Where did it all go wrong? Implementation failure—and more—in a field experiment of procedural justice policing

Objectives

This paper presents the findings from a retrospective qualitative process evaluation to the Scottish Community Engagement Trial (ScotCET). The study explores the unanticipated results of a randomized field trial testing the effect of ‘procedurally just’ modes of road policing on public perceptions of police. The ScotCET intervention failed to produce the hypothesized results, producing instead significant, and unexplained, negative effects on key aspects of public perception. The present study seeks to examine, from the perspectives of officers implementing the experiment, what the impacts (intended or otherwise) of participation were.

Methods

Group interviews were held within the ScotCET experiment ‘units’ to explore how officers had collectively interpreted and framed ScotCET, and responded as a group to its requirements/demands. Nine groups were held over a 5-month period post experiment completion.

Results

Findings indicate that communication breakdowns during the ScotCET implementation led to misunderstandings of its aims and objectives, and of the requirements placed on officers. Within the context of organizational reform and perceived organizational ‘injustice’, commonly cited aspects of police culture were invoked to facilitate non-compliance with aspects of the experimental intervention, leading to implementation failures, and, possibly, a diffuse negative effect on the attitudes and behaviors of experiment officers.

Conclusions

Organizational structures and processes, and coercive top-down direction, are insufficient to ensure successful implementation of policing research, and, by implication, policing reforms, particularly those that demand alternative ways of ‘doing’ policing and ‘seeing’ citizens. Greater investment in organizational justice and encouraging openness to evidence-led knowledge is needed to promote change.

     

‘For you were strangers’: Jewish ritual,black musics,and commemorative politics in Tel Aviv’s Refugee Seder

ABSTRACT

Each Passover since 2009, hundreds of East African asylum seekers and Israeli activists have gathered for ‘Refugee Seder’, a public event to support Sudanese and Eritrean communities in Israel. Featuring a ceremonial seder meal, storytelling, speeches, and a dance party, Refugee Seder draws on age-old Jewish rituals and contemporary global black pop musics to symbolize Africans as members of the Israeli national collective. This article explores Refugee Seder’s modified commemorative practices, which engage dual narratives of Jewish nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. I show how seder rituals enable African participants to temporarily embody a Jewish spiritual identity, and how black pop musics help publicly reframe Africans’ ‘blackness’ as a cultural asset instead of a political liability. Ultimately, I argue that Refugee Seder distills larger ideologies of identity and belonging that are deeply rooted in Israeli collective consciousness, and which shape the trajectories of ‘refugee issue’ politics and policy-making.     

The problem with criminal records: Discrepancies between state reports and private-sector background checks

Criminal records are routinely used by employers and other institutional decision-makers who rely on their presumed fidelity to evaluate applicants. We analyze criminal records for a sample of 101 people, comparing official state reports, two sources of private-sector background checks (one regulated and one unregulated by federal law), and qualitative interviews. Based on our analysis, private-sector background checks are laden with false-positive and false-negative errors: 60 percent and 50 percent of participants had at least one false-positive error on their regulated and unregulated background checks, and nearly all (90 percent and 92 percent of participants, respectively) had at least one false-negative error. We define specific problems with private-sector criminal records: mismatched data that create false negatives, missing case dispositions that create incomplete and misleading criminal records, and incorrect data that create false positives. Accompanying qualitative interviews show how errors in background checks limit access to social opportunities ranging from employment to education to housing and violate basic principles of fairness in the legal system.     

How Managers Can Reduce Household Water Use Through Communication: A Field Experiment

As populations increase and droughts intensify, water providers are using tools such as persuasive messaging to decrease residential water use. However, district-led messaging campaigns are rarely informed by psychological science, evaluated for effectiveness, or strategically disseminated. In collaboration with a water district, we report a field experiment among single-family households using persuasive messaging based on the information-motivation-behavioral skills model (IMB). We randomly assigned 10,000 households to receive different mailings and measured household water use. All messaging reduced water consumption relative to the control. On average, water use dropped 0.68 hundred cubic feet (HCF) (509 gallons) per household in the first month. Had all 10,000 single-family, occupied, non-agricultural residences been mailed the IMB messaging, more than five million gallons would have been saved in the first month. The effects declined but persisted for approximately three months and were three to six times greater in households with high water use (75th to 90th percentiles) relative to average water use. These findings suggest that combining message elements from the IMB model can reduce residential water use and that targeting high-use households is particularly cost-effective.