Vancouver police raid needle exchange run by drug users

The police claimed that drug trafficking was going on at the needle exchange run by the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, but they failed to provide any evidence to that effect. The police later apologized for their remarks and the exchange re-opened.     

Longitudinal Links Between Perceptions of Adolescence and the Social Beliefs of Adolescents: Are Parents’ Stereotypes Related to Beliefs Held About and by Their Children?

This study examined: (1) relations between parents prior stereotypes about adolescence and their later beliefs about their own child during early and middle adolescence, (2) relations between parents stereotypes and their own childs behaviors during middle and late adolescence, and (3) the role of congruency between mothers and fathers beliefs about adolescence in predicting their childs behavior. The results revealed significant relations between parents prior stereotyped beliefs and their specific beliefs about their own children during the 7th and 10th grades. In addition, the relations between parents prior stereotypes and their adolescent childrens behaviors measured at 3 and 5 years later (10th and 12th grades) were estimated. Parents stereotypes about adolescence significantly predicted their childrens behaviors in both 10th and 12th grades. Finally, the congruency between mothers and fathers stereotyped beliefs was significantly related to their childrens behaviors in the 10th and 12th grades. Parents who had consistent and strong stereotypes about adolescence had adolescent children with more deviant peers than parents with consistent, but less-stereotyped views.Portions of this paper were presented at the 2002 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Adolescence, New Orleans, LA. This research was made possible by grants from NSF, the Spencer Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation to Jacquelynne Eccles and Bonnie Barber.Professor of Psychology, and Human Development and Family Studies, Pennsylvania State University. Received PhD in Psychology from the University of Michigan. Current interests include the development of social cognitive processes during childhood and adolescence, and gender differences in achievement motivation, self-perceptions of achievement, and parents influences on achievement.Doctoral Candidate and Research Assistant, Human Development and Family Studies, Pennsylvania State University. Received MS in Human Development and Family Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. Current interests include gender socialization and activity involvement during adolescence.Research Associate, North Carolina Center for Nursing. Received MS in Human Development and Family Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. Current interests include adolescent development.     

Establishing the Limits of TrueAllele® Casework: A Validation Study

The limits of the expert system, TrueAllele^® Casework (TA), were explored using challenging mock casework profiles that included 17 single‐source and 18 two‐, 15 three‐ and 7 four‐person DNA mixtures. The sensitivity (ability to detect a minor contributor) of the TA analysis process was examined by challenging the system with mixture DNA samples that exhibited allelic and locus dropout and other stochastic effects. The specificity (ability to exclude nondonors) was rigorously tested by interrogating TA derived genotypes with 100 nondonor profiles. The accuracy with which TA estimated mixture weights of contributors to the two‐person mixtures was examined. Finally, first‐degree relatives of donors were used to assess the ability of the system to exclude close relatives. TA demonstrated great accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. TA correctly assigned mixture weights and excluded nearly all first‐degree relatives. This study demonstrates the analysis power of the TrueAllele^® Casework system.     

Police and the War on Women: A Gender-Linked Examination Behind and In Front of the Blue Curtain

The war on women was a term coined during the 2012 election cycle that referred to attempts to pass legislation that would limit women's rights, from control of women's bodies (with a particular focus on birth control, abortion, and the aftereffects of rape) to equal pay for women and their rights in the workforce (M. E. Gilman, 2014 Gilman, M. E. (2014). Feminism, democracy, and the “war on women.” Law & Inequality, 32, 1–30. [Google Scholar]). One arena in which evidence of such a war's impact on women may be assessed is behind and in front of the blue curtain of policing. To what extent, then, does policing reflect culture that supports and facilitates a war on women? We review arrest trends for female offenders, discuss police responses to crimes against women, and examine policies and practices that may improve understanding of the criminal justice system's role in this war. We find evidence of changes in police perspectives, actions, and policies toward women as perpetrators and victims of crime. Specifically, at the same time that police undertook more aggressive enforcement efforts against certain types of female offenders, resulting in trends for women that were often the reverse of those for men, there was an absence of similar attention to laws and policies protecting women as victims.     

Ethnic outbidding and nested competition: Explaining the extremism of ethnonational minority parties in Europe

The classical outbidding model of ethnic politics argues that democratic competition involving ethnic parties inevitably leads to ethnic outbidding where parties adopt ever more extreme positions. However, recent small‐N studies show that ethnic outbidding is only one of a range of strategies available to ethnic parties. This article seeks to explain why some ethnic parties are extremist, whereas others adopt moderate positions. Drawing on the ethnic outbidding and the nested competition model of ethnic party competition, it is hypothesised that the ethnic segmentation of the electoral market, and the relative salience of an ethnically cross‐cutting economic dimension of party competition, account for the varying degrees of extremism. Hypotheses are tested drawing on a novel, expert‐survey‐based dataset that provides indicators for the positions of 83 ethnonational minority parties in 22 European democracies in 2011. Results of ordinary least squares and two‐level linear regressions show that as the economic dimension gains importance, parties become more moderate relative to the party system mean. The electorate's ethnic segmentation has a positive effect on extremism, but this effect is not significant in all models. Contrary to expectations, higher ethnic segmentation of the party system is associated with more moderate positions in the majority of the estimated models.