Drug policies: A study of the opinions of local law enforcement patrol officers about various policy alternatives

The article briefly reviews some literature describing the scope and seriousness of psychoactive substance misuse in the United States and then examines some chronic problems in the nature of public policy analysis. A methodology. Conceptual Review, is briefly discussed as a plausible alternative to contemporary approaches. Data from n=100 patrol officers who completed the Drug Policy Questionnaire (DPQ) are presented. Patrol officers were highly supportive of conventional policies, e.g., prevention, education, and treatment, but also recommended more punitive approaches, e.g., imprisonment for both dealers and users. Legalization was rejected as a viable policy alternative. Implications for policy and future research are also discussed.     

Domestic Violence and Children’s Presence: A Population-based Study of Law Enforcement Surveillance of Domestic Violence

The purpose of the present study was twofold: (1) to test whether law enforcement officers could reliably use a standard protocol to collect data on domestic violence events (DVEs) across a large municipality, and (2) to use these data to examine prevalence and nature of the violence and children’s presence. Reliability checks indicated that data were collected reliably on over 5,000 substantiated DVEs. Findings showed that 48% of all assaults in the municipality were DVEs. Victims were predominantly females in their early thirties, and injuries were predominantly minor and resulted from body contact. Children were present in nearly 50% of the DVEs. They were disproportionately present in domestic violence households compared to all other households in the municipality. Domestic violence households with children were more likely to have mothers and fathers involved in the violence and were disproportionately minority households headed by single females in relatively poor neighborhoods.     

Toxicologic studies in a fatal overdose of 2,4-D, mecoprop, and dicamba

A suicidal poisoning committed by a 61-year-old woman, who ingested an unknown quantity of Killex, containing in aqueous solution 100 g/L of (2,4-dichlorophenox)acetic acid (2,4-D), 50 g/L of mecoprop, and 9 g/L of dicamba as amine salts is described. Quantitation of chlorophenoxy acids was performed by extraction from an acidified mixture and concentration before high performance liquid chromatography analysis. All three herbicides were separated in a phosphate buffer/acetonitrile mixture at 280 nm on a RP-8 column. Concentrations of herbicides found were: in blood--520-mg/L 2,4-D, 530-mg/L mecoprop, and 170-mg/L dicamba; in urine--670-mg/L 2,4-D and 520-mg/L mecoprop; in bile--340-mg/L 2,4-D, 530-mg/L mecoprop, and 140-mg/L dicamba; and in liver--540-mg/Kg 2,4-D, 500-mg/Kg mecoprop, and less than 100-mg/Kg dicamba. Liquid chromatography was found to be a reliable method for herbicide quantitation in biological tissues and fluids. The technique offered definite advantages over ultraviolet spectrophotometry and avoids the derivatization requirement for gas chromatography.     

Overcoming the benchmark problem in estimating bias in traffic enforcement: the use of automatic traffic enforcement cameras

Objectives

The existence of bias in law enforcement can be difficult to verify or disprove, in part because of the difficulty of finding a benchmark—an objective estimate of actual offenses committed by the studied population—that can be compared with police enforcement. In the current study, we propose and test a method for examining bias in enforcement of speeding offenses.

Method

Using all speeding tickets issued in Israel in 2013–2015, we compare speeding tickets generated by stationary automatic traffic cameras, which provide an objective estimate of speed offenses, with speeding tickets issued manually by police officers, based on drivers’ ethnicity with further distribution by gender and age.

Results

Initial findings indicate that, overall, speeding tickets issued by police officers in Israel are not biased based on drivers’ ethnicity.

Conclusions

This study highlights the importance of distinguishing between overrepresentation and bias in law enforcement, which sometimes seem to be blurred in the literature.

     

A Fresh Look at Stock Market Short‐termism

In this article, we develop a novel understanding of stock market short‐termism as a social phenomenon. Contrary to formerly popular academic belief, short‐termism is a problem that is highly unlikely to be structurally self‐correcting. An important driver of short‐termism typically elided within standard legal‐academic analyses is the informational centricity of modern stock markets, and resulting pressure on corporate managers to generate fresh ‘news’ indicative of perceived business ‘progress’. We highlight the growing enthusiasm of policy‐makers for a discriminatory ‘two‐tiered’ approach to public company investor relations. Accordingly, long‐term and committed investors are expected to be brought into the company's governance ‘inner circle’, while other investors are implicitly relegated to lowertier ‘outsider’ status. We argue that this supports a discriminatory approach to the allocation of voting entitlements in newly listing companies, enabling committed investors to develop cooperative and sustained governance relations with management unencumbered by ‘outside’ stock market pressures for short‐term financial‐performance outcomes.     

Depression and substance use in two divergent high school cultures: A quantitative and qualitative analysis

Research has generally concluded that adolescent depression and substance use are strongly interrelated, but has rarely considered how this relationship may vary across diverse populations. In this study, we used quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the relationships among depression and cigarette, alcohol, marijuana, and harder drug use across two culturally disparate environments: a suburban and an inner-city high school. Our sample included 164 suburban and 242 inner-city high school students. The students completed Kovacs' Children's Depression Inventory of 1985 and substance use measures derived from various sources. In-depth semistructured interviews were conducted with subjects who scored in the top 10% of the CDI (N=19) from both schools. Our quantitative findings indicated a positive association between depression and cigarette, marijuana, and harder drug use among the suburban students, and no association between depression and the use of any substances for the urban students. There were no significant differences in levels of reported depression across samples. However, with the exception of marijuana use, suburban students reported greater involvement in substance use than urban students. Our qualitative analyses suggest that across-school differences in the relationships among depression and substance use may be related to the varied meanings of depression and substance use that are informed by cultural context.The research was funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), Grant No. 1 R01 DA-06844, Perry London, principal investigator. The views, opinions, and findings contained in their article are not to be construed as NIDA's position or policy.B.A. from University of California, Berkeley, and Ed.D. from the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. Research interests include the phenomenology of high-risk behavior and social development among urban adolescents.B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and Ed.M. from the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. Research interests include the relationships among high-risk behavior, personality variables, and cultural context.B.A. from Michigan State University, M.A. from University of Minnesota-Duluth, and Ed.D. from Harvard Graduate School of Education. Research interests include integrating quantitative and qualitative methods in social science research and the phenomenology of high-risk behavior.Research interests included adolescent high-risk behavior and ethnic and religious identity development. Deceased June 1992.