The Evidence-Based Policing Matrix

The next phase of evidence-based policing requires both scholars and practitioners to move from lists of specific studies about “what works” to using that information strategically. This requires developing generalizations or principles on the nature of effective police strategies and translating the field of police evaluation research into digestible forms that can be used to alter police tactics, strategies, accountability systems, and training. In this article, we present a tool intended for such use: the Evidence-Based Policing Matrix. The Matrix is a consistently updated, research-to-practice translation tool that categorizes and visually bins all experimental and quasi-experimental research on police and crime reduction into intersections between three common dimensions of crime prevention—the nature of the target, the extent to which the strategy is proactive or reactive, and the specificity or generality of the strategy. Our mapping and visualization of 97 police evaluation studies conducted through December 31, 2009, indicate that proactive, place-based, and specific policing approaches appear much more promising in reducing crime than individual-based, reactive, and general ones. We conclude by discussing how the Matrix can be used to guide future research and facilitate the adoption of evidence-based policing.     

Everyday Understandings of Citizenship in Germany

Most scholarship on citizenship focuses on institutional and structural analyses and extrapolates these to individual citizens' experiences. This renders citizenship a static and uniform concept that is divorced from individuals' understandings. Data gathered during qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, Germany, in 2000–01 show how ordinary Germans' understandings of citizenship challenge an oversimplified narrative about “Germanness” which has assigned a static notion of German citizenship as based on “blood”, or principles of jus sanguinis. By analyzing interviews with 60 working-class youth, this article demonstrates that these young people construct understandings of citizenship based primarily on cultural criteria. These findings redefine prevailing assumptions about Germans' understandings of citizenship and demonstrate that citizenship and naturalization policies cannot be used as a measure of the meaning of citizenship for ordinary citizens. Citizenship is not a static or uniform concept, but is rather imagined and re-imagined by ordinary citizens in a variety of ways.     

Lustration in poland and the former czechoslovakia: a study in decommunization

This article examines the process of decommunization in Poland and the former Czechoslovakia as it impacted opportunity for public services employment in elected or civil service offices. In each setting we describe the motivations expressed for and against lustration in the public service, explain the patterns of decommunization in each country and consider these events from legal, ethical and political points of view.     

Health care cost escalation in the united states: Implications of market failure

Much of the rhetoric in the debate over health care reform suggests reconfiguring the health care system so that the free market forces can work efficiently. This paper will show that hopes for a free market solution to the maldistribution of health care are false. The free market system cannot work at the same level of efficiency for health care as it does in the distribution of other goods and services. Health care presents an anomaly to the free market system, making optimal and efficient distribution virtually impossible. That failure of the market system has led to a crisis of disparity in health care access and delivery in the United States.     

Peer Relations,Violence and School Attendance: Analyses of Bullying in Senior High Schools in Ghana

Abstract

This article focuses on bullying among students and explores the ways it affects the attendance of senior high school students in Ghana. It explores whether having emotional problems, in addition to being bullied, incrementally affects the relationship between bullying and school attendance and the mitigating influence of peer friendships on these relationships. The results show gender differences in which absenteeism associated with bullying was mitigated by the support of friends for boys but not to the same degree for girls, especially those girls who had reported being psychologically bullied. Our findings suggest a school environment in which peer friendship and emotional wellbeing are intertwined in complex ways.