Assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of a police service: the analytics of operational reviews

Concerns over rising costs have forced police services to balance increasing fiscal and operational pressures. Discussions of the resources and requirements of police, however, are generally only informed by political expediency and traditional practice. Operational reviews (ORs) can be used to document the demands on police, their capacity to respond, and ways in which they can become more efficient and effective. Drawing on an OR of a major urban Canadian police service, this article provides a broad outline of the components of an OR and the analytics that can be used to answer these key questions.     

Forensic Evidence in Homicide Investigations and Prosecutions

Even though forensic evidence is collected at virtually every homicide scene, only a few studies have examined its role in investigation and prosecution. This article adds to the literature by providing the results of a study of 294 homicide cases (315 victims) occurring in Cleveland, Ohio, between 2008 and 2011. Through a logistic regression on open versus closed cases, the collection of knives, administration of gunshot residue (GSR) kits, and clothing at the scene were positively and significantly related to case closures, while collection of ballistics evidence and DNA evidence were statistically significant in the opposite direction. With regard to analysis, the clearance rate for cases with probative results (i.e., matches or exclusions) was 63.1% compared to a closure rate of 56.3% for cases without probative results. However, only 23 cases had probative results prior to arrest compared to 128 cases with probative results after arrest.     

My life as a community activist

The author recounts his life and how it led to a career as an activist community psychology practitioner with a focus on issues of social justice. He tells of his upbringing, family and education as the background to a series of positions in various systems. The story shows an evolution from working with individuals to working with whole communities; and from working on issues of remediation and treatment to working on prevention and finally empowerment, social change, and social justice. The story of his life parallels the social issues of the time. Throughout the accounting of his life the author raises the questions that he was struggling with. The sequence of those questions is as follows: Can I emerge as a community leader? What do I do with that leadership? Can my work in psychology have any relationship to the larger social issues? Can my politics, social action and beliefs in social justice, be integrated with my mental health job? Can I find a setting that will tolerate and permit me to do work to create social change and reduce oppression? Can we build competent helping systems with partners from many sectors? Can we mobilize whole communities around community crises? Can we use coalition building to make a difference in quality of life? And finally: How can our spirituality inform our work for social change and how can our social change work to inform our spirituality?     

The Contingency of Voter Learning: How Election Debates Influenced Voters’ Ability and Accuracy to Position Parties in the 2010 Dutch Election Campaign

Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties’ issue positions, thereby increasing voters’ ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on voters’ characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters’ knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters’ ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas voters’ attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewers’ ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost voters’ subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy.     

Bioinformatics and human identification in mass fatality incidents: the world trade center disaster

Victim identification initiatives undertaken in the wake of Mass Fatality Incidents (MFIs) where high-body fragmentation has been sustained are often dependent on DNA typing technologies to complete their mandate. The success of these endeavors is linked to the choice of DNA typing methods and the bioinformatic tools required to make the necessary associations. Several bioinformatic tools were developed to assist with the identification of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, one of the most complex incidents to date. This report describes one of these tools, the Mass Disaster Kinship Analysis Program (MDKAP), a pair-wise comparison software designed to handle large numbers of complete or partial Short Tandem Repeats (STR) genotypes, and infer identity of, or biological relationships between tested samples. The software performs all functions required to take full advantage of the information content of processed genotypic data sets from large-scale MFIs, including the collapse of victims data sets, remains re-association, virtual genotype generation through gap-filling, parentage trio searching, and a consistency check of reported/inferred biological relationships within families. Although very few WTC victims were genetically related, the software can detect parentage trios from within a victim's genotype data set through a nontriangulated approach that screens all possible parentage trios. All software-inferred relationships from WTC data were confirmed by independent statistical analysis. With a 13 STR loci complement, a fortuitous parentage trio (FPT) involving nonrelated individuals was detected. Additional STR loci would be required to reduce the risk of an FPT going undetected in large-scale MFIs involving related individuals among the victims. Kinship analysis has proven successful in this incident but its continued success in larger scale MFIs is contingent on the use of a sufficient number of STR loci to reduce the risk of undetected FPTs, the use of mtDNA and Y-STRs to confirm parentage and of bioinformatics that can support large-scale comparative genotyping schemes capable of detecting parentage trios from within a group of related victims.