Policing as a second career: recruiting police applicants over 30 years of age

Situations involving people who, due to a mental illness, are unable to care for themselves or pose a threat to others are typically handled by the police. Dealing with people experiencing mental illness who are in crisis is inherently challenging work and police officers are often considered to be unprepared and unsupported. When resolving such encounters, police officers have a number of options, including formal dispositions, such as arrest or involuntary hospitalisation, and informal dispositions, such as calming the person down or ignoring the situation. Given that there is no single framework which can be applied to all encounters between law enforcement personnel and people experiencing mental illness, police officers are necessarily afforded some discretion when resolving these situations. Much research has been conducted regarding the factors which influence outcomes following police encounters with people experiencing mental illness. Among these are the policies and procedures which operate in different police organisations, the availability of community mental health resources, whether the encounter was invoked by the police or the public, and the characteristics of the offender and the police officers involved. The broad aims of this thesis were to (i) describe police officers’ perceptions regarding their experiences dealing with people experiencing mental illness in Victoria, Australia, (ii) describe police officers’ attitudes toward working with people experiencing mental illness, and (iii) investigate the predictive capacity of police officers’ attitudes regarding mental illness related to their preferred means for handling cases involving people experiencing mental illness. Three main studies are reported. The first is an investigation of the current interface between police officers in Victoria and people experiencing mental illness. Based on survey data, findings related to the frequency of police contacts, the types of encounters, the signs and symptoms associated with mental illness and the challenges faced by police officers when performing these duties are reported. The second study is an examination of police officers’ attitudes toward people experiencing mental illness. Participants completed a survey measuring their attitudes and the results were then analysed using Principal Components Analysis (PCA). Analyses revealed four distinct themes underlying the attitudes of surveyed police officers. Broadly speaking, the officers held positive attitudes toward people experiencing mental illness, but negative attitudes about the system that cared for them. Multivariate analyses revealed that the measured attitudes were not associated with demographic characteristics. The third study explored factors which are related to police officers’ preferred means for resolving encounters with people experiencing mental illness. Participants watched one of three vignettes depicting an encounter with a man who might be mentally ill, and were asked to speculate on how they would “likely” and “ideally” resolve the encounter. Each of the vignettes differed according to the apparent severity of the man’s psychiatric symptoms. Discriminant function analysis revealed that the outcomes chosen by officers were related to both the severity of the man’s psychiatric symptoms and the officers’ attitudes toward people experiencing mental illness. These findings highlight the important role played by police officers in managing people in the community who experience mental illness. Some police officers surveyed felt unprepared for this role and many perceived that there was inadequate cooperation from mental health services. Given these challenges, it was important to begin to understand police officers’ attitudes to their work involving people experiencing mental illness. Following quasi-experimental analysis, these attitudes, among with other situational variables, were found to relate to outcomes chosen by police officers following their encounters with people experiencing mental illness.

Law enforcer or social worker? Exploration of the role of police in responding to persons with mental illness

College education and its benefits to policing have been studied for several decades. These studies included the effects of college education upon a broad range of police behaviors within police work. Police officers must have a myriad of special skills as they interact with the public. The skills that are most commonly studied are: the propensity to use force, professionalism, acceptance of diversity, conceptual skills, and communication skills. The responsibilities in policing grew substantially in 2001, after the first major terrorist event that then put police officers at the forefront of combating terrorism. Changes in technology, as well as technological crimes, have also added additional issues in policing, society and crime, not necessarily representative of the past. Policing and police officers are expected to overcome and effectively handle these issues in accordance with the changes in law and also changes in society as well. To compare the current effectiveness of policing to former eras is problematic because expectations and duties of officers have changed drastically. Because of this, longitudinal studies are often challenged with the vast number of changes in law and society that police officers must adapt to. Furthermore, studies often measure these skills collectively by police officer satisfaction ratings and police conduct related lawsuits, which also fluctuate in accordance with societal changes. This adds to the difficulty in analyzing the conduct of police, however researching changes in influencing factors is essential.

CAHOOTS, a thirty-year-old Oregon program, has reduced calls to police and saved money. Now it's going national.

Background: Accident is a global health problem. In 2002 the major cause of accident leading to death is road accident (22.8%). In 2003–2005 the number of road accidents in the Province of Yogyakarta Special Territory is decreasing; however the fatality and ratio of road accident and the number of victims are increasing. In Indonesia there are two kinds of reporting made whenever there is a road accident. When the accident is handled by the police, data are kept at the police office and hospital; however, when it is not handled by the police, data are kept only at the hospital, not at the police office. In the Province of Yogyakarta Special Territory data of road accident are based on the report of Traffic Office of Yogyakarta Special Territory Regional Police so that they may not reflect the actual road accidents. Objective: To estimate the prevalence of road accidents by combining data sources from both the police and hospital at the Province of Yogyakarta Special Territory 2006. Method: This was a descriptive study with survey design. It was carried out at the Province of Yogyakarta Special Territory from May to August 2007. Analysis was made using capture-recapture method. Data entry and calculation were carried out using web-based computer program with Personal Home Page language programming and the database was maintained in MySQL. Result: There were as many as 1,721 data from 5 district police office/big city police office and 5,422 data from 22 hospitals and there were as many as 751 similar data. Data from the police office were 100% complete and from hospitals were not as complete as those from the police office. Coverage of data from the police office was 13.9% and from hospitals was 43,7%. The result of the study showed that the prevalence of road accident based on data from the police office was 51 per 100,000 people and from the hospital was 161 per 100,000 people; whereas the prevalence of the result of estimation using capture-recapture method was 369 per 100,000 people (12,417 cases – 95% CI:11.799-13.035) with highest prevalence for male of 16–25 years old, living and having road accidents at Sleman District. Conclusion: The estimation of the prevalence of road accident using capture-recapture method at the Province of Yogyakarta Special Territory in 2006 was 369 per 100,000 people, 2.28 times greater than data of hospitals and 7.2 times greater than data of the police office with under reporting as much as 724% at the police office and 229% at hospitals. Keywords: road accident, capture-recapture method, prevalence

PROTOCOL: Police Training Interventions to improve the democratic policing of protests

Over the course of the past half century, policing in the United States has gone from an institution in deep crisis and a flashpoint in the country’s culture wars to a widely admired example of innovative, bipartisan reform—and then back again. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and politically reactionary. Liberals saw the police as racist, violent, and ineffective and blamed them, with justification, for the hundreds of riots that convulsed American cities under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. At the same time, conservatives rallied around the police as symbols of “law and order”—the cause that, more than any other, won Nixon the White House in 1968.1 By the late 1990s, however, the police had become far more diverse and far less insular, and new approaches to law enforcement, especially “community policing” and “problem-oriented policing,” had won remarkably broad respect across lines of race, class, and ideology.2 Enthusiasts of “new governance” regularly pointed to police departments as models of the kind of pragmatic reform other public sectors could profitably emulate.3 The pitched battles over the police in the Johnson and Nixon years, the jeering of officers as “pigs,” and the strident calls to “support your local police” felt increasingly remote.Then all the progress seemed to disappear. President Donald Trump resurrected “law and order” as a partisan rallying cry, championed the most violent and aggressive forms of policing, and allied himself with officers more loudly and divisively than Nixon ever had. In the summer of 2020, when tens of millions of protesters marched across the United States and riots broke out in a series of cities, the motivating grievances were about the police, and especially about the large number of young Black men killed by law enforcement officers. For many on the left, reforming the police no longer seemed possible; they wanted to abolish the police or least to slash their budgets.4 Americans on the right, meanwhile, increasingly saw attacks on law enforcement as attacks on them and on their idea of what the country should be.5 The calls in 2020 to “defund the police” were blamed, in 2021, for rising homicide rates across the United States, for spates of robberies and car thefts in some cities, and—by moderate Democrats—for off-year electoral losses to Republicans.6 Law enforcement is again a political battleground, not just dividing Democrats from Republicans but pitting progressives against moderates, young against old, and marginalized community against marginalized community.7 Once again, the police are in crisis, and once again they seem part of the reason the country is in crisis. The recent history of policing is a tale of reversals and upended expectations.In other ways, as well, the enterprise of policing is marked by contradictions. This is especially true of the deep and complicated connections between policing and equality. Public law enforcement agencies are inherently redistributionist, socializing the use of force, but ever since the birth of modern policing in London in the late nineteenth century, officers have protected the privileged against the “dangerous classes,” and American policing in particular has long and continuing connections with racial subordination. People of color in the United States are more likely than whites to be victims of crime and more likely to be victims of police violence and abuse; they suffer from both police nonfeasance and police malfeasance. Inadequate protection against crime is among the most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States, but so is the appallingly large number of young people of color, particularly African Americans, killed every year by the police.Charting a new course for public safety thus means confronting paradoxes and trade-offs. It requires accepting necessary compromises while rejecting those that have been tolerated for lack of imagination. It also means confronting two different social divides. The first is the ideological divide, the growing chasm between left and right that today, as half a century ago, has made policing a partisan flashpoint. The second divide is sociological: the gulf separating privileged Americans from the poor people and people of color who disproportionately bear the burdens of both crime and abusive forms of policing. Each of these two divides has implications for police reform. The ideological divide places a premium on proposals that can gain broad, cross-partisan support. The sociological divide provides reason to give special weight to the interests and views of poor people and people of color, especially African Americans.8Although police reform was never as successful as it was said to be in the 1980s and 1990s, neither was it a dead end. There are ways to make policing fairer, more effective, less abusive, and less lethal by building on successes of past reforms while addressing their very real shortcomings. Fortunately, moreover, the proposals most likely to work are supported by Americans on both sides of the ideological divide and by a majority of the groups most affected by crime and by abusive policing.How can American policing be transformed into a more effective and egalitarian system of public safety? We need to start with four key facts. First, crime has devastating, disproportionate impacts on poor people and people of color, especially Black Americans. Second, police violence and other forms of abusive law enforcement also take a tragic and outsize toll on poor people and people of color, and here, too, Black Americans are particularly likely to be victimized. Third, improved policing has helped make crime far less common today than thirty or forty years ago, but some of the progress has been lost in recent years. Fourth, there have been successes over the past several decades in reforming police departments, but the victories have been partial and very often fleeting.Fear of crime is often whipped up for partisan purposes, but the damage that crime inflicts on victims, as well as on their families and communities, is real and massive. Criminal victimization is also regressive, falling most heavily on those who are already disadvantaged. All of this is particularly true of the most extreme forms of violence—homicide, aggravated assault, and rape—which can fairly be called epidemic in the United States and which victimize African Americans, along with their families and neighborhoods, at greatly elevated rates.There are between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand homicides annually in the United States—a rate of about five or six per one hundred thousand people in the country. Among Black Americans, though, the rate is much higher. African Americans die violently at seven times the rate of whites; for men the ratio is nine to one. Homicide is the third-leading cause of death among Americans aged fifteen to thirty-four; it is the leading cause of death among Black males under forty-five and the second-leading cause of death among Latino males under forty-five. Young Black men are fifteen times more likely than their white counterparts to be the victims of homicide. Violence is responsible for more lost years of Black male lives than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Meanwhile more than a million Americans are hospitalized each year from attacks that do not turn out to be fatal, and African Americans are more likely than whites to be the victims of these attacks, too. Black people are also disproportionately represented among the several hundred thousand victims of rape each year in the United States.9The failure to protect African Americans and other marginalized populations from crime is among the starkest and most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States. No other wealthy country tolerates such extreme racial disparities in the risks of violent victimization.10Moreover, beyond the lives that it cuts short, homicide and other forms of extreme violence can have tragic consequences for the families of victims and for the neighborhoods where it occurs. High rates of violence make fear a constant presence in people’s lives, affecting the material conditions of their daily existence in countless ways. It turns heat waves more deadly, for example, by making people afraid to leave their homes. Children living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence perform worse in school, reinforcing the cycle of disadvantage that keep families locked in intergenerational poverty. This is not just a matter of correlation: Black schoolchildren do dramatically worse on standardized tests in the days immediately after a local homicide than in the days just before. Exposure to lethal violence makes it hard for them to concentrate, and the effects appear to accumulate with each additional killing. Crime, especially homicide and other serious forms of violence, also depress property values, helping to maintain the gaping disparities between the household wealth of Americans of different races and robbing local governments of tax revenues, which in turn makes it harder for them to confront not only violence but virtually every other challenge they face. For communities as well as for individuals, exposure to criminal victimization, and in particular to homicide and serious assault, is a pillar of American inequality.11Much of the explanation for the racial disparities in rates of criminal victimization in the United States lies outside the criminal justice system: in the pervasive, interlocking disadvantages imposed on people of color, especially on African Americans. Discrimination perpetuates poverty, and poverty breeds crime, making potential offenders more desperate and potential victims more vulnerable.12 But part of the explanation is inadequate policing, and more precisely the long history of police departments protecting white, wealthy neighborhoods more than poor neighborhoods disproportionately populated by people of color.13If poor people and people of color in the United States have long suffered from inadequate protection against crime, they have also suffered from an excess of violence and abuse at the hands of the police. Police officers kill roughly a thousand Americans every year. Somewhere between half and eighty percent of the deaths, probably, are unjustified.14 And the victims of police killings are disproportionately people of color, with young Black people men especially at risk. Black Americans are fourteen percent of the population but more than a quarter of the people shot dead by the police.15 From 1980 through 2019, on an age-adjusted basis, Black people were more than three times as likely to be killed by the police as whites; Latinos were close to twice as likely.16 Between 2015 and 2019, an unarmed Black man was four times as likely to be fatally shot by the police as an unarmed white man.17 For Black and white males between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, the ratio was five to one.18Deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers are the most extreme way, but far from the only way, in which the burdens of policing fall disproportionately on African Americans and other people of color. People of color, especially young Black men, are more likely to be stopped by the police. When they are stopped, they are less likely to be treated with respect, more likely to grabbed or struck, more likely to be searched, and more likely to be arrested.19The harsh, often brutal treatment of African Americans and other people of color by police has ramifications far beyond the deaths, physical injuries, and indignities it inflicts. Stops and arrests are entry points into the carceral system. Excessively aggressive, discriminatory policing helps to sustain jail and prison populations that are bloated and racially lopsided. And the interactions that people have with the police reverberate through their communities, with lasting effects not just on attitudes toward law enforcement but on broader ideas about law, government, and society.20 Unsurprisingly, African Americans consistently report less confidence in the police than whites.21 But mistreatment by the police often leads, also, to an enervating sense of disempowerment—a sense of physical vulnerability, lack of belonging, and alienation—not just in the immediate victim of the mistreatment but in friends, family, and neighbors as well.22The damage that American policing does to people of color and their communities has received more attention over the past three decades for several reasons. Part of the explanation is changes in law enforcement: the expansion of police forces since the 1980s; more aggressive use of stop-and-frisk; crackdowns on low-level, quality-of-life offenses; and the spread of militarized equipment and tactics, including through the proliferation and increased use of SWAT teams.23 Increased public awareness of police violence has also played a role; the key contributors here have been the Black Lives Matter movement and the advent of smartphones and social media.24 But some part of the reason that police violence and its disproportionate use against people of color has loomed larger may also be a success to which law enforcement agencies themselves contributed: the dramatic, transformational decline of crime in the 1990s. As threats of private violence became less omnipresent in poor neighborhoods of color, threats of police violence—which had always been there, in the background—became more jarringly inexcusable.25As devastating a toll as crime now takes in the United States, it did far more damage thirty years ago. Between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, the national homicide rate dropped by roughly forty percent, and the decline was even larger in the neighborhoods and demographic groups hardest hit by crime. The rates of other crimes saw similar drops.26 The sociologist Patrick Sharkey notes that for Black men, the homicide drop was the largest public health achievement of the past several decades, shrinking the racial disparity in life expectancy and preserving roughly one thousand years of life for every one hundred thousand Black men. Sharkey has also documented the ways in which the decline of crime changed the fabric of life in poor neighborhoods, allowing public spaces to be reclaimed and alleviating the constant, debilitating fear of violent attack. Combined with changes in law enforcement, the crime decline of the 1990s altered the nature of the physical insecurity experienced in poor communities of color, particularly by young people, “from the threat of violent peers to the threat of abusive police.”27The plummeting crime rates of the 1990s were followed by more modest reductions in homicides and aggravated assaults in the early years of the twenty-first century. Homicide rates began to rise, though, around 2014, and then surged in cities across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021.28 Some major American cities recorded more homicides in 2021 than in any prior year.29 And just as the crime decline in the 1990s was particularly pronounced in poor neighborhoods and predominantly Black neighborhoods, fatal shootings have risen most dramatically in recent years in those same neighborhoods.30 In Los Angeles, for example, Black Americans are nine percent of the population but constituted thirty-six percent of homicide victims in 2021; in New York City, the figures are twenty-four percent and sixty-five percent, respectively.31 Rates of other violent crimes do not appear to have risen as much as homicides, and the nationwide homicide rate in 2020 and 2021 remained well below its peak in the 1980s. Still, a significant amount of the progress made in reducing fatal attacks in the 1990s and early 2000s seems to have slipped away, at least temporarily and possibly for longer. Just as there was nothing unavoidable about the high crime rates of the 1980s, there is no guarantee those rates will not return.The causes of the crime drop in the 1990s are still debated, and so are the explanations for the rising homicide rates of the past several years. Some of the credit for the crime drop, though, almost certainly should go to improvements in policing: either to the expansion of police forces in the 1990s, or to changes in how the police operated, or most likely to both factors. The evidence is threefold. First, a growing body of research links increased police presence to decreases in crime, especially homicides. Some of this research examines the effects of changes in the size of local police forces; others look at the effects of temporary surges in police presence because of, for example, terrorist alerts.32 Second, the crime drop during the 1990s was roughly twice as large in New York City as elsewhere in the country, and the most plausible explanation for the difference is the especially large changes in the quantity of and quality of policing in New York City during that period.33 Third, there is strong evidence for the effectiveness of particular police strategies that became more widespread in the 1990s, especially tactics that focus on areas where a large number of crimes take place and other examples of “problem-oriented policing.”34American law enforcement didn’t just get better at controlling crime in the last decades of the twentieth century. It also improved in other ways, albeit unevenly, and too often transiently. At the beginning of the 1970s, for example, police departments in the United States were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Many departments, particularly in big cities, grew more diverse in the 1980s and 1990s, often through hiring plans adopted in response to lawsuits. By the early 2000s, some large police forces were majority minority—this was true, for example, in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—and the percentage of female officers had grown as well. Smaller departments made less progress, though. Moreover, as court-ordered hiring plans have expired over the past twenty years, diversification has stalled even in larger departments, and some past gains have been undone.35Diversifying law enforcement agencies is not a panacea—there are no panaceas in police reform—but accumulating research suggests that minority and female officers are less likely to use unjustified force, especially against people of color.36 White male officers partnered with minority or female officers also change their patterns of policing for the better. And diverse departments are less insular, more open to outside ideas, and better connected to the communities they serve, all of which makes them more likely to adopt other reforms.37One particular way in which police diversity has facilitated other reforms is by countering the strident hostility of police unions toward efforts to reduce police violence, increase police and racial in law Police unions are not always of but even today they do more to than to for making law enforcement fairer, more effective, and less reason for that is that the of police unions and than police officers of Black and Latino officers have often championed reforms by police and the presence of officers of color may in some have police unions to moderate their most of those reforms over the past half century have been community policing and policing, both of which spread widely in the 1980s and 1990s, as and just as every police in the country to “community policing,” in part because it became a for At its though, community policing was more than a It was a of law enforcement from a and toward a that on and with the public and with other policing had major some of which will be And because community policing was with of it was hard to It though, because it often greatly increased public with the police and made people fear of crime to real reductions in when people felt they out and and to become with more people most community policing also police departments, and it focus beyond crime allowing them to a of other by the communities they It well with policing, which called on officers to work and on an basis, with other agencies and the public to of particular local but not policing to responsible for a disproportionate amount of but not the were officers. community policing, the focus on to and a body of evidence these with significant crime there are that and other forms of policing have helped some cities the national and reduce homicides in community policing and policing also increased attention to low-level, of such as and the Part of the idea was that when these of were left neighborhoods toward people on the and rates of serious this was the of Police on quality-of-life could be too, and the that these were in effective at reducing serious crime, but not as dramatically as policing and only when the community and particular in particular crackdowns on quality-of-life as community policing and policing, did not reduce the other of the from quality-of-life policing, policing the of in which the police with community groups and other agencies to particular groups of people responsible for a disproportionate of a first and most of which was in the 1980s and called because their most was often threats of consequences at the and groups violence in a particular But the also of social to the same people, and more recent of this more than policing. is growing that these when right, their moreover, community policing and policing their in poor were and not just because they were of from of officers in neighborhoods hit hardest by crime. policing and policing police to adopt what the had called the of law kind of policing in to from the of law enforcement in had called the which and the which when community policing and policing were to against life they on the In community policing and policing officers to for neighborhoods to a of other than law enforcement: and so that they had not up to be social but it out they often were at other agencies to more attention to marginalized several different community policing and policing have lost much of their over the past two The terrorist attacks of to calls for more aggressive forms of law enforcement, and and local in the early 2000s many departments to community policing and policing as forms of these the crackdowns on and in New York City, helped to community against them in many against the of police And it became increasingly that, even at their community policing and policing had some was that these attention to police This was not in the of either of could have with the public and agencies outside law enforcement to reduce police But they Police the of police violence, especially police because they did not the of the This was because the victims were of marginalized groups and or because did not still does on police killings or other forms of police violence, and the advent of body and of these were to It those and the Black Lives Matter movement to give the of police killings the attention it had long lethal police violence against Black Americans and Latinos has over the past half century. for the of the victims, the of killed by a police in the United States during the 1980s, and the drop was particularly Black Americans and The decline in police killings over the course of that to have been to new the use of lethal against In the three decades, in the age-adjusted rate of police killings of Black Americans and Latinos remained roughly constant while the rate for white Americans as a the age-adjusted for Americans also In some though, rates to From through 2019, police killings in areas and but by thirty percent in the thirty largest American cities, because of new on use of violence in some cities has dropped especially In Los Angeles, for example, significant of by the police appear to have been in half between and 2019, and police shootings appear to have by forty by officers increased in 2021 but remained far than in past In on the other of by the police have dropped by percent over the past fifteen years, but the rate of police shootings has not a similar Police shootings in between and in and again in and and then dropped over the several years, by to roughly the Los and have been of efforts at police reform over the past two decades, so the of by police in these cities over the past are in some reductions in of in both cities and significant reductions in police shootings in Los but in others progress on police shootings in also the in patterns of police violence, as in crime across the United States. The Police by the and the number of of per thousand arrests for hundreds of American police departments from to the from fifteen to the United States as a had New York rate of police almost Americans have been killed by the police in had New York homicide people have violently that same Police can and have but the victories have been and often

A linguistic competence is considered to be a measure of functional knowledge of the language. The authors have an opinion that any kind of communicative activity should be treated as a part of a wider approach towards linguistic competence. It means that linguistic competence is determined by the quality of regular language as well as by the speaker’s internal culture. The concept of competence is described as a combination of the following elements: knowledge, skills, values and personal qualities. The purpose of this study is to reveal the characteristics of linguistic competence of the police officers, and their linguistic competence experience. The objectives of this article were to analyse the role of language in the human communication process, linguistic competence and its expression in police work, as well as to compare linguistic competences of the Lithuanian and Slovak police officers. The role of language in communication process has been reviewed by analysing the concept of communication, the main component of communicative competence – language (linguistic) competence. The analysis part of the article involves presentation of the methodology and results of the survey on the Lithuanian and Slovak police officers’ approach towards the linguistic competence. Based on the analysis of the survey, confidence and positive evaluation of the police officers’ language knowledge have been defined. Police officers were found to be interested in a regular and ethical language and its use. Police officers recognized that familiar, impolite and irregular communication affects the public image of the police. The results showed that respondents possessed a positive approach towards their existing linguistic competence. Furthermore, the survey revealed that police officers appreciate knowledge and skills of communication in foreign languages.

Objectives: Law enforcement is a high-stress and high-risk occupation that is one of the top ten sleep-deprived occupations. Most police officers who require to work night shifts, suffer from greater physical and psychological detrimental effects than other normal daytime workers. This study was intended to explore whether work stress is associated with the sleep quality of police officers. Methods: We used self-rated Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) questionnaires to measure work stress and sleep quality among police officers working in southern Taiwan. Results: Police officers should pay more attention to their health and work stress. The analysis results showed that sleep quality among police officers was significantly poor, and work stress was significantly associated with sleep quality, police officers who had higher levels of work stress had the worst sleep quality, and such association was still significant under different demographic variables. Conclusion: The low sleep quality of police officers in southern Taiwan in this study was found to be associated with work stress. Those police officers often worked night shifts and showed poor health. We suggest that they should be provided with ”good sleep awareness” education to improve their sleep quality and health.

Applying Procedural Justice Theory to Law Enforcement's Response to Persons With Mental Illness

Police recruitment across the UK is under intense political and social pressure to increase representation and legitimacy. This layered in to a quest to raise the number of police officers in England and Wales by 20,000. However, despite decades of reform initiatives, police recruitment continues to be a challenging and potentially exclusionary process for candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds. Research in this area mainly comprises macro-level process evaluation and subsequent extrapolation of the results into positive action initiatives. There is a paucity of research at the micro-interaction level among social actors. In this paper, we present a case study of police recruitment in a large English Police Constabulary over four recruitment cohorts in 2018. We conducted 26 long-form, in-depth interviews with new police recruits. Utilising the embeddedness theoretical framework based on sociological studies of the labour market, we attempt to understand police recruitment at the micro-social interaction level. We demonstrate that police recruitment has a high level of social embeddedness within the Constabulary. Candidates utilise social connections throughout the recruitment process to develop competence in the recruitment stages, while also building their respective police social identities. Although positive action recipients also receive significant organisational and instrumental support, they build a relationship with the abstract organisation and not existing police officers. This creates an imbalance in social identity development and may have implications for how positive action initiative recipients may struggle within the policing environment. Further implications exist for positive action design and implementation.

Reverse police prostitution stings, which target men by using female police officers as decoy prostitutes, are becoming a common method in some United States cities for controlling the problem of solicitation for prostitution. The role of policewomen as decoys has received scant attention by scholars, though critics and traditional feminists view the practice as further evidence of the subjection and degradation of women in law enforcement. This article presents participant field observations of how reverse prostitution operations are conducted in Aurora, Colorado Springs, and Denver, Colorado and qualitative interview data from 25 female police officers who discuss their experiences as prostitution decoys. The findings indicate that female officers view the decoy role as an exciting opportunity for undercover work, despite the negative connotations of acting like a whore. According to the officers who work as decoys, it adds excitement and variety and offers potential for other opportunities for advancement within the police department in contrast to the rather mundane duties often associated with patrol.

Police officers are often required to perform under high-stress circumstances, in which optimal task performance is crucial for their and the bystanders’ physical integrity. However, stress responses, particularly anxiety and increased cortisol levels, shift attention from goal-directed to stimulus-driven control, leaving police officers with poor shooting performance under stress. Cardiac vagal activity and coping-related traits (i.e., self-control, sensation seeking) might help individuals to maintain performance under stress. So far, only few studies have integrated coping-related traits, psychophysiological stress markers and occupationally meaningful measures of behavior to investigate police officers’ work performance under stress. Therefore, the present study investigated 19 police recruits (Mage = 22.84, SD = 3.30) undergoing a reality-based shooting scenario in two experimental conditions in a within-design: low stress (LS) against a non-threatening mannequin, and high stress (HS), involving physical threat by an opponent. Psychological (i.e., anxiety, mental effort) and physiological stress responses (i.e., salivary cortisol, alpha-amylase, cardiac vagal activity) as well as shooting accuracy were repeatedly assessed. It was hypothesized that under stress, police recruits would demonstrate elevated psychophysiological stress responses and impaired shooting performance. Elevated psychophysiological stress responses would negatively influence shooting performance, whereas self-control, sensation seeking and cardiac vagal activity would positively influence shooting performance. While recruits reported significantly higher anxiety and mental effort in the HS scenario, both scenarios elicited comparable physiological responses. Overall, shooting accuracy was low and did not significantly decrease in the HS scenario. Shooting performance was predicted by self-control in the LS scenario and by post-task cardiac vagal activity in the HS scenario. While increased anxiety hints at a successful stress manipulation, physiological responses suggest similar stress levels for both scenarios, diminishing potential behavioral differences between the scenarios. Performance efficiency decreased under stress, as indicated by increasing mental effort. Findings on self-control suggest that suppressing negative stress responses might lead to impaired goal-directed attention, resulting in performance decrements. For police research and training, high-realism scenarios afford an opportunity to investigate and experience psychophysiological stress responses.

Does Procedural Justice Matter in the Private Security Sector?: Comparing Public Perceptions of the Private Security and Public Policing Sector

This research aimed to explore the experiences of operational stress in retired police officers and of their growth following the adverse events they had faced during their service in U.K. police forces. As there exists a paucity of studies on retired officers, the rationale for exploring these participants’ perspectives in the present study was illuminated through the review and critical analysis of relevant theory and research on stress and growth among serving police officers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight participants and the resultant transcripts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), which gave rise to seven superordinate themes: “How stress presents itself”; “The weight of accountability”; “Diverse ways of coping”; “The corrosive nature of distress”; “Breaking point”; “Anchored in macho narratives” and “Forged in the fire”. Findings were discussed at an interpersonal level, which examined culturally-specific aspects of experiencing operational stress, emotion and vulnerability within the police and also at the individual level. More specifically, findings showed that in the context of stress and inconsistent support, officers had distanced themselves from the organisation, minimising distress, before turning to social groups for support. Furthermore, within the hegemonic, masculine context of the police, officers had been left to construe the expression of emotion as unhelpful or unacceptable, leaving them in a state of emotional isolation and often extricating them from their own internal worlds. Findings suggested that the minimisation of emotion was construed as adaptive in terms of job performance but toxic in hindering officers’ capacity to make sense of their individual and interpersonal experiences. Recommendations were made in relation to more comprehensive police training around the expression of emotion; around the need for the police organisation to become a more secure base, where operational stress may be contained and harnessed in order to enhance performance and in terms of the necessity to move away from clinical interventions that rely purely on help seeking practices of the individual.