spike in firearm assaults on police, after which the trend in firearms assaults dropped to levels only slightly above that which were predicted by pre-Floyd data. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and consider their relevance to the contemporary discussion of a “war on cops,” violence, and officer safety.     

Police drinking behavior and organizational deviance: An exploratory approach

Contemporary literature on police officer subculture has focused on correlates of cynicism while ignoring behavioral manifestations within law enforcement organizations. This paper explores the relationships between trouble due to drinking, cynicism, absenteeism, rank and deviation from police officers. Antecedent variables examined by regression analysis are observed to explain forty-eight percent of the total variance in police officer drinking scores and is highly significant. The relationship between a modified version of the Niederhoffer cynicism scale and the trouble due to drinking scale [r=−.22] is in an opposite direction than expected from anomie theory and seems to suggest that drinking behavior is an alternate adaptation to the stresses and strains of policing for older, higher ranking officers.     

The theory of planned behavior and policing: how attitudes about behavior,subjective norms,and perceived behavioral control affect the discretionary enforcement decisions of police officers

This research used qualitative methods to investigate police officer decision-making processes within the context of the theory of planned behavior from the discipline of psychology. Interviews with police officers were conducted to elicit how the constructs of attitudes about enforcement behaviors, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control manifest themselves in a policing context and how they affect the enforcement decisions that police officers ultimately make. The results indicated that officer attitudes about enforcement behaviors impact the decisions officers make with the caution that the impact of these attitudes varies across varying situational contexts. In terms of subjective norms, officers were primarily concerned with supervisor expectations more than the expectations of coworkers or the community in general. Officer decisions are also impacted by perceived limits on their discretion with these perceived limits being largely conditioned by offense seriousness. Theoretical implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.     

Arbitrary Arbitration: Diverting Juveniles Into the Justice System

Abstract Considerable research has examined the effects of diverting juveniles away from the juvenile justice system. These studies have seldom investigated the possibility that diversion may inadvertently “widen the net.” This article assesses the relationship between diversion and net-widening by evaluating a leading Florida-based diversionary program, and this program's capacity to “create a clientele” in order to justify its very existence. The diversionary program under evaluation herein boasts a 98% nonrecidivist rate among its clients, and is touted as a prototype diversionary program for the nation. The current study results, however, indicate that a majority of youths diverted by this program have committed such trivial acts that entrance into any aspect of the juvenile justice system—even under the guise of a diversionary program—seems unwarranted. The results further suggest that among youths who have committed serious juvenile crimes, most are terminated unsuccessfully from this program, and are returned to the justice system for prosecution.