Leadership with an Enduring Impact: The Legacy of Chief Burtell Jefferson of the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C.

On January 13, 1978, after nearly 30 years of public service, Burtell Jefferson became the first African American to serve as chief of the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C. This profile describes his personal and professional journey and describes—from the perspective of a cadre of active and retired police chiefs and chief executive officers—the impact of Jefferson's career on the Metropolitan Police Department and policing in America more broadly. Jefferson's story, an exemplary illustration of public sector leadership, has profound implications for contemporary efforts to ensure the equality of employment opportunity. Jefferson's career provides a model of effective leadership that is applicable across organizations and sectors. He not only led his organization well but also encouraged and developed generations of future leaders.     

Losing the Feminist Voice? Debates on The Legal Recognition of Same Sex Partnerships in Canada

Over the last decade, legal recognition of same-sex relationships in Canada has accelerated. By and large, same-sex cohabitants are now recognised in the same manner as opposite-sex cohabitants, and same-sex marriage was legalised in 2005. Without diminishing the struggle that lesbians and gay men have endured to secure this somewhat revolutionary legal recognition, this article troubles its narrative of progress. In particular, we investigate the terms on which recent legal struggles have advanced, as well as the ways in which resistance to the legal recognition has been expressed and dealt with. We argue that to the extent that feminist critiques of marriage, familial ideology, and the privatisation of economic responsibility are marginalised, conservative and heteronormative discourses on marriage and family are reinforced. Our case studies include two pivotal moments in the quest for legislative recognition of same-sex relationships: the Hearings of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Bill C-23, The Modernization of Benefits and Obligations Act, in 2000 and the hearings on Same-Sex Marriage in 2003. We find that the debates operated within a narrow paradigm that bolstered many existing hierarchies and exacerbated conditions for those who are economically disadvantaged.     

Child sexual victimisation: ethnographic stories of stranger and acquaintance grooming

Abstract

In recent years research into child sexual offending has highlighted “grooming” as an important part of the offence chain. Topics that have come to dominate the research agenda have focused on the offenders' perspectives, psychological models of offending behaviour and how child sex offenders (CSOs) are managed and treated in local communities (for example through Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements). Whilst these studies are extremely important, one area that has suffered from a lack of research and visible debate is how victims, their families and local communities experience grooming in situ and on a day-to-day basis. Using observational, interview and document data collected from an ethnography of a south-east coast community that houses a number of CSOs, this article examines the strategies used by strangers and acquaintances when grooming the local environment, significant others and children. Importantly, these grooming experiences are articulated from the perspective of the victims and their families. In doing so, the article discusses the implications that these experiences have for understanding offender–victim behaviours.     

Potential Use of Bacterial Community Succession in Decaying Human Bone for Estimating Postmortem Interval,,

Bacteria are taphonomic agents of human decomposition, potentially useful for estimating postmortem interval (PMI) in late‐stage decomposition. Bone samples from 12 individuals and three soil samples were analyzed to assess the effects of decomposition and advancing time on bacterial communities. Results indicated that partially skeletonized remains maintained a presence of bacteria associated with the human gut, whereas bacterial composition of dry skeletal remains maintained a community profile similar to soil communities. Variation in the UniFrac distances was significantly greater between groups than within groups (p < 0.001) for the unweighted metric and not the weighted metric. The members of the bacterial communities were more similar within than between decomposition stages. The oligotrophic environment of bone relative to soft tissue and the physical protection of organic substrates may preclude bacterial blooms during the first years of skeletonization. Therefore, community membership (unweighted) may be better for estimating PMI from skeletonized remains than community structure (weighted).     

The profile of gender equality issue attention in Western Europe

This article investigates the factors that drive governments to pay attention to gender equality issues and place them upon executive agendas. In line with studies of the dynamics of issue attention, which demonstrate the importance of investigating variability in the attention policy makers give to issue demands across policy domains, this article argues that policy issues related to gender equality are multidimensional and patterns in executive attention vary across the different types of gender issues. Multidimensionality of gender equality issues reflects different dynamics in agenda‐setting as different issues invoke contrasting constellations of political representation, institutional friction and veto points. To investigate this variation, this article proposes a twofold distinction between class‐based and status‐based gender equality issues and assesses the validity of three sets of explanations for when gender issues succeed in reaching executive agendas: women in politics, party ideology and economic performance. Drawing on governmental attention datasets from the Comparative Agendas Project, a systematic comparative quantitative analysis of the determinants of gender equality issue attention in five Western European countries is conducted. The main findings confirm that the mechanisms through which different types of gender equality issues gain executive attention differ according to the kind of the gender equality demand. Costly class‐based gender equality issues are more likely to receive executive attention when the economy is performing well, when there is a strong presence of Social Democrats and when there is a high proportion of female MPs. In contrast, economic performance, party politics and women's parliamentary presence do not seem to exert any impact on status‐based issues. Instead, critical actors in the government seem to be the strongest driver for attention over this second type of gender equality issue. This study contributes a gendered dimension to the policy agendas scholarship, adding theoretical and empirical depth to the understanding of how non‐core issues secure their place on full governmental agendas. By focusing on how to secure governmental attention for gender equality issues, the article makes a major contribution to understanding the initial genesis of gender equality policies.     

Don't Stand So Close to Me: Spatial Contagion Effects and Party Competition

In this article, we bring together elements from the literatures on economic voting and spatial voting to gain theoretical leverage on the combined role of clarity of responsibility, party policy positions, and economic performance in elections. Building on evidence of voter knowledge, we develop a theory of spatial contagion effects to explain how factors drawn from both of these literatures combine to shape changes in support for political parties. We test this theory with a spatial autoregressive model of party competition in 23 nations from 1951 to 2005. As expected, we find evidence of strong spatial contagion effects in elections with low clarity of responsibility.     

Copycatting the smell of death: Deciphering the role of cadaveric scent components used by detection dogs to locate human remains

Human remains detection dogs (HRDD) are commonly used by law enforcement agencies to search for cadavers. Biological material is typically used as a training stimulus, also called aids, to train dogs to recognize the smell of cadavers. While HRDD training approaches have received extensive attention, information remains limited on the olfactory cues used to train them. Here, we aimed to decipher the chemical basis of detection dog olfaction. Five specific objectives were explored to precise whether the composition or the concentration of the training aids drives the HRDDs responses. We recorded the behavioral responses of four HRDDs exposed to different cadaveric-like smells. We found that HRDDs recognized a simplified synthetic aid composed of cadaveric compounds. The lowest concentration at which HRDDs continued to perceive the cadaveric smell was determined. HRDDs were not impacted by slight modifications to the chemical composition of a blend of odors that they have been trained with. HRDDs associated sulfur and nitrogen compounds as human cadaver. Our findings highlight a lack of specificity of HRDDs to cadaveric compounds, which could lead to error of detection. Moreover, all dogs did not positively respond to the same blends, despite being trained with the same aids and procedure. However, we confirmed that dogs could be trained with a simplified blend of molecules. The chemical composition of a training aid has, therefore, high consequences on the performance of the trained animal, and this conclusion opens additional questions regarding olfaction-based detection animals.     

Law Enforcement and the Rights of the Accused: Are the Police Getting a Bad Rap?

Nationwide, law enforcement professionals have endured increasing scrutiny regarding their treatment of custodial suspects and their alleged abridgement of suspects’ Constitutional rights. At the same time, in the interests of community safety, many members of the public fully expect police officers to function efficiently in arresting and facilitating the prosecution of likely perpetrators. These perspectives reflect due-process and crime-control models respectively. Very little is known, however, about how law enforcement professionals actually view the rights of the accused when not acutely immersed in the cross-currents of public opinion. Using an anonymous survey, the current investigation addresses both Miranda rights as well as the European Union’s (EU) much more comprehensive approach to the rights of the accused. In general, this sample of 209 urban police officers favored protections of criminal suspects that went considerably beyond Miranda safeguards.