The balanced scorecard: Sustainable performance assessment for forensic laboratories

The purpose of this article is to introduce the concept of the balanced scorecard into the laboratory management environment. The balanced scorecard is a performance measurement matrix designed to capture financial and non-financial metrics that provide insight into the critical success factors for an organization, effectively aligning organization strategy to key performance objectives. The scorecard helps organizational leaders by providing balance from two perspectives. First, it ensures an appropriate mix of performance metrics from across the organization to achieve operational excellence; thereby the balanced scorecard ensures that no single or limited group of metrics dominates the assessment process, possibly leading to long-term inferior performance. Second, the balanced scorecard helps leaders offset short term performance pressures by giving recognition and weight to long-term laboratory needs that, if not properly addressed, might jeopardize future laboratory performance.     

Reelection and Legislative Power: Surprising Results from Brazil

A diverse and growing literature ties legislative professionalization and power to career paths. In particular, higher rates of reelection and longer legislative careers should produce more professional, competent, and high‐quality legislatures. Legislators have more incentives to strengthen their own institution when they intend to remain there for a long career. Using data from the most recent constitutional convention in Brazil, we show that legislators with greater prospects for long careers were actually less likely to support strengthening the legislative branch. We explain this as part of a local equilibrium where career legislators’ short‐term need for pork trumped their long‐term interest in a stronger institution.     

The intersection of race and gender: an examination of sentencing outcomes in North Carolina

This study examines the intersection of offenders’ race and gender in the sentencing process using data on felony cases sentenced in North Carolina. Analyses examine the likelihood that charges were reduced in severity between initial filing and conviction, the likelihood of imprisonment, and the length of sentence imposed, and test whether race affects punishment similarly for men and women. Results indicate that status characteristics predict both reductions in charge severity and the severity of the final sentence, and that racial disparity is conditional on gender. However, the results are not entirely consistent with predictions derived from the extant literature. Gender significantly predicts case outcomes at each stage, but black men were not uniformly disadvantaged, and black women received the least severe treatment in two out of four analyses. Theoretical implications for the intersection of race and gender in sentencing theories are discussed.     

Implementing Intelligence-Led Policing: An Application of Loose-Coupling Theory

Purpose

This research is intended to inform a knowledge gap in the literature and present the first national findings related to intelligence-led policing adoption among state and local agencies. Specific practices are identified to inform scholars and practitioners regarding intelligence-led policing behaviors.

Methods

Original survey research from a federally-funded project is gleaned to explore intelligence-led policing adoption through a loose-coupling theoretical perspective. Negative binomial and logistic regression models are employed to identify predictive relationships.

Results

Agencies nationwide appear to be closely following the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan recommendations to enhance information sharing. Consistent with the Department of Homeland Security’s Target Capabilities List is also observed. Agency size appears to have a significant effect on key organizational information sharing behaviors. The findings are tempered due to limitations in the research design.

Conclusions

Local agencies appear to be tightly-coupled with the recommendations put forth in the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan in their efforts to adopt intelligence-led policing. Agency size appears to enhance adoption across most dependent metrics. This research progresses the limited evidence base and progress regarding this emerging policing philosophy.     

When the Interest Rate on the National Debt Is a Policy Variable (and “Printing Money” Does Not Apply)

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) argues that the interest rate on the national debt for a monetary sovereign is a policy variable, not subject to whether bond markets “accept” or “reject” it. This paper defines measures of the components of the standard analysis of fiscal sustainability. It then methodically describes the Federal Reserve's operations relevant for understanding why interest rates on government debt in the United States have been and continue to be driven by monetary policy. A corollary that emerges—“printing money,” as economists usually understand it—is not applicable and has never been advocated by MMT.     

The New Ecology of Tornado Warning Information: A Natural Experiment Assessing Threat Intensity and Citizen‐to‐Citizen Information Sharing

The complexity of the modern information ecosystem raises many questions for public organizations. In the context of emergency management, information (such as warning messages) is communicated not only from a source of authority to the public but also between members of the public. The authors use a series of storms that affected Oklahoma in the spring of 2016 to test propositions related to how information about tornado warnings reached the public and who received and shared information about the storm, as well as to identify how gender and age mediate the influence that exposure to an extreme weather event has on the sharing of this information. Overall, the authors find that reported exposure to a tornado increases information sharing through a variety of media and technology. The effect of the tornado erases the otherwise present gender gap in sharing information, while it has little effect on the media platforms that are most popular among older respondents.     

Britain Returns to the Indian Ocean?

This article considers how far the UK is returning to an ‘East of Suez’ role in the Indian Ocean. A threefold structure is taken based on past, current and future aspects of this role. The first section (‘past’) considers the Indian Ocean as a British Lake and the announced withdrawal from East of Suez that was announced in the early 1970s. The second section (‘present’) looks at the various bases, facilities and partnerships that the UK has around and across the Indian Ocean with Bahrain, Oman, Gulf of Aden, Somaliland, Diego Garcia (and the United States), India, Malaysia and Singapore (including the Five Power Defence Agreements), Australia and China. The third section (‘future’) considers likely post-BREXIT decisions facing the UK in the Indian Ocean with regard to its projected naval assets and political choices across the region. It finds there is some substance behind the rhetoric on a British return to the area.     

Noncitizens and the Supplemental Security Income program

The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, established by the Social Security Amendments of 1972 (Public Law 92-603), was designed to provide cash assistance to needy aged, blind, and disabled citizens, and noncitizens lawfully admitted for permanent residence or permanently residing under color of law. Since then, this means-tested program has undergone many legislative changes that affect the eligibility status of noncitizens. This article, presented in three parts, discusses the legislative history of noncitizen eligibility, and details relevant laws enacted since the program's inception; provides current data on the trends and changes of the noncitizen population; and describes the larger population of foreign-born SSI recipients, of which the noncitizens are a part. Data on the number of SSI recipients born abroad but who had become citizens before applying for SSI payments were not previously available. Analytical data are from the Supplemental Security Record (SSR) matched to the Social Security Number Identification (Numident) file.