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.     

The Programme de recherche en démographie historique: past,present and future developments in family reconstitution

The Programme de recherche en démographie historique (Historical Demography Research Programme) (PRDH), founded in 1966 and based at the Département de Démographie of the Université de Montréal, has since its inception featured a central project, a family reconstitution database of Quebec’s Catholic population from 1621 to 1799 named the Registre de la population du Québec ancien (Population Register of Historic Quebec) (RPQA). This article, which marks the fiftieth anniversary of the project, explores the development of the RPQA over the five decades in the context of similar international databases, explains the current state of the database as well as our record linkage methodology, describes an important collaboration now underway to build a larger Quebec historical data infrastructure, outlines new and renewed international collaborations, and summarizes research conducted using these data as well as future research possibilities. The particular geographic context, historical development and manageable colonial population size of Quebec favoured family reconstitution of the whole colony from the beginning of the project. Today, the RPQA comprises 438,193 individual biographies and 74,000 family files encompassing up to nine generations. To reconstitute families, we must identify and incorporate into the database all demographic events, including those whose existence can only be inferred through other sources. Future efforts to link nineteenth-century parish acts will need to deal with large case counts, mixed Catholic–Protestant marriages, and increased geographic and social mobility. The integration of complementary data will provide information on household co-residence, occupations, help track the destinies of mixed-religion persons and persons outside nuclear families and provide additional points of observation.     

The Adaptation of License-plate Readers for Investigative Purposes: Police Technology and Innovation Re-invention

Scholarship has focused on the use of license plate readers by patrol officers as a rational instrument for accomplishing key policing goals, including recovering stolen vehicles. In contrast, this paper applies the theoretical framework of innovation reinvention to explain how license plate readers are being used by criminal investigators in more novel ways. This perspective provides insights into the practical benefits of an enhanced version of this technology. More significantly, it helps illuminate the innovation attributes and the organizational determinants that contribute to its adaptation. In our case study of an agency with extensive deployment of license plate readers, we found that factors contributing to their reinvention included their widespread availability and compatibility with other information systems, their lack of complexity, the characteristics of their users, and the role of leadership in promoting their use. These findings have implications for advancing knowledge about the complex nature of the innovation process.     

The globalized, generous welfare state: Possibility or oxymoron?

Abstract. Arguments about the incompatibility of globalization and generous welfare spending have given way to more nuanced analyses of how domestic-level institutions mediate the impact of globalization. This article discusses and compares two models – the labour-partisan politics model and the labour-monetary politics model – that identify national-level institutions that are said to make it possible for states to combine generous welfare spending and good economic performance. The empirical analysis shows that the labour-monetary politics model performs better for the period 1973–1989. However, institutional conditions that existed during these years are shown to be rather poor predictors of economic performance in the 1990s. The article goes on to discuss what this suggests for the continued viability of generous welfare spending and argues that while globalization might undermine some institutional settings conducive to continued generosity, there is evidence that other ones remain viable.     

The nature and importance of attachment relationships to parents and peers during adolescence

The nature and quality of adolescents' attachments to peers and parents were assessed with the newly developed Inventory of Adolescent Attachments. The relative influence on measures of self-esteem and life satisfaction of relations with peers and with parents was then investigated in a hierarchical regression model. The sample consisted of 213 adolescents ranging from 12 to 19 years of age. Two hypotheses were tested: (1) The quality of perceived attachments both to parents and peers would be related to well-being, and (2) the quality of parental relationships would be a more powerful predictor of well-being than would the quality of peer relationships. Confirming the study's hypotheses, the perceived quality of the adolescents' relationships to both peers and parents, their frequency of utilization of peers, and their degree of negative life change were significantly related to both measures of well-being. The quality of attachment to parents was significantly more powerful than that to peers in predicting well-being. In addition, quality of attachment to parents showed a moderating effect under conditions of high life stress on the measures of self-esteem. The study suggests that it is useful to consider the quality of attachments to significant others as an important variable throughout the life span.     

Correlates of Levels of Democracy in Latin America During the 1990s

Does the conventional wisdom about the relationships between economic, cultural, and political party variables and democracy stand up in the Latin American experience of the 1990s? This study, utilizing new data sets for the region, finds that some traditional hypotheses are upheld better than others. It sustains the conventional wisdom that economic development, economic growth, democratic values, and (with a two‐year lead) education correlate positively with the level of democracy. Surprisingly, however, neither social trust nor the number of political parties is significantly correlated with the level of democracy. The study suggests various possible explanations for the weak or nonexistent relationships for social trust and number of parties, in the hope that these surprising results will stimulate further research.     

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.