A Stone’s Throw from the Metropolis: Re-Examining Small-Agency Homeland Security Practices

Police agencies nationwide have enhanced their homeland security preparedness capacity since the 9/11 attacks. Evidence suggests that departments have not uniformly adopted measures to prepare for and respond to critical incidents. Rather, larger agencies are more likely than their smaller peers to take such steps. Small agencies do not constitute a homogenous group; some experience geographic isolation while others are near major metropolitan areas. Unclear is whether small agencies (25 or fewer full-time sworn personnel), those that are commonly found to be less prepared, benefit from proximity to large-agency peers. This study examined whether physical and relational proximity to large departments contributed to homeland security preparedness in over 300 small departments. A structural equation model revealed that interactions with large agencies facilitated preparedness but physical proximity had no direct effect. Increasing geographic isolation from large-agency peers indirectly affected preparedness by stifling the level of inter-department interactions.     

Changes in homeland security activities since 9/11: an examination of state and local law enforcement agencies’ practices

This study investigated differences in state and local law enforcement agencies participation in homeland security activities within the year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and 13 years later. Further, this investigation assessed whether there were regional differences for these practices during these same time periods. Activities assessed were based on a homeland security initiatives index. Data suggest that, in the year after the attacks, agencies’ participation in all of Stewart and Morris’ homeland security activities was not high and statistically significant differences existed across several regions for some of these practices. However, since then, the number of agencies participating in all of Stewart and Morris’ homeland security activities increased and statistically significant differences between regions decreased. The increase in participation may be attributed to incentives provided by the federal government. Nevertheless, data suggest that support may be waning within law enforcement agencies to participate in homeland security activities.     

Local law enforcement terrorism prevention efforts: A state level case study

Although law enforcement agencies across the nation have assumed part of the responsibility in the fight against terrorism, significant confusion exists as to the role of local law enforcement. While some agencies have taken steps towards terrorism prevention, little data has been collected on which agencies have taken the greatest steps, how those agencies have changed, and how other agencies should direct their activity. This case study of law enforcement census data from a single state considered variations in terrorism preparedness and predictors of preparedness. Agency size, presence of funding, and other variables significantly predict levels of terrorism preparedness. Important policy implications such as the distribution of funding and which agencies should be working towards terrorism preparedness are discussed.     

警事治理:国家警事社会化的新定义

治理理论对国家与市民社会关系的认识思路是国家和市民社会相互"型塑"达致社会公共事务管理的"善治"。在国内外警务战略模式变革中成为潮流的"国家警事社会化"战略,是指在警察机关专业警务活动的同时,动员社会组织和社区公众共同参与防控违法犯罪、维护社会治安秩序活动的过程。显然,"国家警事社会化"寻求警察与社会组织及社区公众的互动合作基础上公共安全管理的改善。因为警察与国家的对应、社会组织及公众正是市民社会的具象,所以可以用治理理论作为分析"国家警事社会化"的框架,并将其定义为"警事治理"。     

Critical incident preparedness and response on post-secondary campuses

Campus-based critical incidents received renewed focus in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University shootings. Legislative bodies, task forces, and professional associations sought to provide campus public safety departments with a range of recommended strategies to prevent and mitigate accidental and intentional critical events. Using data from a national sample of colleges and universities, this study examined the status of critical incident preparedness and response in the spring of 2008. Results indicated a solid base of prevention and response capacity; at the same time, respondents highlighted areas lagging behind recommended practices and barriers limiting achieved changes.     

“Shaping history” or “Riding the wave”?: President Bush's influence on the public opinion of terrorism, homeland security, & crime

The theory of presidential influence over public opinion is used to predict the impact of presidential rhetoric on the public's concern for terrorism, homeland security, and crime as the “most important problems facing the country.” Using OLS time-series regression, the authors find consistent results that President Bush influenced public opinion in relation to terrorism, homeland security and crime, despite the overwhelming events of September 11th and its impact. The article concludes by discussing the president's ability to shape events and how some events shape the presidency.     

Europol and the Policing of International Terrorism: Counter‐Terrorism in a Global Perspective

The European Police Office (Europol) is an international police organization that was formed to promote cooperation among law enforcement agencies in the European Union. Framed within the context of the Treaty of the European Union, Europol’s mandate includes all serious forms of international crime, including international terrorism. This paper offers an analysis of the organization of Europol’s counter‐terrorism operations in the context of the history and dynamics of international police cooperation. More specifically, on the basis of the bureaucratization theory of policing, Europol is reviewed to exemplify the dual forces of political control over the organization via the regulative bodies of the European Union, on the one hand, and the institutional autonomy and professional expertise of participating police agencies, on the other. The outcome of these dual forces can be expected to determine the course and outcome of counter‐terrorist policing in the European Union in years to come.     

Making Sense of COMPSTAT: A Theory-Based Analysis of Organizational Change in Three Police Departments

COMPSTAT, the latest innovation in American policing, has been widely heralded as a management and technological system whose elements work together to transform police organizations radically. Skeptical observers suggest that COMPSTAT merely reinforces existing structures and practices. However, in trying to assess how much COMPSTAT has altered police organizations, research has failed to provide a broader theoretical basis for explaining how COMPSTAT operates and for understanding the implications of this reform. This article compares two different perspectives on organizations—technical/rational and institutional—to COMPSTAT's adoption and operation in three municipal police departments. Based on fieldwork, our analysis suggests that relative to technical considerations for changing each organization to improve its effectiveness, all three sites adopted COMPSTAT in response to strong institutional pressures to appear progressive and successful. Furthermore, institutional theory better explained the nature of the changes we observed under COMPSTAT than the technical/rational model. The greatest collective emphasis was on those COMPSTAT elements that were most likely to confer legitimacy, and on implementing them in ways that would minimize disruption to existing organizational routines. COMPSTAT was less successful when trying to provide a basis for rigorously assessing organizational performance, and when trying to change those structures and routines widely accepted as being "appropriate." We posit that it will take profound changes in the technical and institutional environments of American police agencies for police departments to restructure in the ways anticipated by a technically efficient COMPSTAT.     

Governmental Efforts on Homeland Security and Crime: Public Views and Opinions

This paper examines views of the respondents regarding homeland security and traditional crime in the United States. Using questions from the 2007 Penn State Poll, a sample of 862 Pennsylvanians participated through a telephone interview. Participants were questioned about their concerns regarding the effectiveness of homeland security, their fear of crime (white-collar, property, violent and terrorist attacks). The results revealed that citizens were satisfied with the effectiveness of homeland security since the September 11, 2001, attacks. The results indicate that fear of crime is different for demographics, and we were able to show that those that thought homeland security had been effective increased the likelihood of fear of white-collar crime. We were also able to show demographic differences for national spending on crime. In addition, we were able to show that those who believed that homeland security was effective did not believe that national spending was at the proper level for property, violent, or white-collar crime. The implications of these results are discussed.     

马克思主义和新制度主义制度变迁理论的比较与综合

马克思主义和新制度主义在制度与制度变迁、制度变迁的动力与机制、制度变迁的形式与方式等方面都做了比较系统的论述，因而都提出了比较完整的制度变迁理论。新制度主义与马克思主义的制度变迁理论既包含相互补充、相互融合的方面，也包含相互排斥、相互冲突的方面。新制度主义制度变迁理论一部分是科学的，一部分是非科学的。我们应该吸取新制度主义制度变迁理论中的科学因素，摈弃其非科学的成分，形成以马克思主义为基础的制度变迁理论的新综合。     

Congressional Oversight Hearings and Policy Control

Oversight hearings should be an important congressional tool for controlling recalcitrant agencies, but it is not clear that this should always be equally true. The logic of principal‐agent models of legislative policy control implies that oversight might sometimes, but not always, be superfluous to said control. Here, I reintroduce oversight hearings to theories of policy control and argue that congressional committees conduct oversight hearings primarily as a response to the extent to which agencies have different policy preferences from them and as a function of their capacity to conduct hearings cheaply. I test these hypotheses using committee hearings data (Policy Agendas Project) from both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate from 1947 to 2006 and provide support for theoretical arguments about the institutional nature of legislative policymaking strategies and ultimately help clarify the role of oversight in legislative‐executive relations.     

Theories on the Economics of Regulation: A Survey of the Literature from a European Perspective

This article is, on one hand, a survey of the core theoretical literature on the economics of public regulation; and, on the other hand, a cohesive discussion about how the literature has matured and how recent contributions on political and regulatory institutions—US and European—are related to, and affect the results of, former lines of research. We conclude that the traditional distinction between public interest theories and special interest theories has lost validity due to the entry of game theory and institutional research. The evolving institutional analysis provides a sophisticated interpretation of possible corrective rationales inherent in regulatory restrictions, and is as such an important complement to the still vigorous special interest literature focusing on the redistributive rationales and their effects.     

Social Institutions,Theory Development,and the Promise of Comparative Criminological Research

This paper highlights the ways in which recent comparative criminological research has begun to advance theory development by directing systematic attention to the role of institutional structure. The overarching thesis is that sensitivity to the institutional context in recent criminological studies, especially those conducted in Asia, has paved the way for the productive elaboration of two highly influential theories: Routine Activities Theory and the General Theory of Crime (or self-control theory). Such theoretical elaboration promises to enhance the explanatory power of these theories by placing individual behavior in a multilevel, institutional context. The paper also outlines a transformed variant of self-control theory that posits two distinctive forms of self-control, which are likely to have differential impacts on criminal offending depending on features of the institutional structure of societies.     

A Note on Taiwan's National Security Council and its Role in Antiterrorism

While the U.S. struggled to quickly mobilize a coordinated national homeland security office after the September 11 attacks, the National Security Council (NSC) has been responsible for monitoring security in the Republic of China since the Nationalists moved to Taiwan in 1949. Although its primary mission has been to prevent Taiwan from being invaded by Mainland China, recent world events have awakened us to a need for security, a need that seemed to have faded away after the end of the Cold War. Although not a strong probability, Taiwan is still a possible target of terrorism because of its close relationship with the U.S. Thus, it is worthwhile to explore the role of NSC in antiterrorist efforts. The NSC plays a vital role in coordinating executive agencies in antiterrorism efforts. The NSC's antiterrorist measures cover the whole spectrum of the executive branch ranging from law enforcement to non‐law enforcement efforts. The tradition of collaboration among the military, police, and private security in Taiwan may help the NSC to smoothly coordinate these three parties.     

Policing Intimate Partner Violence in Rural Areas and Small Towns: Policies,Practices, and Perceptions

The extant literature has given only limited consideration to the adoption of intimate partner violence policies and procedures on the part of police organizations, particularly in rural areas and small towns. Using survey data from police agencies in the southern regions of Illinois, this study found that although policies were nearly universal, specific elements varied. Agencies relied heavily on conferences and other departments in formulating their policies, making less use of recommendations from professional associations or the salient literature. The findings suggest variation in how intimate partner violence is perceived and policed in rural areas and small towns while highlighting some of the challenges agencies encounter in addressing this offense within their jurisdictions.     

The Cosponsorship Patterns of Reserved Seat Legislators

This study analyzes the bill cosponsorship behavior of reserved seat legislators in the Pakistan National Assembly, where special legislative seats are reserved for women and religious minorities. It offers a critical case because two theories on reserved seat legislators—the theory of electoral incentives and the theory of institutional weakness—lead to opposite predictions about the extent to which such legislators will engage in bill cosponsorship, with the former (latter) predicting the negative (positive) effect of reserved seats. I find that women and minorities in reserved seats initiate a greater number of bills and cosponsor bills with a larger number of peers than nonreserved male legislators. Using network analysis, I also show that reserved legislators tend to play a role in bridging different partisan blocs of legislators within the cosponsorship network. These empirical patterns provide support to the theory of institutional weakness, rather than to the theory of electoral incentives.     

The Reconstitution of Law in Local Settings: Agency Discretion, Ambiguity, and a Surplus of Law in the Policing of Hate Crime

An important yet poorly understood function of law enforcement organizations is the role they play in distilling and transmitting the meaning of legal rules to frontline law enforcement officers and their local communities. In this study, we examine how police and sheriff's agencies in California collectively make sense of state hate crime laws. To do so, we gathered formal policy documents called “hate crime general orders” from all 397 police and sheriff's departments in the state and conducted interviews with law enforcement officials to determine the aggregate patterns of local agencies' responses to higher law. We also construct a “genealogy of law” to locate the sources of the definitions of hate crime used in agency policies. Despite a common set of state criminal laws, we find significant variation in how hate crime is defined in these documents, which we attribute to the discretion local law enforcement agencies possess, the ambiguity of law, and the surplus of legal definitions of hate crime available in the larger environment to which law enforcement must respond. Some law enforcement agencies take their cue from other agencies, some follow statewide guidelines, and others are oriented toward gaining legitimacy from national professional bodies or groups within their own community. The social mechanisms that produce the observed clustering patterns in terms of approach to hate crime law are mimetic (copying another department), normative (driven by professional standards about training and community social movement pressure), and actuarial (affected by the demands of the crime data collection system). Together these findings paint a picture of policing organizations as mediators between law‐on‐the‐books and law‐in‐action that are embedded in interorganizational networks with other departments, state and federal agencies, professional bodies, national social movement organizations, and local community groups. The implications of an interorganizational field perspective on law enforcement and implementation are discussed in relation to existing sociolegal research on policing, regulation, and recent neo‐institutional scholarship on law.     

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND VIOLENCE: A SUB‐NATIONAL TEST OF INSTITUTIONAL ANOMIE THEORY*

Messner and Rosenfeld's institutional anomie theory is grounded in the assumption that relatively higher crime rates in the United States are due to (1) the overwhelming influence of economic motives and institutions in society, and (2) the subjugation of all other social institutions to cultural economic interests (e.g., the American Dream). Our analysis is designed to extend the limited body of empirical research on this theory in several ways. First, we seek to test the utility of institutional anomie theory for predicting crime rates across aggregate units within the United States (counties). Second, we draw out the theory's emphasis on instrumental crime and suggest that measures of noneconomic social, political, familial, religious, and educational institutions will be particularly relevant for explaining instrumental as opposed to expressive violence. Third, in contrast to prior research, we develop conceptual reasons to expect that these factors will primarily mediate (as opposed to moderate) the relationship between economically motivating pressures and instrumental violence. Our negative binomial regression analyses of data from the Supplementary Homicide Reports and various censuses indicate that the measures of noneconomic institutions perform well in explaining both instrumental and expressive homicides, but that these measures mediate the impact of economic pressures (as measured by the Gini coefficient of family income inequality) to commit instrumental violence most strongly. Further, we find only very limited support for the more popular moderation hypothesis.