THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A POLICE GANG UNIT: AN EXAMINATION OF ORGANIZATIONAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS*

Although researchers have begun to document the programs and activities performed by police gang units, little research has examined why police gang units are created and why they have responded to local gang problems in the way they have over the past 10 years. Using a multimethodological research design, the present study examines the factors that shaped a Midwestern police department's response to its community's gang problem. The results from the present study lend support for the institutional perspective. The data suggest that the gang unit was created as a consequence of pressures placed on the police department from various powerful elements within the community and that, once created, the unit's response was largely driven by its need to achieve and maintain organizational legitimacy.     

GENDER,RACE, AND HABITUAL OFFENDER SENTENCING IN FLORIDA*

This study explores the effects of race and gender on habitual offender sentencing in Florida. The sample consists of 1,103 female offenders admitted to the Florida Department of Corrections in fiscal year 1992–1993 who were eligible for sentencing under the habitual offender statute. Controlling for prior record, crime seriousness, crime type, and sentencing county contextual variables through logistic regression analysis, defendant race was found to be a relevant and statistically significant factor in the enhanced sentencing of female offenders. This factor was most noticeable with black female drug offenders and under structural contexts that were “high,” i.e., the percent of the population black, drug arrest rates, and violent crime rates. The race effects found with this sample of female offenders were often stronger than those in the Crawford et al. 1998 study of 9,960 eligible male offenders in Florida. The relevance of these findings is discussed.     

LOCAL INQUIRIES OR PUBLIC HEARINGS: CHANGES IN PUBLIC CONSULTATION OVER THE REDISTRIBUTION OF UK PARLIAMENTARY CONSTITUENCY BOUNDARIES

The UK government undertakes a variety of public consultation procedures during the implementation of a range of policies, some of which involve public hearings with varying formats. In 2011 it proposed a major change to such procedures used in the redistribution of Parliamentary constituency boundaries. Local Inquiries were deemed ‘not fit for purpose’ and eliminated, because they were lengthy and dominated by the political parties seeking electoral gain. This change was opposed in Parliament and an alternative procedure introduced involving Public Hearings which were to be shorter and less conflictual than the Local Inquiries they replaced. The Hearings for the first round of redistributions under the new procedure have now been held. This article assesses whether they were any ‘fitter for purpose’; there was very little participation by the general public and, as before, the proceedings were dominated by the political parties.     

Preventing Local Government Fiscal Crises: The North Carolina Approach

Some local governments face fiscal challenges due to mismanagement and declining economies. In particular, manufacturing states like Michigan and Ohio have been hard hit by the effects of international competition. To prevent fiscal distress from becoming a crisis, states exercise oversight over local government fiscal management. The three bond rating agencies consider the North Carolina oversight system a model. This paper discusses the North Carolina oversight system, including audit review, technical assistance, debt issuance, and power to take over the financial operations of distressed local units.     

Current Criminal Justice Projects Here and Abroad

The present survey is based mainly, as far as the United States is concerned, on the files of the Smithsonian Science Information Exchange (SSIE), from whom we received—with the financial support of the University of Central Florida—the most recent five hundred or so project reports in the field of criminal and juvenile justice and related areas, including crime-related drug and alcohol abuse projects. As to foreign projects, only a few are listed with SSIE; most of the following information is the result of an admittedly incomplete inquiry among organizations, research institutes, and universities abroad. May we say here that we received excellent cooperation from them which we greatly appreciated. Space being limited, we can describe in the following article only a few of the some one-thousand projects we examined.     

INSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP DIMENSIONS OF CASCADING ECOLOGICAL CRISES

While some of the future impacts of global environmental change such as some aspects of climate change can be projected and prepared for in advance, other effects are likely to surface as surprises – that is situations in which the behaviour in a system, or across systems, differs qualitatively from expectations. Here we analyse a set of institutional and political leadership challenges posed by ‘cascading’ ecological crises: abrupt ecological changes that propagate into societal crises that move through systems and spatial scales. We illustrate their underlying social and ecological drivers, and a range of institutional and political leadership challenges, which have been insufficiently elaborated by either crisis management researchers or institutional scholars. We conclude that even though these sorts of crises have parallels to other contingencies, there are a number of major differences resulting from the combination of a lack of early warnings, abrupt ecological change, and the mismatch between decision‐making capabilities and the cross‐scale dynamics of social‐ecological change.