Police Interviewing and Interrogation: A Self-Report Survey of Police Practices and Beliefs

By questionnaire, 631 police investigators reported on their interrogation beliefs and practices-the first such survey ever conducted. Overall, participants estimated that they were 77% accurate at truth and lie detection, that 81% of suspects waive Miranda rights, that the mean length of interrogation is 1.6 hours, and that they elicit self-incriminating statements from 68% of suspects, 4.78% from innocents. Overall, 81% felt that interrogations should be recorded. As for self-reported usage of various interrogation tactics, the most common were to physically isolate suspects, identify contradictions in suspects' accounts, establish rapport, confront suspects with evidence of their guilt, and appeal to self-interests. Results were discussed for their consistency with prior research, policy implications, and methodological shortcomings.     

Buried voices: Mexican migrants’ views on the question of illegality

How do immigrant Mexican workers perceive the policies and social discourses that regulate their insertion into American society as noncitizens and illegals? Using ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, evidence is presented that unauthorized Mexican migrants do not consider themselves lawbreakers but rather moral actors responding to difficult socioeconomic conditions. Informed by a keen understanding of the social forces oppressing them, these migrants articulate a discourse of social justice that works as a powerful counterpoint to the hegemonic ideas of citizenship, belonging, and illegality. A careful analysis of migrant social reflexivity offers a much-needed corrective to the prevailing top-down perspective typically offered among contemporary scholars. By looking at the ways in which migrants make sense of immigration policies and articulate their right to have rights, this examination departs from the widespread tendency among scholars and policy makers of analyzing the migrant’s social and civic status as a matter of assimilation and immigration control.     

The “Bestie di Satana” Murders

In recent years, satanic groups have been responsible for various types and degrees of crimes. We report the case of a number of murders committed in Italy by a group of young people calling themselves the “Bestie di Satana”. Forensic psychiatric assessment of the members of a satanic sect charged with the crime revealed that all the young people had a fragile, immature personality, a very low level of education and were socially disadvantaged. The trial of the members of the “Bestie di Satana” sect was concluded with the verdict of deliberate murder, and all the members were given long jail sentences. This report should lead us to explore social and cultural responses to juvenile satanism, statistically shown to be a relatively rare phenomenon but with a high criminal potential.     

A trilogy of primers

Barry Rubin (ed.), The Politics of Terrorism: Terror as a State and Revolutionary Strategy, Washington, DC: The Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, 1989. Pp.xiv + 236. $35.75 (hardback), $19 (paperback). ISBN 0–941700–45–3 and 44–5.

Barry Rubin (ed.), The Politics of Counter‐Terrorism: The Ordeal of Democratic States, Washington, DC: The Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, 1990. Pp.xv + 222. $44.50 (hardback), $21 (paperback). ISBN 0–941700–60–7 and 61–5.

Barry Rubin (ed.), Terrorism and Politics, New York: St Martin's Press, 1991. Pp.xi + 174. $39.95. ISBN 0–312–06068–8.     

Theoretical and operational challenges of “high-reliability organizations”: air-traffic control and aircraft carriers

This is an empirical and theoretical examination of high reliability organizations. The empirical referents are the U.S. Navy's nuclear aircraft carriers and the air traffic control system of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Three modes of organizational behavior are observed ranging from routine or bureaucratic to high-tempo to emergency. Each mode has distinctive authority patterns, communications pathways and leadership perspectives.

Since 1984, an interdisciplinary group of scholars at Berkeley has been involved in making observations of and theorizing about “high reliability organizations” (HROs), which operate technical systems that are very beneficial, costly, and hazardous. Major operational errors in these organizations are likely to produce catastrophic consequences; therefore, HROs take on the dual goals of sustaining delivery at maximum capacity and operating in nearly error-free fashion. They are so effective that the probability of serious error is very low.

Other kinds of organizations systematically use trial-and-error learning. HROs, however, have less confidence in this process for conducting hazardous operations, because their next error may be their last trial.

This paper draws on experience with two of the Navy's nuclear aircraft carriers and the Federal Aviation Administration's air-traffic control system. Current theories derive primarily from studies of “failure-tolerant,” trial-and-error operating bureaucracies. Is this literature a sure guide to HROs? Do the phenomena challenge contemporary thinking about complex organizations? “High-reliability” operations reveal a range of theoretical (and operational) surprises. The remainder of this discussion explores a single dimension of this theoretical arena.     

Coprophanaeus lancifer (Linnaeus, 1767) (Coleoptera, Scarabaeidae) activity moves a man-size pig carcass: relevant data for forensic taphonomy

Taphonomy is the study of many variables involving decomposition, preservation, dispersal, erosion, burial or exposition of dead organisms. Forensic Taphonomy examines how biotic or abiotic variables can change evidences in legal investigations. Many insects are closely associated with decomposition processes. The scavenger dung-beetle, Coprophanaeus lancifer (Linnaeus, 1767), may be important biotaphonomically in the decomposition process of carcasses. Man-size pig carcasses were used as models to examine the decomposition process in the Adolpho Ducke Forest Reserve in central Amazonia. The scavenger dung-beetle has great potential in decomposition and production of post-mortem injuries, including dismemberment and the removal of soil beneath the carcass thereby causing a change in its position.     

Is the Chinese ‘entrepreneurial welfare state’ an industrial policy in disguise?

Abstract

What has driven China, a developing country that has only recently saved itself from nationwide poverty, to increase its investment in social welfare so rapidly and extensively in the past decade? Drawing on extensive field research in a prefecture-level district in southwest China between 2014 and 2017, the authors argue in this article that local governments in China provide welfare housing programmes as a veil for developmentalist industrial policies aimed at industrial upgrading and the improvement of dynamic efficiency. The article demonstrates the unique incentive structure behind the local Chinese governments’ role as the front-line investor in social welfare benefits, and how the local state has cunningly used the façade of welfare provision to (1) divert the earmarked budget to implement development-oriented industrial policy; and (2) fake a discursive congruence between the heavily interventionist local practice and the overall neoliberal central-level policy discourse that features deregulation, small government and a laissez-faire developmental pathway. Exploring this set of strategic dynamics underlining the manoeuvres of the Chinese welfare operation helps us understand the variability of welfare state forms and trajectories of developmental strategy in the Global South.     

Political parties and corruption: Ten hypotheses on five vicious circles

Strong political parties and genuine competition among them feature in many anti-corruption strategies, but in practice the relationships between corruption and political parties are much more complex than is generally recognized. This article explores and illustrates ten hypotheses about those connections, drawing in detail upon Italian, Japanese, and other cases for evidence. These connections extend well beyond amounts and trends of corruption to include the motivations of party members and supporters, internal problems of party organizations, and links between parties and state institutions. Major concerns included party bureaucratization, membership, and resources; electoral volatility; party fragmentation; collusion among parties; and party influence in public administration. These hypotheses will be best understood, and tested, comparatively, but in so doing we need to look not only at basic causes of corruption but also at ways in which parties and other institutions reproduce the conditions that sustain it.     

Steuerung jenseits von Hierarchie

The paper sheds new light on recent debates about governance and approaches contemporary problems of governing from the perspective of contemporary theories of power. The concept of “soft governing” is developed in order to capture horizontal mechanisms of power intentionally used to govern beyond formalised hierarchies characteristic of processes of governance. The paper describes in particular the horizontal forms of governing through discursive practices, argumentation and symbols and the ways in which they interact. The example of campaigns against female genital mutilation is introduced in order to illustrate possible forms of governing beyond hierarchy.