The extent to which demographic characteristics determine international drug couriers’ profiles: a cross-sectional study in Istanbul

Transnational crime syndicates (TCS) have increasingly been deploying couriers to transport narcotics. TCSs develop innovative strategies and constantly recruit couriers that demonstrate fewest risk indicators. As a counterstrategy, drug-enforcement agencies launch courier-profiling programs and identify the emerging risk factors. Demographic factors and ethnic origins are often cited by the international literature as noteworthy risk factors in drug-enforcement agencies?? courier-identification schemes. This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate whether demographic characteristics and ethnic origins play any significant role for courier recruitment in Turkey. The population of this study consisted of international drug couriers who were detained between 2006 and the first 6?months of 2010 and charged with drug offenses (importing/exporting drugs) in Istanbul/Turkey. The data was collected through content analysis of criminal case files. This research revealed that several demographic factors and nationalities have a significant relationship with courier recruitment.     

The Characteristics of Relapsed Drug Users in Contemporary Urban China

The present study is aimed at exploring the characteristics of Chinese relapsed drug users associated with their treatment experience in police mandatory treatment centers. The exploration is based on a comparison of Chinese drug users who received the police mandatory treatment for multiple times (the “relapse” group) with those who had the treatment for the first time (the “first-time” group). The comparative analysis is conducted using data collected from a 2009 survey of 177 drug users in several police mandatory treatment centers in a large city of China. The data indicate that both the “relapse” and the “first-time” groups have similar demographic characteristics except age. However, respondents in the “relapse” group were more likely to be heroin users, have a high level of drug dependence, have prior treatment, experience a high level of mental disorder, and have drug-use friends than those in the “first-time” group. The findings imply that relapse among Chinese drug users are likely to have multiple factors which is comparable to that discovered in Western research.     

Female drug abusers, narcotics offenders, and legal punishment in China

Drug abuse and narcotics offenses have been surging since the economic reforms in China. Accompanied is the dramatic increase of female involvement in the use of drugs and narcotics offenses. As a response, laws and governmental decrees have been promulgated and modified to curb these emerging and changing crimes and social problems. Courts at all levels in China also devoted more resources in handling and processing these particular criminals and crimes. Whether and how these legal initiatives have been translated into punishment that treats male and female offenders equally who committed similar offenses remains questionable. Citing published criminal court judgment documents, this study addressed this issue empirically and offered some plausible theoretical explanations for the treatment of female drug users and narcotics offenders by criminal courts in China.     

Tackling Drugs Together: The Possibilities for a Confidential Drug Service

This article explores the exchange of personal information between agencies working with drug users and the 'problems' created by confidentiality. Confidentiality may be conceptualised as a form of information privacy, which in turn derives from a wider idea of privacy. The authors take as a case study the 'Wintercomfort Case', concerning a day centre for drug users in Cambridge. The focus is to look at the legal and practice implications of the case, and to examine in particular the tensions that exist between welfare and justice agencies who may have access to the same information, but who may also have different agendas and objectives in taking action.     

Data retention

Use of our mobile communication devices tells a good deal about us. It is often the case that what number calls what number, at what times and frequencies and, in the case of mobile phones from and to what geographical locations can be as revealing to law enforcement and national security agencies as the actual contents of messages. Inevitably, though, this may involve the processing of data concerning millions of people who have no inclination to engage in unlawful conduct. Establishment of a legal regime for data retention that balances the claims of law enforcement agencies to prevent and detect criminal and terrorist activities has proved to be a difficult task. A number of legal challenges have been brought before the British and European Courts and this note seeks to consider and place in context the recent litigation involving the legality of the United Kingdom's Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (Watson and Others v. Secretary of State [2018] EWCA Civ 70).     

Using Booking Data to Model Drug User Arrest Rates: A Preliminary to Estimating the Prevalence of Chronic Drug Use

Public policy is often concerned with the size and characteristics of special populations that are difficult to reach in household surveys. Chronic drug users, who often live outside conventional households, provide the illustration motivating this paper. An alternative to household surveys is to question chronic drug users where they congregate—jails, treatment programs, and shelters, for example. Using such opportunistic data for prevalence estimation raises difficult problems for statistical inference: Study subjects who arrive at the collection points cannot be deemed a random sample of the general population. However, if we could estimate the rates at which chronic drug users arrive at the collection points, then we could use those estimates to weight the sample to represent the population. This paper presents a modified Poisson mixture model used to estimate the stochastic process that accounts for how chronic drug users get arrested. It uses that model to estimate arrest rates for 38 counties using up to sixteen quarters of data from the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring survey.

吸食新型毒品的特点及其防控对策

新型毒品被专家称为“21世纪毒品”,在我国蔓延迅速,大有取代传统毒品海洛因成为吸毒者最主要消费品之势,已构成对我国禁毒的新威胁,并已引起党和政府高度重视,必须采取有效的防范和控制手段,减少吸食新型毒品的人数,将禁毒人民战争进一步推向深入。     

Assessing Police Attitudes Toward Drugs and Drug Enforcement

The American War on Drugs has been a long and protracted battle. On the front lines are local, state and federal drug enforcement officers who are tasked with pursuing drug users and dealers. Empirically, officers’ attitudes about the laws they uphold have been shown to impact how aggressively they enforce those laws and the discretion they employ. Although there is a well established body of literature which documents the importance of discretionary dynamics in many areas of law enforcement, we know almost nothing about narcotics officers’ attitudes toward drugs and drug enforcement. Hence, we are unaware of extremely important variables that almost certainly impact and influence front line drug officers. This study fills that gap by examining the survey responses of over 1,000 drug interdiction officers at all levels of law enforcement, measuring their attitudes toward various drugs and the relative harm they incur, along with existing and proposed policies and strategies. The results are discussed in terms of their enforcement and policy implications.     

CRIME AND DRUG-USING BEHAVIOR

The purpose of this article was to examine the ecological perspective as an explanation of criminal and drug-using behavior and to present data from a pilot study on the areal distribution of crime and drugs. We found that individuals engaged in narcotics use, those engaged in criminal behavior, and those engaged in both resided in the same area of the community. Those who used other types of drugs were less likely to reside in the same areas as those engaged in criminal behavior. Thus, we concluded narcotics users and criminals were drawn from the same population and both behaviors may be produced by the same environmental variables, rather than have an individual causal relationship.     

A Race for the Regs: Unified Government,Statutory Deadlines,and Federal Agency Rulemaking

Theory suggests that Congress should delegate more policymaking authority to the bureaucracy under unified government, where lawmakers are less worried about the president orchestrating “bureaucratic drift.” Yet, all unified governments come to an end, making broad delegations potentially advantageous to future lawmaking coalitions (“coalitional drift”). We seek to assess how lawmakers simultaneously limit the risk of each of these pitfalls of delegation. Our answer is rooted in Congress’s ability to spur agency rulemaking activity under unified government. Specifically, we expect statutes passed under unified government to require agencies to issue regulations quickly and for enacting coalitions to use oversight tools to influence agency policy choices. Such “proximate oversight” allows coalitions to cement policy decisions before a new election changes the configuration of preferences within Congress and the executive branch. We assess our argument using unique data on both congressional rulemaking deadlines (1995–2014) and the speed with which agencies issue regulations (1997–2014).     

Trends and pattern of drug abuse deaths in Maryland teenagers

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland recorded a total of 149 drug abuse deaths of teenagers aged 13-19 years between 1991 and 2006. Of these deaths, 96 (64.4%) were caused by the use of narcotic drugs only, 29 (19.5%) by both narcotics and cocaine, four (2.7%) by both narcotics and methylenedioxymethamphetamine, six (4.0%) by cocaine only, and 14 (9.4%) by volatile substances (e.g., butane, Freon, nitrous oxide, and propane). The annual death rate from drug abuse for teenagers increased from 1.4 deaths per 100,000 population in 1991 to 2.7 deaths per 100,000 population in 2006 (chi-square test for time trend, p<0.01). The increase in teenager drug abuse deaths occurred in 1999 and since has remained at a higher rate. Further analysis revealed that the increase in drug abuse deaths was attributable to a large degree to narcotic drugs, particularly heroin/morphine and methadone, and was confined to teenagers residing in the suburban and rural areas.     

Bruise dating using deep learning

The bruise dating can have important medicolegal implications in family violence and violence against women cases. However, studies show that the medical specialist has 50% accuracy in classifying a bruise by age, mainly due to the variability of the images and the color of the bruise. This research proposes a model, based on deep convolutional neural networks, for bruise dating using only images, by age ranges, ranging from 0–2 days to 17–30 days, and images of healthy skin. A 2140 experimental bruise photograph dataset was constructed, for which a data capture protocol and a preprocessing procedure are proposed. Similarly, 20 classification models were trained with the Inception V3, Resnet50, MobileNet, and MnasNet architectures, where combinations of learning transfer, cross‐validation, and data augmentation were used. Numerical experiments show that classification models based on MnasNet have better results, reaching 97.00% precision and sensitivity, and 99.50% specificity, exceeding 40% precision reported in the literature. Also, it was observed that the precision of the model decreases with the age of the bruise.     

The criminality of female narcotics addicts: A causal modeling approach

A longitudinal model was developed relating early deviance, narcotics use, and three types of income-generating crime (property crime, drug dealing, and prostitution) among female narcotics addicts during the first 2 years of the addiction career. The model was tested by a confirmatory structural equation analysis. Early deviance predicted subsequent property crime involvement. Stability across time was demonstrated for narcotics use, property crime, and drug dealing. Strong contemporaneous relationships among these constructs were found. These findings partially replicate patterns found in previous studies for male addicts. In contrast to male addicts, a positive, instead of negative, contemporaneous relationship was found between property crime and drug dealing activities. Between constructs, cross-lag effects were generally small and only that between property crime and later narcotics use was significant. Finally, prostitution was failed to be incorporated in the model. Further research is needed to elucidate the diverse economic support systems among women which may affect the drug-crime relationship.     

数据安全认证:个人信息保护的第三方规制

契合"放管服"改革理念的数据安全认证,在数字时代整个规制法体系中必将占据日益重要的地位。数据安全认证通过声誉评价机制,可以引导、激励互联网企业守法合规经营,可以增强用户对中小微互联网企业和新兴数字产业的信任感,可以避免"一刀切"的政府规制,可以满足社会公众多元的数据安全需求。数据安全认证机构应具有高度的独立性与专业性,防止其被互联网企业"俘获"或成为政府的"附庸"。宜实行自愿为主、强制为辅的数据安全认证模式。认证程序应强调公正透明性,认证标准应注重评价企业数据合规的制度建设。根据过错责任原则,分别设置数据安全认证机构"相应的赔偿责任"或"连带责任",并加大对数据安全认证违法行为的公法责任追究。科学构建法治化的数据安全认证体制机制,不仅是保障数据安全的现实需要,而且是弥补数字时代政府规制缺陷的迫切需求。     

Using National Incident-Based Reporting System Data for Strategic Crime Analysis

The utility of the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) forstrategic crime analysis has yet to be explored. The NIBRS represents anadvancement over existing reporting systems and possesses considerableutility to frontline law enforcement with respect to strategic crimeanalysis. This paper discusses the utility of the NIBRS for identifyinglocal and regional trends in narcotics related offenses. As an example, weselected four localities from the 1997 Virginia NIBRS data to examine trendsin the sale/distribution and possession of narcotics. Our analysis showsthat the NIBRS provides significantly more incident-related detail than hasheretofore been available for strategic crime analysis at the regional orstate level. Moreover, the NIBRS provides neighboring communities theopportunity to compare information on emerging crime patterns and criminalenterprises which extend beyond local boundaries. Finally, enhancing localreporting compliance by highlighting the strategic utility of the data tolocal law enforcement will ultimately ensure the quality of the data set,which can then be employed by larger entities as well as criminal justiceresearchers for policy development and planning.     

Hypothermia-related Deaths: A 10-year Retrospective Study of Two Major Metropolitan Cities in the United States*

Hypothermia-related deaths affect vulnerable populations and are preventable. They account for the vast majority of weather-related deaths in the United States. The postmortem diagnosis of hypothermia can be challenging, as there are no pathognomonic signs. The electronic databases of the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner and Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences were searched for all fatalities where the primary cause of death included hypothermia, between January 2009 and July 2019. There were 139 hypothermia deaths in New York City (NYC) with an average annualized rate of 1.7 per million. During this same time, there were 50 hypothermia deaths in Houston with an average annualized rate of 2.4 per million. Males were more likely to die of hypothermia compared to females in both cities. The rate ratio (RR) in NYC was 3.55 (95% CI 2.40, 5.25), while the RR in Houston was 2.83 (95% CI 1.50, 5.32). Age- and sex-specific standardized hypothermia mortality rates were 18.2 (95% CI 15.1, 21.2) per million in NYC and 30.1 (95% CI 21.7, 38.6) per million in Houston. The comparative hypothermia death ratio was 1.66 (95% CI 1.19, 2.30), indicating hypothermia mortality in Houston was 66% higher than in NYC. There was no correlation between zip code poverty rates and hypothermia-related deaths. The most consistent autopsy finding was Wischnewski spots (56.6%), and ethanol was the most common toxicological finding (36.5%). Local agencies can use this data to target these higher-risk populations and offer appropriate interventions to try to prevent these deaths.     

NIBRS Data Available for Secondary Analysis

The NIBRS data program currently being implemented by the FBI and local lawenforcement agencies has by now produced sufficient data for archiving anddistribution. Although not representative of crime in the United States, existing NIBRS data can be used to investigate the nature of crimesknown to the police compared to the traditional UCR data. The Bureau ofJustice Statistics has requested the National Archive of Criminal JusticeData to store and make NIBRS data available to interested users. The datafrom 1996 will shortly be available from the NACJD web site. The 1996 datacontain almost 6.5 million records and the FBI's full file includes about 361 Mbytes of data. The data have been disaggregated from the FBI's complex single file into 11 segment levels or record types. This makes theindividual record types easier and faster to analyze than using the fullfile, which more closely resembles a relational database than a hierarchicalfile. However, splitting apart the record types requires that specialprocedures be used to merge files of different record types, which would benecessary if a user were interested in analyzing variables appearing in morethan one record type (e.g., comparing offender and victim ages). These procedures are described, and a test comparing the time to run a simple frequencycount using the full file against the merged files shows that using themerged files is considerably more efficient. Also discussed are some futuredevelopments to facilitate the analysis of NIBRS data.     

Drug abuse in Denmark (Jutland and Funen). A forensic study based upon drugs seized in 1982-1987

Two thousand fifty-three samples submitted to forensic chemical analysis during the period 1982-1987 were characterized according to their content of narcotics and the year of seizure. Heroin and cannabis dominated the material, but a significant decrease in the number of heroin samples was observed in 1987. Amphetamine, on the contrary, hardly seen during the period 1982-1984, accounted for half of the narcotics submitted in 1987. The misuse of morphine, especially in the form of poppy capsules, was a problem for some years, whereas cocaine has not yet been a drug of abuse in Denmark. The mean concentrations of the heroin and the amphetamine samples were 30% and 44%, respectively, both for retail drugs and the entire material.     

Integrated Administrative Data &amp; Criminal Justice Research

Using integrated administrative data from criminal justice and social service systems can harness information in meaningful ways that transcend traditional “silos” and allow communities to focus collective attention on important social issues that cross systemic boundaries. Despite recent advances in use of integrated administrative data, practical information to promote adoption by new users is lacking. Here we provide an introduction to potential uses of integrated administrative data for criminal justice researchers, including general benefits of using integrated data as well as implications for innovative research design. We describe a case example of data integration through a state data warehouse for a federally funded project on impact of incarceration on families. The project utilizes data from eight agencies (corrections, juvenile justice, mental health, substance use, social services, health, education, and environmental control) and includes development of an Online Analytical Processing cube. We draw from lessons learned to provide specific recommendations for developing researcher-practitioner partnerships that use integrated administrative data to improve translational criminal justice research and evidence-based practice and policy.     

WOMEN IN THE STREET-LEVEL DRUG ECONOMY: CONTINUITY OR CHANGE?*

Images of women in the contemporary drug economy are highly mixed. Most scholars emphasize change in women's roles, some emphasize continuity, and others suggest that both change and continuity are evident. At issue is whether an increased share of women were involved in selling and higher-level distribution roles in the crack cocaine markets of the late 1980s and early 1990s, compared to the heroin markets of the 1960s and 1970s. We present the results of an ethnographic study of women drug users conducted during 1989–92 in a New York City neighborhood. Contrary to those who suggest that crack cocaine markets have provided “new opportunities” for women, we find that such opportunities were realized by men. At the same time, the conditions of street-level sex work, which has traditionally provided women drug users with a relatively stable source of income, have deteriorated.