MIDDLE MANAGEMENT AND POLICE DEMOCRATIZATION: A Reply to John E. Angell

This article responds to John Angell's (1971) proposal to abolish police middle management. With use of the data from a seven-city study of team policing (Sherman et al., 1973) and Tannenbaum's (1968) framework of control in organizations, the past obstructions and potential uses of middle management to police change are discussed. Rather than abolish or neutralize mid-management, I propose to expand their support functions as a positive aid to change.     

Doctors,Lawyers, and Malpractice Insurance: Is Physician Discipline or Legal Restrictions the Answer?

Legislatures have made numerous attempts to reduce medical malpractice costs by changing the legal rules governing malpractice suits. Additional changes through physician discipline are also under consideration. This paper - tests whether these changes have had the desired effects, using cross-state data. The empirical findings are that the results of changes in the legal rules are generally as expected, but that physician discipline seems to have little impact on either insurer costs or insurance rates, even after the discipline rules have been in effect for up to four years.     

FROM INITIAL DETERRENCE TO LONGTERM ESCALATION: SHORT-CUSTODY ARREST FOR POVERTY GHETTO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE*

Persons arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence are held in custody for widely varying lengths of time. To test the effects of this variance, we randomly assigned short (X?= 2.8 hours), full (X?= 11.1 hours), and no arrests (warning only) to a sample of 1,200 cases with predominantly unemployed suspects concentrated in black ghetto poverty neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Victim interviews and one official measure showed that short arrest had a substantial initial deterrent effect relative to the warning group. Longer term follow-up and before-after analysis, however, found neither arrest group reflected any deterrence. On the most comprehensive official measure, short arrest consistently showed significantly higher long-term recidivism than no arrest. Its deterrent effect ended at 30 days, but its criminogenic effect was significant after one year. We conclude that short-custody arrests for domestic violence in poverty ghetto areas may pose a dilemma between short- and long-term crime control, but longer custody arrests have no clear long-term effect in either direction.     

How Kant's View of Perfect and Imperfect Duties Resolves an Alleged Moral Dilemma for Judges*

Abstract. I clarify Kant's classification of duties and criticize the apocryphal tradition that, according to Kant, perfect duties trump imperfect duties. I then use Kant's view to argue that judges who believe that an action is immoral and should be illegal need not set aside their beliefs in order to comply with binding precedents that permit the action. The same view of morality that causes some people to oppose certain actions, including abortion, requires lower–court judges to comply with binding precedents. Therefore, someone's opposition to legal abortion, by itself, does not justify opposing that person's nomination to a lower court.     

Strategic Terror and Amateur Psychology

Terror is defined as deliberate acts of violence designed to create a psychological effect—terror—with the intention of causing a shift in the target's attitudes and behaviour. A distinction is drawn between tactical terrorism, when such acts are undertaken as part of a multifaceted campaign, and strategic terrorism, where they are undertaken as an independent means of achieving the desired political ends. This follows a familiar distinction in airpower theory. A set of historical examples from both airpower and terrorism, as well as the fictional works of H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, is used to demonstrate the reliance on amateur psychology, concerning the likely social responses to forms of attack. This helps explain why strategic terror is rarely successful, though tactical terror can be.     

Really Responsive Risk‐Based Regulation

Regulators in a number of countries are increasingly developing “risk‐based” strategies to manage their resources, and their reputations as “risk‐based regulators” have become much lauded by regulatory reformers. This widespread endorsement of risk‐based regulation, together with the experience of regulatory failure, prompts us to consider how risk‐based regulators can attune the logics of risk analyses to the complex problems and the dynamics of regulation in practice. We argue, first, that regulators have to regulate in a way that is responsive to five elements: (1) regulated firms' behavior, attitude, and culture; (2) regulation's institutional environments; (3) interactions of regulatory controls; (4) regulatory performance; and (5) change. Secondly, we argue that the challenges of regulation to which regulators have to respond vary across the different regulatory tasks of detection, response development, enforcement, assessment, and modification. Using the “really responsive” framework, we highlight some of the strengths and limitations of using risk‐based regulation to manage risk and uncertainty within the constraints that flow from practical circumstances and, indeed, from the framework of risk‐based regulation itself. The need for a revised, more nuanced conception of risk‐based regulation is stressed.     

PUBLIC SERVICE VALUES: A NEW APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF MOTIVATION IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

This article details an approach for empirically eliciting and examining public service values and their impact on decisions made by public servants. The approach involves adaptation of the Schwartz Portrait Values Questionnaire such that it: (1) elicits values relevant to an individual's public service role rather than broad personal values; and (2) incorporates values omitted by the Schwartz framework, including those identified by Jørgensen and Bozeman and others. To examine the impact of public service values on specific public management decisions, we use structured decision context statements similar to those proposed by Tetlock. We find that: (1) the adapted instrument maps favourably to the Schwartz personal value space; (2) the public service values space includes value sets that expand and refine the personal value space defined by Schwartz; and (3) the public service values elicited can be used to predict decisions made by respondents in specific public service decision contexts.