Guidelines for police undercover work: New questions about accreditation and the emphasis of procedure over authorization

A survey of the 100 largest police departments in the United States was conducted to document the experience of police undercover operations and the existence of agency guidelines. Eighty-nine agencies responded, revealing that all 89 conduct undercover activities but only 64 have guidelines for such operations. Types of crimes investigated by police undercover operations, reasons for having or not having guidelines, and regional analyses are offered. One finding is that police undercover guidelines emphasize either procedure or authorization in undercover police work. Of the departments that have guidelines, more emphasize procedure (“how to”) than authorization (“when to”). Questions about this dichotomy and the impact of national accreditation standards are raised for future research.     

Community policing,loose coupling,and sensemaking in American police agencies

This study examines the community policing movement in the United States using two concepts from organization theory—loose coupling and sensemaking—to frame the analysis and discussion. In particular, we focus on the degree of coupling between police agencies' general and specific community policing claims. Because community policing may be considered a fairly ambiguous (or broad) reform movement, police agencies must engage in interpretive processes to define, make sense of, and enact it at the local level. While we did not observe these interpretive processes, our analyses enable us to observe the products of these processes.     

Diversity in Policing

Abstract

Police and minority relations have received much interest among public and academic audiences, yet little is known about policing in Latino communities. As Latinos emerge as the largest minority group in the United States, researchers and police agencies are increasingly concerned with the experience of Latinos in the criminal justice system. One strategy for improving police and community relations is to enhance the diversity of law enforcement agencies. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the ethnic composition of law enforcement agencies in major U.S. metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2000. Using data from the U.S. Census and the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, it appears that the growth in the U.S. Latino population has been met with an increase in the percentage of Latinos as sworn full-time police officers. Further, the degree of enhanced diversity varies by the ethnic composition of the community served. Implications of findings for improving relations between police and the Latino community are discussed.     

The impact of license plate recognition technology (LPR) on trust in law enforcement: a survey-experiment

Objectives

We examine the extent to which individuals' knowledge of an advanced police technology (license plate recognition or "LPR") may impact perceptions of police. Technologies with the capacity to track individuals' movements are becoming increasingly common in police practice. Although these technologies may yield positive benefits, their use may also heighten community concerns about increased surveillance, data storage, and data security, thereby potentially negatively impacting community-police relationships.

Methods

We utilize a survey-based experiment with randomized assignment of participants (n=405) to investigate the impact of individuals' knowledge of LPR use on a variety of police perceptions, including trust in police, community approval, respect for citizens, and respect for individual rights.

Results

Most respondents were unaware of LPR use prior to the survey. When compared with a control group, respondents who encountered brief mentions of LPR functions on the survey expressed significantly lower levels of trust in police. Additionally, "strong agreement" with other positive statements about police also appears to have declined in this sample in response to LPR information. Notably, the sample contained high pre-existing levels of trust and support for police, factors which may have moderated the impacts of LPR information.

Conclusions

These results support the hypothesis that awareness of LPR use may negatively impact perceptions of police, including trust in police. More generally, although technologies like LPR represent technological innovations, they may also yield unintended consequences, including the potential to undermine police-community relations if adoption decisions are not accompanied by sufficient transparency or community support.

     

Public preferences regarding police facebook posts: a macro-level analysis

ABSTRACT

Police agencies have adopted social media quite widely, but researchers have paid relatively little attention to the phenomenon. To date few studies have explored public reaction to police use of social media. The current study uses a purposive sample with 7,116 police Facebook posts collected from 14 different police agencies during a one-year period to answer two principal research questions: (1) with respect to the number of likes, number of shares, or number of comments regarding different themes present in police Facebook posts, are there differences among police agencies corresponding to differences in the thematic content in their postings? and (2) What factors are related to the public reaction (i.e., likes, shares, comments) to a police Facebook post? The findings from ANOVA and negative binomial regression models clearly indicate that citizens do have definite preferences on police Facebook posts – they are more likely to like and make comments on posts of police personnel and police-public relations, but less likely to share posts of Social Networking Sites. Also, they are more prone to like posts with narratives and pictures, but less likely to favor posts containing hyperlinks. Policy implications and practice guidelines, study limitations, and future research are also discussed.     

Overcoming the benchmark problem in estimating bias in traffic enforcement: the use of automatic traffic enforcement cameras

Objectives

The existence of bias in law enforcement can be difficult to verify or disprove, in part because of the difficulty of finding a benchmark—an objective estimate of actual offenses committed by the studied population—that can be compared with police enforcement. In the current study, we propose and test a method for examining bias in enforcement of speeding offenses.

Method

Using all speeding tickets issued in Israel in 2013–2015, we compare speeding tickets generated by stationary automatic traffic cameras, which provide an objective estimate of speed offenses, with speeding tickets issued manually by police officers, based on drivers’ ethnicity with further distribution by gender and age.

Results

Initial findings indicate that, overall, speeding tickets issued by police officers in Israel are not biased based on drivers’ ethnicity.

Conclusions

This study highlights the importance of distinguishing between overrepresentation and bias in law enforcement, which sometimes seem to be blurred in the literature.

     

Switching on,switching off: reflections of a practitioner researcher examining the operational behaviour of police officers

ABSTRACT

Evidence-based policing is rapidly becoming adopted by policing agencies among policing jurisdictions. Many academic programmes have been established in higher education to train police managers in applied criminology. However, there is a lack of literature for police officer practitioner researchers (POPR) who might undertake qualitative research, especially research projects that examine police behaviour. This paper reflects on the changing role of the practitioner-researcher and suggests that police officers undertaking qualitative research need to learn to ‘switch off their police role’ and ‘switch on their researcher role’. The author’s insights are drawn from his own experience of qualitative fieldwork working with police officers from New Zealand Police and South Australian Police.     

Online victimization risk and self-protective strategies: developing police-led cyber fraud prevention programs

ABSTRACT

The prevalence and impact of cyber fraud continues to increase exponentially with new and more innovative methods developed by offenders to target and exploit victims for their own financial reward. Traditional crime reaction methods used by police have proved largely ineffective in this context, with offenders typically located outside of the police jurisdiction of their victims. Given this, some police agencies have begun to adopt a victim focused, crime prevention approach to cyber fraud. The current research explores with a sample of two hundred and eighteen potential cyber fraud victims, the relationship between online victimization risk, knowledge and use of crime prevention strategies. The study found those most at risk of cyber fraud victimization despite accurate perceptions of risk and knowledge of self-protective behaviors in the online environment underutilise online prevention strategies. This research has important implications for police agencies who are designing and delivering cyber fraud education. It provides guidance for the development of effective prevention programs based on practical skills development.     

Militarizing mayberry and beyond: Making sense of American paramilitary policing

National-level data, derived from a survey of all police agencies serving 25,000 to 50,000 people, document a previously unrecognized phenomenon: the growth in the number, an expansion of the activities, and the movement toward the normalization of small-locality police paramilitary units (PPU). Beside examining the implications of these findings for small-locality policing, we situate this phenomenon within broader paramilitary changes in the police. To begin the process of making theoretical sense of PPUs, we refute the commonsense notion that their rise is a response to changes in crime. We then contextualize the phenomenon by discussing the lingering influence of the military model, the recent popularity of paramilitary subculture, changing police tactics in the war on drugs, police reform efforts, and the quest to modernize the criminal justice apparatus. Noting similar developments in corrections, we conclude that this phenomenon should not be seen merely as a peculiar manifestation of get-tough policies. Instead it corresponds closely to attempts by the state, in times of high modernity, to further refine its administration of violence.     

A factorial analysis of police pursuit driving decisions: A research note

Police pursuit driving has become an important public policy concern and topic of research during the past few years. The present study reports the attitudes of police officers and supervisors from four different agencies concerning the continuation of a pursuit. Using logistic regression, it is reported that the most influential factor on the officers' opinions is the offense for which the suspect is wanted. This one factor is more than twice as important as the environmental factors such as chase area, traffic conditions and weather.     

Constitutional considerations of the escrowed encryption standard

In the physical world, spaces are tangibly defined to secure privacy. The cyberspace equivalent of sealed envelopes and locked doors is encryption. Encryption uses hardware and/or software to ensure that electronic communication is not intercepted by unwelcome and unintended parties. The technology allows communicators transmitting across telephone lines to encode conversations or data.

Sophisticated encryption technology protects legitimate privacy, but it may also cloak illegal activities by obstructing electronic surveillance by law enforcement agencies. The Escrowed Encryption Standard is a federal plan to protect telephone and computer communication from illegal interception and allow government access to these communications for surveillance. This article examines the plan's possibly adverse impacts on constitutional rights, with specific attention to the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments.     

Theory and racial profiling: Shortcomings and future directions in research

The volatile political environment that surrounds the issue of “racial profiling” has led local and state police agencies across the nation to start collecting information about traffic and pedestrian stops. The controversy over this issue is overwhelmed by the unsupported assumption that all race-based decision making by police officers is motivated by individual police officers' racial prejudice. This article reviews recently published studies on racial profiling and critiques both their methods and conclusions. Using the conceptual framework for police research presented by Bernard and Engel, it reviews a number of theories that may explain racial disparities in the rates of police stops. The authors argue that to explain police behavior better, theoretical models must guide future data collection efforts.     

Hispanic Perceptions of Community Policing

Abstract

The two core elements of community policing are community partnership and problem solving (Rosenbaum, 1994). A major challenge that continues for proponents of community policing is developing and evaluating programs in areas with diverse ethnic groups. While many agencies have successfully developed community policing programs, empirical evaluations of community policing are scarce in areas that include a variety of minority groups. This research explores the effectiveness of community policing by examining citizen satisfaction with local police. Analyses are conducted with data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics on Criminal Victimization and Perceptions of Community Safety in 12 United States cities. The results indicate that Whites and Hispanics have the most positive perceptions of police, while Blacks, Eskimos, Asians, and Pacific Islanders have negative perceptions of police.     

Attitudes of chinese immigrants and vietnamese refugees toward law enforcement in the United States

The present study identifies areas of concern related to the interaction of recent Asian arrivals with the American police, and differentiates Chinese immigrants from Vietnamese refugees. Community leaders reported their perception of Asian attitudes toward the police. This information was used to construct a questionnaire administered to residents of a Chinese and a Vietnamese community in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. The study found 1) that fear of crime, poor communication with police, and gang activities are the major concerns for the Vietnamese in the sample, and that fear of crime and perceived police prejudice against residents are the primary concerns for the Chinese; and 2) that the Vietnamese consistently rated all the problems as more serious than did the Chinese.     

‘If it’s not worth doing half-assed,then it’s not worth doing at all’: Police views as to why new strategy implementation fails

ABSTRACT

Strategy implementation is the most challenging aspect of strategic management. In the case of police organizations, failure to effectively carry out a strategy results in loss of organizational resources and employee commitment. The present study is an attempt to explore the reasons behind failure of new strategies by drawing upon qualitative survey responses from 353 police officers and civilian employees from seven agencies across Canada. The results reflect mostly negative sentiments towards strategy implementation efforts, with failure attributed to issues ranging from leadership incompetence to lack of organizational resources. These concerns must be taken into account by police leaders in order to address challenges associated with strategy implementation in their organizations.     

About the authors

The present research evaluates the hypothesis that dimensions of police organizational structure germane to police reformers may be affected by the dynamics of organizational size and urbanism, thus constraining the ability of reformers to invoke desired structural changes. Using data gathered from police departments in Illinois, we examined the impact of urbanism and size on four dimensions of agency structure of interest to advocates of police reform: concentration, height or segmentation, civilianization, and supervisory ratio. Size revealed both linear and nonlinear influences on two dimensions of structure. This finding suggests that research on factors affecting organizational structure, typically conducted in large departments, may not generalize to smaller agencies. The authors concluded that the influence of size, though affecting dimensions of organizational structure, was generally too modest to substantially constrain structural variation.     

Book review essay

This article examines changes in organizational priorities related to the three core functions of American policing—crime control, the maintenance of order, and the provision of services—during the era of community-oriented policing (COP). The change in priorities is analyzed using panel data from three national surveys of more than 200 municipal police departments conducted in 1993, 1996, and 2000. The primary finding is that police core-function priorities remained largely unchanged during this period. However, the systematic implementation of COP programs reflects an all-out effort to address all three core functions of policing at a higher level of achievement.     

Crimestoppers: The legitimation of snitching

A recent addition to the U.S. crime-fighting arsenal is Crimestoppers, a program relying on anonymous citizens' informing to police—snitching—in return for cash rewards. Using a social constructionist perspective, this paper seeks to account for Crimestoppers' legitimation and rapid rise in popularity despite well-established moral opposition to snitching and snitches and despite a general public reluctance to become involved in police business. The analysis of conditions leading to this legitimation includes consideration of a general public pessimism and fear of crime, stereotypy of criminals, the instrumental and pragmatic nature of Crimestoppers, and the appeal of localism, as well as the roles of the media and the police. The paper concludes with questions about some potential long-range social psychological and sociopolitical consequences of this innovation in the “war on crime.”