Leadership with an Enduring Impact: The Legacy of Chief Burtell Jefferson of the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C.

On January 13, 1978, after nearly 30 years of public service, Burtell Jefferson became the first African American to serve as chief of the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C. This profile describes his personal and professional journey and describes—from the perspective of a cadre of active and retired police chiefs and chief executive officers—the impact of Jefferson's career on the Metropolitan Police Department and policing in America more broadly. Jefferson's story, an exemplary illustration of public sector leadership, has profound implications for contemporary efforts to ensure the equality of employment opportunity. Jefferson's career provides a model of effective leadership that is applicable across organizations and sectors. He not only led his organization well but also encouraged and developed generations of future leaders.     

Nonphysical Abuse Among Batterer Program Participants

Nonphysical abuse of women is receiving increased attention, but research with clinical samples of batterers has not substantially addressed the risk markers of nonphysical abuse. A multisite sample of batterer program participants (n = 840) with a longitudinal 15-month follow-up was used to identify risk markers. Logistic regressions were computed with batterer characteristics for 4 categories of nonphysical abuse (i.e., control, verbal, threats, combined) reported by the batterer's female partners during the follow-up. The only substantial and consistent risk markers were nonphysical and physical abuse prior to program intake and program dropout. The programs appear to help reduce the abuse. Other significant risk markers varied across the categories of nonphysical abuse, suggesting that the categories do not form a continuum or hierarchy of abuse. Recurrent abuse, moreover, continues to be more difficult to predict in clinical samples than in the general population.     

Psychopathy,Treatment Involvement,and Subsequent Violence Among Civil Psychiatric Patients

Individuals with psychopathy typically are viewed as incurable cases that should be diverted from treatment settings to environments where their behavior can be monitored and controlled. The prevailing clinical conviction that psychopaths are untreatable has crucial implications, given the scarcity of mental health care resources, the number of legal contexts that call for assessment of treatability, and the explosion of research on psychopathy and violence risk over recent years. Based on a sample of 871 civil psychiatric patients (including 195 potentially psychopathic and 72 psychopathic patients), this study explores the relations among psychopathy, receipt of outpatient mental health services in real-world settings, and subsequent violence in the community. The results suggest that psychopathic traits do not moderate the effect of treatment involvement on violence, even after controlling statistically for the treatment assignment process. Psychopathic patients appear as likely as nonpsychopathic patients to benefit from adequate doses of treatment, in terms of violence reduction. We interpret these results in light of prior research with offenders and analyze their implications for future research, policy, and practice.     

Contraceptive embarrassment and contraceptive behavior among young single women

The objective of this paper was to determine factors predictive of contraceptive embarrassment and to determine the relationship of contraceptive embarrassment to contraceptive use among young unmarried females. Contraceptive embarrassment was measured by an eight-item scale (a=0.88]. Data were obtained from 265 nonvirgin high school and university females who were currently dating. Using simple multiple regression, 30% of the variance of the embarrassment scale was explained, with the most important predictors being parental attitude to premarital intercourse and sexual guilt. Other significant predictors were attitude to planning ahead to use contraception, perveived difficulty in obtaining contraceptive devices, and peer attitudes toward premarital intercourse. The embarrassment scale had significant correlations with contraceptive use.Sponsorship from Health and Welfare Canada through Family Planning Grant No. 4470-5-10 provided for the data collection, and sponsorship from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, DH&W, Contract No. N01-HD-92809 provided for the data analysis.Received his Ph.D. from Department of Sociology, Iowa State University and is interested in the sociology of adolescence, particularly dating, sexual relations, and use of contraception.     

Multi-agency approaches in ‘criminogenic’ settings: the case of the Amsterdam Red Light District

This paper assesses the empirical evidence on multi-agency collaboration to reduce crime, uphold justice and improve safety in the so-called ‘Red Light District’ in the city center of Amsterdam, which has been a high crime area for decades. Three periods are analyzed: crime on the streets (1980s–1996); organized crime behind the front doors (1996–2007); and reconquering the Red Light District (2007–2011). The paper analyzes shifts in the definition and framing of central crime problems, causal assumptions, policy assumptions, and evidence on multi-agency collaboration and outcomes. Alongside positive outcomes, all three periods contain evidence on how difficult it is to forge and sustain alliances between government agencies; and to coordinate a shared focus on a single area and on a single topic. Furthermore, the final outcomes of these efforts are hard to measure with the exception of visible street crime. Finally, the paper contributes to the literature on Third Party Policing and multi-agency collaboration by looking beyond the police as the central actor and by widening the predominant instrumental focus to normative and political issues such as changing norms, priorities, and increasing and decreasing internal and external support for certain policy lines and actions.     

Solace for the Frustrations of Silent Citizenship: the Case of Epicureanism

Insofar as no democratic society can fully realize norms of free and equal citizenship, citizens in such regimes are likely to experience some degree of discontent with their political lives. This raises a second purpose for democratic theory beyond the usual focus on improving democratic institutions: the psychological issue of how ordinary citizens might find solace in the face of disappointment. Democratic theory is capable of providing solace because egalitarian commitments – equality, free speech, solidarity, and self-sufficiency – have a double potential: they not only ground efforts to democratize institutions, but when sublimated in apolitical form also have the capacity to generate a transcendence of the political form itself. In this essay, I pursue both ideas – the need for solace and egalitarianism's ability to provide it – through analysis of the way Epicureanism may have functioned for the ordinary, plebeian citizens in late Republican Rome.     

Identification of the veterinary sedative medetomidine in combination with opioids and xylazine in Maryland

Public health, public safety, and forensic science personnel continue to face the emergence of new compounds into the drug market. While focus is often put on the detection of new analogs of known illicit drugs, monitoring the changes in cutting agents and other compounds can be equally as important. Over the last year, near real-time monitoring of the drug supply in Maryland has been completed through a public health–public safety partnership whereby residue from suspected drug packaging or used paraphernalia is collected and analyzed. Through this project, we have recently detected the presence of the veterinary sedative medetomidine in a small number of samples. The presence of medetomidine has been identified in both public health and law enforcement samples and in the presence of fentanyl and xylazine—another veterinary sedative that has been widely observed over the last year. While the rate at which medetomidine has been detected remains low, it is concerning and worthy of continued monitoring.     

“Juvenile Drug Courts and Recidivism: Results from a Multisite Outcome Study”

This study reports findings from a study of nine juvenile drug courts (JDCs) from across the US. A quasi-experimental design, with one-to-one matching on possible confounders and sociodemographics, was used for the outcome assessment (n?=?1372). Baseline and outcome data were drawn from justice system records. Although there is variation across sites and, to some extent, outcomes, these JDCs were generally ineffective in reducing recidivism. Similar findings have emerged in other recent studies of JDCs. Given the results of this study and others, it is essential that juvenile courts work to improve the effectiveness of JDCs by increasing adherence to known principles of effective intervention.