The Salience of Social Contextual Factors in Appraisals of Police Interactions with Citizens: A Randomized Factorial Experiment

Objectives

Prior research indicates that public assessments of the manner in which the police exercise their authority are a key antecedent of judgments about the legitimacy of the police. In this study, the importance of context in influencing people’s assessment of police wrongdoing is examined.

Methods

A randomized factorial experiment was used to test how respondents perceive and evaluate police–citizens interactions along a range of types of situations and encounters. 1,361 subjects were surveyed on factors hypothesized to be salient influences on how citizens perceive and evaluate citizen interactions with police. Subjects viewed videos of actual police–citizen encounters and were asked for their evaluations of these observed encounters. Contextual primes were used to focus subjects on particular aspects of the context within which the encounter occurs.

Results

Structural equation models revealed that social contextual framing factors, such as the climate of police–community relations and the legality of the stop that led to the encounter, influence citizen appraisals of police behavior with effects comparable in size to and even larger than demographic variables such as education, race, and income.

Conclusions

These results suggest that the understandings and perceptions that people bring to a situation are important determinants of their assessment of police fairness. The police can positively influence citizen interpretations of police actions by striving to create a climate of positive police–community relationships in cities.     

A ‘synchronised attack’ on life: the Saudi-led coalition’s ‘hidden and holistic’ genocide in Yemen and the shared responsibility of the US and UK

Abstract

Since the Saudi-led coalition (Coalition) began its military campaign in Yemen in March 2015, upwards of 13,000 Yemen civilians have been killed, including nearly 2000 women and 3000 children. Additionally, Coalition aerial attacks have intentionally targeted Yemen’s civilian infrastructure, economic infrastructure, medical facilities and cultural heritage. Combined with the ongoing air and naval blockade, which has impeded the ability of Yemenis to access clean water, food, fuel and health services, the violence visited upon Yemen has created near-famine conditions. Furthermore, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) predicts another imminent outbreak of cholera, with the potential to be as deadly as last year’s which infected more than one million children and killed a child every 10?minutes. Through engagement with genocide studies literature, this article applies a holistic conception of genocide to the Coalition military campaign. It finds that the Coalition is conducting an ongoing campaign of genocide by a ‘synchronised attack’ on all aspects of life in Yemen, one that is only possible with the complicity of the United States and United Kingdom.     

Britain Returns to the Indian Ocean?

This article considers how far the UK is returning to an ‘East of Suez’ role in the Indian Ocean. A threefold structure is taken based on past, current and future aspects of this role. The first section (‘past’) considers the Indian Ocean as a British Lake and the announced withdrawal from East of Suez that was announced in the early 1970s. The second section (‘present’) looks at the various bases, facilities and partnerships that the UK has around and across the Indian Ocean with Bahrain, Oman, Gulf of Aden, Somaliland, Diego Garcia (and the United States), India, Malaysia and Singapore (including the Five Power Defence Agreements), Australia and China. The third section (‘future’) considers likely post-BREXIT decisions facing the UK in the Indian Ocean with regard to its projected naval assets and political choices across the region. It finds there is some substance behind the rhetoric on a British return to the area.     

Noncitizens and the Supplemental Security Income program

The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, established by the Social Security Amendments of 1972 (Public Law 92-603), was designed to provide cash assistance to needy aged, blind, and disabled citizens, and noncitizens lawfully admitted for permanent residence or permanently residing under color of law. Since then, this means-tested program has undergone many legislative changes that affect the eligibility status of noncitizens. This article, presented in three parts, discusses the legislative history of noncitizen eligibility, and details relevant laws enacted since the program's inception; provides current data on the trends and changes of the noncitizen population; and describes the larger population of foreign-born SSI recipients, of which the noncitizens are a part. Data on the number of SSI recipients born abroad but who had become citizens before applying for SSI payments were not previously available. Analytical data are from the Supplemental Security Record (SSR) matched to the Social Security Number Identification (Numident) file.     

How Disgust Influences Health Purity Attitudes

Food and health regulations are increasingly being pushed onto the political agenda, with rising concerns about genetically modified foods, obesity rates, and vaccination. Public beliefs and attitudes on these issues often conflict with the scientific evidence, yet we know relatively little about what influences opinion on these issues. The public lacks clear partisan cues, and many food and health attitudes cut across the ideological spectrum. We argue that these issues represent new ‘purity’ attitudes that are driven by the emotion of disgust. Across three studies, both by measuring individuals’ trait disgust sensitivity and experimentally inducing an emotional state of disgust, we demonstrate the impact of disgust on food and health policy attitudes. Our results show that greater sensitivity to disgust is associated with support for organic foods, opposition to genetically modified foods, and anti-vaccination beliefs. However, we find only limited evidence that experimentally manipulated disgust affects attitudes toward genetically modified and organic foods. Overall, our results demonstrate that disgust plays an important role in attitudes regarding public health and broadens our understanding of purity attitudes.     

Why Assessing Estimative Accuracy is Feasible and Desirable

The US Intelligence Community (IC) has been heavily criticized for making inaccurate estimates. Many scholars and officials believe that these criticisms reflect inappropriate generalizations from a handful of cases, thus producing undue cynicism about the IC's capabilities. Yet there is currently no way to evaluate this claim, because the IC does not systematically assess the accuracy of its estimates. Many scholars and practitioners justify this state of affairs by claiming that assessing estimative accuracy would be impossible, unwise, or both. This article shows how those arguments are generally unfounded. Assessing estimative accuracy is feasible and desirable. This would not require altering existing tradecraft and it would address several political and institutional problems that the IC faces today.     

The 2017 election in Kenya: reimagining the past or introducing the future?

The new 2010 Kenya Constitution introduced a devolved system of government that has radically transformed the Kenyan polity. The political elite which operated primarily at the national level now encounters a new competitive political arena with the introduction of county governments under devolution. In particular, a new post of County Governor has surpassed in power calculations both the traditional MP and the new position of senator. In the 2013 elections, the focus was on the national arena; in 2017, all this will change.