The Salience of Social Contextual Factors in Appraisals of Police Interactions with Citizens: A Randomized Factorial Experiment

Objectives

Prior research indicates that public assessments of the manner in which the police exercise their authority are a key antecedent of judgments about the legitimacy of the police. In this study, the importance of context in influencing people’s assessment of police wrongdoing is examined.

Methods

A randomized factorial experiment was used to test how respondents perceive and evaluate police–citizens interactions along a range of types of situations and encounters. 1,361 subjects were surveyed on factors hypothesized to be salient influences on how citizens perceive and evaluate citizen interactions with police. Subjects viewed videos of actual police–citizen encounters and were asked for their evaluations of these observed encounters. Contextual primes were used to focus subjects on particular aspects of the context within which the encounter occurs.

Results

Structural equation models revealed that social contextual framing factors, such as the climate of police–community relations and the legality of the stop that led to the encounter, influence citizen appraisals of police behavior with effects comparable in size to and even larger than demographic variables such as education, race, and income.

Conclusions

These results suggest that the understandings and perceptions that people bring to a situation are important determinants of their assessment of police fairness. The police can positively influence citizen interpretations of police actions by striving to create a climate of positive police–community relationships in cities.     

Are Overlapping Local Governments Competing With Each Other When Issuing Debt?

Local public services are produced through various overlapping jurisdictions. This study examines how the issuance of municipal general obligation bonds is affected by the tax policies of overlapping local governments. The findings challenge the hypothesis that the shared tax base would be overused in a common-pool resource scenario. Instead, the empirical results show that the issuance of general obligation bonds is more likely in jurisdictions where counties and school districts make more intensive use of the property tax. These findings highlight the importance of the signals local governments receive from their overlapping neighbors regarding voters’ demand for additional public spending.     

Jeremy Bentham,John Stuart Mill and the Secret Ballot: Insights from Nineteenth Century Democratic Theory

As part of a series of demands for political reform in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham famously made a case for use of the secret ballot in elections. The advocacy of Bentham and his disciples on this issue fed into broader and at times robust public debate, particularly in the 1830s. On the opposite side of this debate was another leading political theorist, John Stuart Mill, who opposed secret ballot reform. This paper re‐examines the contours of this debate, making the case that it has important implications for contemporary political theory and debates about democracy. Firstly, and in terms of making sense of the debate itself, it points to the need to make a distinction between the “voter intimidation” argument and the Benthamite preference aggregation argument. Secondly, it suggests that distinguishing between vote‐buying and voter's dependence provides support for defenders of the secret ballot. Thirdly, it demonstrates the potential application of the idea of voting held in “trust” to the so‐called boundary problem in democratic theory. Finally, it points to the potentially wide but overlooked application of the Chartist idea of open voting (allowing the oppressed to identify their allies) in contemporary political theory.     

Multiculturalism and the Willingness of Citizens to Defer to Law and to Legal Authorities

A key problem in trying to manage diverse societies is finding social policies that will be acceptable to all individuals and groups. Studies suggest that this problem may not be as intractable as is often believed, since people's acceptance of policies is shaped to an important degree by the fairness of the procedures used by authorities to make policy. When policies are fairly made, they gain widespread support, even among those who may feel that the consequences of the policy for them or their group are undesirable or even unfair. These findings support an optimistic view of the ability of authorities to manage diverse societies. On the other hand, research suggests that the ability of procedural justice to bridge differences among individuals and groups may not be equally strong under all conditions. People's willingness to accept policies is more influenced by procedural justice judgments when they identify with the society that the authorities represent and view them as representing a group of which they are members. They are less influenced by procedural justice judgments when they identify more strongly with subgroups than with society and/or view the authorities as representatives of a group to which they do not belong.     

Where is public affairs going?

This paper suggests the future direction in which public affairs practice is developing and advances a number of propositions about public affairs and political systems which provide the context in which public affairs practitioners operate. The paper examines the changing nature of the political systems in which public affairs functions and argues that, by inference, public affairs practice is culturally specific. The paper explores these contextual issues from both a European and a global perspective. The paper argues that an understanding of public affairs should be recognised as an essential element on management teaching syllabi and laments the fact that this is far from the case. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

How Explicit Racial Prejudice Hurt Obama in the 2008 Election

Some commentators claim that white Americans put prejudice behind them when evaluating presidential candidates in 2008. Previous research examining whether white racism hurts black candidates has yielded mixed results. Fortunately, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama provides an opportunity to examine more rigorously whether prejudice disadvantages black candidates. I also make use of an innovation in the measurement of racial stereotypes in the 2008 American National Election Studies survey, which yields higher levels of reporting of racial stereotypes among white respondents. I find that negative stereotypes about blacks significantly eroded white support for Barack Obama. Further, racial stereotypes do not predict support for previous Democratic presidential candidates or current prominent Democrats, indicating that white voters punished Obama for his race rather than his party affiliation. Finally, prejudice had a particularly large impact on the voting decisions of Independents and a substantial impact on Democrats but very little influence on Republicans.     

Near‐fatal Intoxication with the “New” Synthetic Opioid U‐47700: The First Reported Case in the Czech Republic

Recreational use of the potent synthetic opioid 3,4‐ dichloro‐N‐(2‐(dimethylamino)cyclohexyl)‐N‐methylbenzamide (U‐47700) is rising, accompanied by increasingly frequent cases of serious intoxication. This article reports a case of near‐fatal U‐47700 intoxication. A man was found unconscious (with drug powder residues). After 40 h in hospital (including 12 h of supported ventilation), he recovered and was discharged. Liquid chromatography/high‐resolution mass spectrometry (LC/HRMS) or gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) were used to detect and quantify substances in powders, serum and urine. Powders contained U‐47700 and two synthetic cannabinoids. Serum and urine were positive for U‐47700 (351.0 ng/mL), citalopram (<LOQ), tetrahydrocannabinol (THC: 3.3 ng/mL), midazolam (<LOQ) and a novel benzodiazepine, clonazolam (6.8 ng/mL) and their metabolites but negative for synthetic cannabinoids. If potent synthetic opioids become cheaper and more easily obtainable than their classical counterparts (e.g., heroin), they will inevitably replace them and users may be exposed to elevated risks of addiction and overdose.     

Online Grooming and Preventive Justice

In England and Wales, Section 15 of the Sexual Offences Act (2003) criminalizes the act of meeting a child—someone under 16—after grooming. The question to be pursued in this paper is whether grooming—I confine myself to online grooming—is justly criminalized. I shall argue that it is. One line of thought will be indirect. I shall first try to rebut a general argument against the criminalization of acts that are preparatory to the commission of serious offences. Grooming is one such act, but there are others, sometimes associated with terrorism. According to me, the general argument misapplies certain considerations about autonomy that are alleged to be in force in other areas of criminal law. Contrary to that general argument, criminalization of preparatory acts does not, in general, bypass the agency of citizens. Moreover, the criminalization of preparatory acts can disrupt activity that would have led to very serious crime, and with relatively low costs to the perpetrators, costs that reflect the non-occurrence of the more serious crime. There is evidence that grooming is harmful in itself, and so another point against the general argument is its assumption that preparatory offences are often harmless or at least victimless. There are objections to some of the undercover policing techniques that lead to a Section 15 prosecution, but these objections are not all weighty.