The impact of welfare reform on local labor markets

We develop a local labor market information system to assess the labor market effects of recently adopted welfare reform laws. Using the Cleveland-Akron metropolitan area as a prototype, we develop an occupationally and geographically specific inventory of projected job openings and measure the skill mismatch between projected job openings and the welfare population likely to enter the labor market. We find the skill mismatches are quite large: Following implementation of reform, welfare recipients entering the labor force would initially have to claim anywhere from 34 to 61 percent of expected low-skill job openings in order to become fully employed. Labor market opportunities are further diminished if one takes into account the effect of gender and space in limiting job accessibility. Welfare recipients entering the labor market as a result of reform would require from 40 to 75 percent of jobs remaining if predominately male occupations are removed from consideration. The AFDC recipients who depend on public transportation, even in extraordinarily long commutes, can access only 40 to 44 percent of entry-level job openings. © 1998 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Systemic Dissemination of Injected Foreign Material

A 32‐year‐old woman collapsed following an intravenous injection of material that included crushed pharmaceutical tablets. Resuscitation was attempted but was unsuccessful. She had an extensive past medical history of complications resulting from intravenous drug use. Death was due to mixed drug toxicity. The major findings at autopsy included a 10 mm deep skin sinus over the right femoral vein that was used as an injection site. Polarizable foreign material was present at the injection site and also within the lungs with a granulomatous reaction. Of note, a probe‐patent foramen ovale had permitted paradoxical embolization of this material into the systemic circulation with lodgement within the liver, portal lymph nodes, myocardium, spleen, kidneys, and pancreas. This case highlights the importance of checking for any intracardiac shunts, which may be quite small, and systemic dissemination of foreign material to multiple organs in intravenous drug users who present for medicolegal assessment.     

Spatial analysis of violent crimes in Metro Manila,Philippines

Spatial patterns of murder and physical injury in Metro Manila, Philippines were visualised through conditional choropleth maps. Relationship of both crime rates with some demographic variables were investigated while accounting for possible spatial autocorrelation using spatial lag models. Results show that both crime rates tend to cluster in the northern cities of Metro Manila. Furthermore, significant spatial lag coefficients were found only for physical injury rates, with values ranging from 0.49 to 0.62, signifying a positive city-level spatial dependence of physical injury rates in Metro Manila. Moreover, some demographic covariates, such as population density, percentage of young males, education, marriage, and immigration were found to be associated with both crime rates. These results could serve as useful indicators of crime incidence; thus it is recommended that crime monitoring systems include them to aid in resource allocation and program planning for better crime prevention and security management.     

Policing football crowds in Sweden

The policing of football crowds in Sweden is underpinned by a national coordination approach based upon a set of conflict reducing principles and supported by crowd theory. The approach is referred to as the Special Police Tactic (SPT). While focused on police capacity to exercise force, the SPT also gives primacy to tactics based upon communication, in the form of Dialogue Police. Existing research on the SPT focuses exclusively on the policing of protest crowds. This paper extends the existing literature by reporting on a large scale three-year observational research project examining the SPT as it is applied to football fixtures involving several of Sweden’s major football clubs. On the basis of our analysis we draw out how policing operations in line with facilitation and communication were associated with effective outcomes. However, we also highlight deficiencies in national coordination and coherence as well as highlighting important innovations with regard to approaches to dialogue with football fans. We explore the implications of our analysis for theoretical understanding of effective football crowd management and engagement with fan culture.     

Reconciling Independence and accountability at the European Central Bank: The false promise of Proceduralism

This article revisits the balancing act between independence and accountability at the European Central Bank (ECB). It contrasts procedural and substantive concepts of accountability, and challenges the mainstream idea that independence and accountability can be reconciled through narrow mandates, the indiscriminate increase of transparency, the creation of multiple channels of accountability, and the active use of judicial review. These assumptions form the pillars of a procedural type of accountability that promises to resolve the independence/accountability dilemma but fails to do so in practice. The article brings evidence to show how ECB accountability has become a complex administrative exercise that focuses on the procedural steps leading up to monetary and supervisory decisions while simultaneously limiting substantive accountability. The failure to acknowledge the trade‐off between independence and accountability (said to be ‘two sides of the same coin’) has resulted in a tendency to privilege the former over the latter.     

Can analysis of a small clod of soil help to solve a murder case?

Soil forensics utilizes extensive soil information to answer legal questions and test hypotheses. The main difficulty often is the determination of different variables from a small amount of soil sample collected on the suspect. We developed a sequential mineralogical and chemical analyses to assess a limited quantity of soil vestiges (0.5 g) from a suspect's vehicle (adhered to the outside rear-view mirror and to the left front fender) involved in a murder case and compared them with the surface samples found at the victim's body disposal site at the Graciosa Road, Paraná State, Brazil. All results affirm that the suspect’s vehicle could have been in contact with the edge of the Graciosa Road, approximately the place where the victim’s body was located. As a result of the soil analysis and comparison, the results support the likely contact of the suspect’s vehicle with the crime scene.     

Obesity,Body Mass Index,and Homicide

The body mass indexes (BMIs) of 100 randomly selected homicide cases from the files of Forensic Science SA were compared to the Australian and South Australian populations. There were 70 males and 30 females (M:F = 2.3:1; age range 18–84 years; mean 42.3 years). There was a substantially lower proportion of obese individuals in the homicide population compared to the general Australian and South Australian populations (19% [vs.] 27.9% and 30%, respectively). A second group of 144 randomly selected autopsy cases where the BMI was ≥40 kg/m² was analyzed. There were 77 males and 67 females (M:F = 1.2:1; age range 23–78 years; mean 46.7 years). The majority of deaths were natural (N = 108), with no homicides. A negative association between obesity and homicide has, therefore, been demonstrated. Reasons for the lower numbers of obese/morbidly obese individuals among homicide victims are unclear, but may include physical protection afforded by fat padding from sharp force injuries, and relative sociodemographic isolation.     

The collateral consequences of GPS-LED supervision in hot spots policing

Hot spots policing is popular, yet little is known about officer receptivity to the tactic and its impact on internal procedural justice, organizational commitment, and self-legitimacy. The nature of the tactic means that officers must relinquish their discretionary powers so that they can be directed to crime and disorder locations at specific times and for regimented durations. This loss of ‘spatiotemporal autonomy’ is exacerbated by technological tracking devices. We examined the receptivity of British officers to hot spots patrols, where the deployment was tracked with individual GPS trackers, compared to parallel patrols without hot spots policing or tracking. In contrast to the comparison group, officers in hot spots disliked the routinization of their shifts; regimented patrols were detrimental for internal procedural justice and organizational commitment. The ramifications of the introduction of GPS-enabled systems include certain tracking of officers and their compliance, such as a Taylorist time and motion study. While hot spots policing remains an effective tactic, questions about sustainability may be raised if officers’ expectations, attitudes and receptivity are not managed.     

Rethinking Conflict: Perspectives from the Insight Approach

In this article, the authors present the “insight approach” to conflict as an analytical and methodological framework that addresses the dynamic interactions between conflicting parties. According to the insight approach, conflict is relational, dynamic, and adaptive, generated from the responsive interpretive frameworks that parties use to construct meaning. Conflict arises as a result of parties' experience of what insight theorists call “threat‐to‐cares,” which generates defend–attack patterns of interaction between them. The authors suggest that rethinking the nature of conflict so that it is seen as an interaction embedded in meaning making enables conflict interveners to help parties gain insight into, and articulate, the values that are being generated, advanced, threatened, and realigned within the complex interactions that define us as social beings. In doing so, parties develop abilities to generate new patterns and solutions that can limit and even eliminate the experiences of threat that generate conflict between them.