Confirmatory Factor Analysis of “Competence in Use of Firearms Questionnaire” Administered to City Police

The following research describes the psychometric characteristics of the Competence in Use of Firearms Questionnaire, administered to 139 city police agents from four municipalities of the southern region of Tenerife. The questionnaire was based partly on the framework of the competence model of Pereda and Berrocal (2001), and contained 101 items. We tested the construct validity of the questionnaire, its internal consistency, and its potential for practical application. The initial results suggested four factors, differing to some extent from the original model.     

Influence of environmental variables on fear of crime: Comparing self-report data with physiological measures in an experimental design

Objectives

Self-reports and questionnaires have been the preferred research methods in the criminological field of “fear of crime” (FOC) since its rise in the 1960s. Our study had two main goals: (1) to measure the physiological indicators of fear in real time and (2) to compare these data with those obtained through self-reports, designed also to measure the emotion of fear.

Methods

An experimental study was conducted over the course of a week during late February 2016 in Aarhus (Denmark), in which the focus was on traditional environmental variables in the field of FOC (i.e., poor lighting conditions).

Results

Our results support the ideas that: (1) the absence of good luminosity in an open public space in an urban setting elicits physiological reactions of arousal that can be taken as indicators of experiences of fear and (2) heart rate appears to capture aspects of the emotion of fear that are not reflected in data obtained through self-report questionnaires.

Conclusions

This study, introducing a pioneering approach to the study of FOC, presents great potentials in complementing traditional methods in the crime sciences. The many challenges we faced are significant and reported with the hope that subsequent literature will build upon. We propose that traditional methods and new measurements could be combined to advance research in the field by allowing researchers to more unambiguously constrain the interpretation of their data. This becomes particularly relevant in a field like FOC, which has long suffered from irreconcilable results stemming from different investigations.

     

Elusive justice: tribal police officers’ perception of justice in an American Indian community

This paper explores justice-related perceptions among tribal police officers providing service within a southeastern Indian Reservation in the United States. Interviews with 27 tribal police officers were conducted to understand the manner of the administration of tribal justice. Almost half of the participants interviewed felt that their tribal justice system was dysfunctional due to inter-tribal politics, federal government restrictions, and lenient tribal judges. Additionally, tribal police officers also described the failure of the federal government in prosecuting felony crimes on the reservation. As a result, they believed that both the tribal and federal criminal justice systems did not adequately address crime on the reservation.     

Comparison Among Manual Facial Approximations Conducted by Two Methodological Approaches of Face Prediction

This study verified the difference between two methods of forensic facial approximation (FFA) regarding recognition and resemblance rates. Three‐dimensional models of skulls were obtained from computerized tomography (CT) scans of two subjects (targets). Two manual FFAs were performed for each target, by applying two different guidelines for the facial structures (what we called “American method” (AM) and “Combined method” (CM)). Unfamiliar assessors evaluated the sculptures by recognition and resemblance tests. The AM was that which allowed more correct responses of recognition and higher resemblance's scores for the male target (p < 0.001). Regarding guidelines for modeling characteristics of the face, the ones that are practical and easily performed for sculptures, such as the length of the anterior nasal spine multiplied by 3 for nose prediction, may offer better results in terms of resemblance.     

PCL-R psychopathy predicts disruptive behavior among male offenders in a Dutch forensic psychiatric hospital

In this study, the relationship between psychopathy, according to the Dutch language version of Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), and various types of disruptive behavior during inpatient forensic psychiatric treatment is investigated. Ninety-two male participants were administered the PCL-R following admission to an inpatient forensic hospital. From daily hospital information bulletins, incidents of verbal abuse, verbal threat, physical violence, and violation of hospital rules were derived. Also, the number of seclusion episodes was recorded. As expected, significant correlations were found between PCL-R scores and verbal abuse, verbal threat, violation of rules, total number of incidents, and frequency of seclusion. Psychopaths (PCL-R > or = 30) were significantly more often involved in incidents than nonpsychopaths. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the PCL-R Factor 2 score in particular contributed uniquely to the prediction of the total number of incidents. The findings are discussed in terms of their clinical implications.     

Assignment of paternity in a judicial dispute between two neighbor Holstein dairy farmers

DNA profiling was used as evidence to assign paternity in a dispute between two neighbors in a judicial case of undue appropriation of cattle offspring from five alleged Holstein sires. Five offspring were genotyped using ten genetic markers (nine microsatellites and the BOLA-DRB3 locus). The computer program CERVUS was used to estimate the LOD score values and the confidence of paternity assignments. The results presented here show that three out of five paternity cases were assigned at 95% of confidence to a single sire with a LOD score ranging from 2.53 to 3.55. A fourth male was assigned using its delta value. Finally, all alleged sires were excluded from the paternity of the fifth offspring, probably due to the existence of an non-sampled male in the studied population. We concluded that the likelihood-based approach, included into CERVUS program, was a powerful tool in cattle kinship analysis when dealing with judicial dispute particularly when the dam's genotype was absent, allowing the assignments of paternity at 95% level of confidence in situations usually used by dairy and beef cattle producers in Argentine (e.g., multi-sire pasture mating).     

Diagnostic efficacy of biochemical markers in diagnosis post-mortem of ischaemic heart disease

In forensic medicine, there is a need for more sensitive biochemical markers for the post-mortem diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction. A study of the distribution of biochemical markers in different fluids is of great significance in post-mortem diagnosis, because their distribution depends on the location of tissue damage and release kinetics. The aim of this study is to compare the sensitivities and specificities of creatine kinase-MB (CK-MB), myoglobin and cTnI in serum and pericardial fluid for the post-mortem diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). We studied 188 cadavers selected during 1 year from medicolegal autopsies. The groups were as follows: (1) myocardial infarction (n = 52); (2) asphyxia (n = 59); (3) multiple trauma (n = 41); (4) natural deaths excluding myocardial infarction (n = 36). We obtained statistically significant differences in pericardial fluid for all the biochemical markers, the highest levels being obtained in the group of cadavers who had died from myocardial infarction. A common factor is the high negative predictive value found in biochemical markers, which is contrary to the findings obtained in clinical practice, when the percentages of sensitivity are very high.     

Czech Republic

European Journal of Political Research -