Law Enforcement Challenges Research Articles

Medical marijuana: a public health perspective

Over the few years medical marijuana is growing in the United States. Because of the medical marijuana legislators able to legalized recreational marijuana in the two states in the US. Marijuana has several potential benefits that help in certain disease. The delivery of marijuana is also important because smoking marijuana has severe side effects. Physicians also play important role in medical marijuana, physicians also divided on the use of medical marijuana. Their attitude towards medical marijuana important for the treatment of disease is important for the community. Marijuana is the most commonly used illegal drug in the US and all over world, several risks associated with it. Major concern is medical marijuana increased the use of marijuana and will create the public health problem in the society. There are several medical benefits from the marijuana but require more research to establish the marijuana as a medicine. Control of medical marijuana is also major issue for the law enforcement agencies and challenge for policymakers also in the United States.

Predictors of Patrol Officer Interest in Cybercrime Training and Investigation in Selected United States Police Departments

Cybercrime has created substantial challenges for law enforcement, particularly at the local level. Most scholars and police administrators believe that patrol officers need to become more effective first responders to cybercrime calls. The evidence illustrates, however, that many patrol officers are neither adequately prepared nor strongly interested in taking an active role in addressing cybercrime at the local level. This study, therefore, examined the factors that predicted patrol officer interest in cybercrime training and investigations in two southeastern U.S. cities. The study specifically examined the relationship between demographics, cybercrime exposure, computer training, computer proficiency, Internet and cybercrime perceptions, and views on policing cybercrime with officer interest in cybercrime investigation training and conducting cybercrime investigations in the future. Officer views on policing cybercrime, particularly whether they valued cybercrime investigations and believed that cybercrime would dramatically change policing, along with their computer skills, were the strongest predictors of interest in cybercrime efforts. Officers who had received previous computer training were less interested in additional training and conducting investigations. These findings support the argument that more command and departmental meetings focusing on the value of investigating these types of crime need to be held in order to increase officer interest.

Social network media and political activism: a growing challenge for law enforcement

The use of the internet for political purposes is not new; however, the introduction of social media tools has opened new avenues for political activists. In an era where social media has been credited as playing a critical role in the success of revolutions (Earl & Kimport, 2011; Papic & Noonan, 2011; Wooley, Limperos & Beth, 2010), governments, law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to develop a deeper understanding of the broader capabilities of this emerging social and political environment. This can be achieved by increasing their online presence and through the application of proactive social media strategies to identify and manage potential threats. Analysis of current literature shows a gap in the research regarding the connection between the theoretical understanding and practical implications of social media when exploited by political activists, and the efficacy of existing strategies designed to manage this growing challenge. This paper explores these issues by looking specifically at the use of three popular social media tools: Facebook; Twitter; and YouTube. Through the examination of recent political protests in Iran, the UK and Egypt from 2009–2011, these case studies and research in the use of the three social media tools by political groups, the authors discuss inherent weaknesses in online political movements and discuss strategies for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to monitor these activities.

Social Psychology and Contemporary Immigration Policy: An Introduction

This provides a brief introduction to the articles and commentary that constitute the ASAP collection on “The Social Psychology of Contemporary Immigration Policy.” The collection includes four themes: challenges for law enforcement, group relations and social justice, effects of policy on individuals and communities, and media effects.

Random Breath Testing: A Canadian Perspective

Objective: The purpose of this article is to examine the case for and challenges to implementing random breath testing (RBT) in Canada, with a particular focus on the persistence of impaired driving under the current method of law enforcement. It seeks to place RBT within Canada's existing legal and social framework. Methods: This article reviews Canada's impaired driving record, charge and conviction rates, and law enforcement challenges. It then summarizes the impact that RBT programs have had in comparable countries. Finally, it examines whether the enactment of RBT would be upheld under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Results: Canada has made little progress in reducing impaired driving since the late 1990s. Current enforcement methods fail to detect the majority of impaired drivers, even when stopped at sobriety checkpoints. This has reduced the perceived risk of apprehension and helps to explain the persistence of impaired driving in Canada. Faced with similar challenges, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and most EU countries have introduced comprehensive RBT programs. Comprehensive RBT has been shown to significantly reduce impaired driving deaths and injuries. Proposals to enact RBT in Canada will inevitably generate claims that it violates drivers’ Charter rights. Similar arguments have been raised in opposition to RBT in other countries. This article demonstrates that RBT is compatible with the existing Charter case law involving traffic legislation and border, airline, and courtroom security. Conclusion: Experience in other countries indicates that RBT is a minimally intrusive, cost-effective, and publicly accepted impaired driving countermeasure and that it would significantly improve the detection and deterrence of impaired drivers. Moreover, RBT is compatible with the Charter.

A Strategic Approach to Police Interactions Involving Persons with Mental Illness

A growing challenge for law enforcement is dealing appropriately and effectively with persons with mental illness. Individuals experiencing acute symptoms of mental illness may respond differently than what front-line officers expect. Thus, persons with mental illness raise risk issues regarding intervention, strategy, and program framing. As the population grows and ages, so does the number of persons with mental illnesses. First, we look at the prevalence of mental illness. Second, the evolving research on the relationship between violence and mental illness is presented. Third, we discuss how individuals with mental illnesses are also at risk of being victimized by crime. Fourth, we examine what additional risk factors police can explore to determine the threat level posed when responding to a person with mental illness. A specific technique that officers can employ to more effectively gather information, reduce the risk of confrontation, and promote cooperation is used as an example.

Safe at home? Policing the U.S. hometown in a post 9/11 environment

Despite the prominence of terrorism concerns on the national agenda, three areas of public policy pose more significant challenges for local law enforcement in the United States: illegal gun proliferation and distribution; offender incarceration and re-entry paths; and investments in the lives of children. This paper argues that the current direction of public policy in these latter areas should be a primary concern, because these policies not only impact law enforcement in a negative way, but also threaten the strength and vitality of the communities law enforcement is trying to serve. Moreover, the dangers posed by these policies are far more calculable, more likely and more destructive over the long run than those posited for more extreme, though less-likely threats, to which the U.S., as a nation, is committing enormous sums of money, for seemingly incremental, public safety benefits. The role of law enforcement executives is critical to how these issues will be addressed.

Canada's “Toxic Bus”: The New Challenge for Law Enforcement in the Post-9/11 World/Mass Psychogenic Illness

Talk of devil, and is bound to appear. --Proverb Episodes of psychogenic illness are challenging under best of circumstances. Typically incubated an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, initial diagnoses are often contentious, and ir takes time for environmental tests to be processed. Even when results come back negative and a psychogenic cause is obvious assessment, there is often a backlash from victims and community members, who resent mass hysteria label, which is typically viewed as something that happens to others. For this reason, cases are often officially left unresolved under guise of mystery illnesses or possible terrorist attacks, as occurred following Canadian which documents caveats faced by law enforcement and emergency medical personnel, resulting an inefficient use of rime and resources, and unnecessary public anxiety. The Episode On Tuesday 25 May 2004, at approximately 1 p.m., a passenger walked to front of public TransLink bus #98 downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. As the Richmond Express came to a halt at intersection of 49th Street and Granville Avenue, disembarking man made a cryptic remark. As one passenger recalled, said how's your day going ... and bus driver said good. Then man said it won't be for long ('Passenger 2004). As driver continued his route, began to feel nauseated, and later vomited after travelling 10 kilometres from where man had stepped off. He then asked if any passengers felt ill. When one replied affirmatively, steered bus to roadside and radioed for medics, fearing a chemical or biological As two responding paramedics began to treat driver and hear his version of events, they too fell ill. Others arriving on scene also felt sick. The incident made headlines around world as a possible terrorist attack and became focus of a major investigation that would become known as the toxic bus case, or police file #04-128479. Immediately after incident, 19 people, including driver, passengers, emergency personnel, and journalists, were briefly quarantined. Air quality tests and a forensic examination of bus were unremarkable. Vancouver Police searched for suspect: an olive-skinned male his mid-20s, with an average build, pencil-thin moustache, and a 5 o'clock shadow. This description, suggesting that may have been Middle Eastern, likely heightened suspicion and fear of terrorism (Vancouver Police Department 26 May 2004, 28 May 2004). In early June, incident became subject of a public dispute between Vancouver's Chief Medical Health Officer, John Blatherwick, who maintained that cause was mass anxiety, and both police and ambulance agencies, who disagreed. At a police press conference, a spokeswoman rejected Blatherwick's position, noting that he is not involved investigation and is misinformed. The investigation remains active, as toxicology results are still not complete (Vancouver Police Department 11 June 2004). On June 25, Vancouver Police made a startling announcement: When tests of bus by Royal Canadian Mounted Police were unrevealing, they hired a private firm to conduct further tests, which identified methyl chloride as chemical attack. Reporters were told that in high concentrations [methyl chloride] is capable of killing someone. While it is impossible to say how much of gas victims were exposed to or how it came to be delivered into air on bus, it would have taken a fairly high concentration to force gas into some of materials on bus, such as seat fabric and air filters (Vancouver Police Department 25 June 2004). One of lead police investigators publicly defended his department's interpretation of methyl chloride findings, but on emotional, not scientific grounds, implying that elite medical professionals are immune from hysteria: You're talking about two very senior ambulance attendants and they're not going to have psychosomatic symptoms, they've seen everything (Crawford 2004). …

Intelligence for Counter‐Terrorism: Technology and Methods

ABSTRACT In recent years, access to new information, communications and weapons technologies has enabled criminal and terrorist operations on a scale previously unobtainable. While the number of terrorists and terrorist organizations has increased, the nature of their operations has changed dramatically as well. Understanding and countering modern terrorist operations poses a significant challenge for law enforcement and security services. In many cases technologies open to terrorist abuse have evolved far more rapidly than the technologies and methods needed to counter them effectively, even in the most advanced nations, which are at least a generation behind the terrorists in some areas. In countering terrorism, police and intelligence services need timely and effective access to terrorist communications, as well as the ability to interdict weapons shipments and other logistics. Given the nature of the new technologies, these have become very difficult tasks. As terrorists have become increasingly sophisticated in their operations, demands on counter‐terrorist operations and technologies have escalated as well. In meeting these challenges it is important to note that in some cases the solution will involve both new laws as well as new technologies. In other cases, it may be necessary to face the facts that some operations are currently beyond the reach of the law or the technology base, and alternative approaches will need to be found. This article reviews the current technology base used by terrorists; explores the challenges posed for counter‐terrorist operations; and suggests areas where new technologies may be of use in meeting these challenges.

The EU's approach post-September 11: global terrorism as a multidimensional law enforcement challenge

In response to the threat of terrorism following 9/11, the European Union has opted for a clear cross-border law enforcement approach that is quite distinct from the putative ‘war on terror’. This choice has been determined by factors of history, divergent threat perceptions, relative value orientations and restricted competences. And yet, far from limiting itself to a traditional ‘internal’ law enforcement focus, the EU has developed an extensive multidimensional approach that combines legislative and operational, repressive and preventive, internal and external, as well as institutional, measures. But weaknesses persist: the preference given by member states to instruments of cooperation and coordination, rather than integration, as well as the poor implementation of many agreed-upon measures, negatively weigh against the effectiveness of the EU's multidimensional law enforcement approach. Legitimacy deficits also exist owing to limited parliamentary and judicial control. These deficits will need to be addressed to reinforce the credibility of the EU's approach as a viable ‘European’ alternative to the US ‘war on terror’.

Policing Cybercrimes: Situating the Public Police in Networks of Security within Cyberspace

The Internet and the criminal behaviour it transforms (cybercrime) pose considerable challenges for order maintenance and law enforcement because Internet‐related offending takes place within a global context while crime tends to be nationally defined. Policing cybercrime is made all the more complex by the very nature of policing and security being networked and nodal and also because within this framework the public police play only a small part in the policing of the Internet. In this paper it is argued that the future of the public police role in policing the Internet is more than simply acquiring new knowledge and capacity, but it is about forging new relationships with the other nodes within the networks of Internet security. These relationships require a range of transformations to take place in order to enhance the effectiveness and legitimacy of the nodal architecture. It will then be argued that some of the contradictions faced by ‘the police’ are being reconciled by the gradual reconstitution of a neo‐Peelian paradigm across a global span, which brings with it a range of instrumental and normative challenges.

PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF STEREOTYPING AND PROFILING IN LAW ENFORCEMENT: HOW TO INCREASE ACCURACY BY USING MORE NON-RACIAL CUES

ABSTRACT Stereotypes, stereotyping, profiles, and profiling are complicated issues scientifically and politically and pose serious challenges for law enforcement (LE) officers. This article posits that stereotyping can be a legitimate law enforcement tool if devoid of unlawful and unethical bias. The authors promote a new conceptual framework, through the introduction of three models, which would permit rational and de-stigmatized police stereotyping. To de-stigmatize some kinds of stereotyping under certain conditions bridges the gap between legitimate concerns about inequality held by community leaders, politicians, and scholars, and the realities of good, proactive, “what works” policing in the field. A profile is based on observable behavior while a stereotype is based on the internal perceptions of behavior. Negative and often inaccurate stereotypes amount to bias or prejudice, which may lead to racial profiling. However, human perceptions and judgments, including stereotypes, are full of EPA dimensions— i.e., Evaluation or valence (+—−), memory-Potency (inactivated—activated), and Accuracy (in accuracy—accuracy). Further, negative racial cues or stereotypes can be overridden by non-racial cues (e.g., situational-behavioral cues) in police judgment and decision-making. Based on classical and recent findings, three psychological models (i.e., the cue-reliance model, the cubic EPA model of stereotypes, and law enforcement categorical cue model) are developed in the hope that it will enhance law enforcement efficiency and judgment accuracy by minimizing racial cues and maximizing various non-racial (situational-behavioral) cues. LE applications and implications of these models are also delineated. Human stereotypes and profiles are basically rational categorizations, and it is natural and appropriate to use them.

Medicare Part D creates challenges for safety-net providers and law enforcement

While the new Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit will give 43 million American seniors substantial help in paying for medications, said Elizabeth M. Duke, administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the law has created several reimbursement challenges for safety-net providers—health care facilities that serve the nation’s uninsured and other vulnerable patients. HRSA has been working closely with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to ensure that safety-net providers have the information and resources needed to receive reimbursement under Part D, Duke told a 700-member audience on July 11 at the Ninth Annual 340B Coalition Conference in Washington, D.C. Beginning January 1, 2006, safety-net providers that participate in the 340B prescription drug-pricing program, which provides certain hospitals and federally funded grantees access to low prices on pharmaceutical products, may receive Medicare reimbursement for medications dispensed to beneficiaries as long as the facility contracts as a network pharmacy with a Part D prescription drug plan (PDP) sponsor, according to HRSA.

Anarchist Direct Actions: A Challenge for Law Enforcement

This article provides a descriptive, operational analysis of the modern anarchist movement, emphasizing the actions of the criminal anarchists and implications for US law enforcement. It begins by explaining some core tenets of anarchist “theory,” and its relationship to violence, then describes the structure, tactics and tradecraft of militant anarchist activists. It concludes that Anarchism is a revolutionary movement, not just a “protest group.” Clearly not all anarchists advocate or engage in violence, but some do. Those individuals and factions pose a particular concern to law enforcement. This article offers some practical recommendations to law enforcement for preventing and managing those direct action attacks that may compromise public safety.

Law enforcement challenges in hawala‐related investigations

Defines hawala, which in Arabic means “transfer”; what distinguishes it from other fund transfer methods is its informality, reliance on trust and networks, and lack of records. Describes how it can be used to finance terrorism and launder money, evade tax and so on. Discusses the many problems for law enforcement arising from the lack of records in hawala, or sometimes an excess of confusing records, and the mix of various businesses which tend to coexist with hawala transactions; also linguistic issues, cultural and legal or administrative differences between communities and countries, and “benami” accounts, which are false name or nominee accounts often accepted in ethnic groups that also engage in hawala. Concludes that the success of law enforcement efforts to solve cases depends on international cooperation, but that this is not always forthcoming; excessive zeal may sour working relationships, and it may not be easy even to know whether policies are working.

The Emerging Circuit Split over Secondary Meaning in Trade Dress Law

Big-city sidewalk vendors have long hawked Rolex watches and Donna Karan t-shirts. In an upscale twist on the theme, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that in which hostesses sell knockoff designer goods to their friends, are a hot new trend, albeit with the potential downside of jail time.' Such counterfeits have become a huge business and a major challenge for law enforcement. At a Garment District warehouse in December 2003, New York police netted $1 million worth of counterfeit handbags purporting to be made by Louis Vuitton Malletier, Burberry Ltd., Chanel, Inc., and other luxury manufacturers.2 For Coach, Inc., a maker of handbags and one of the standbys of the sidewalk scene and purse parties, the story is all too familiar: the company's goods turn up regularly in such stings.3

Law enforcement and security challenges in the U.S.‐Mexican border region1

This article examines law enforcement and security challenges of the U.S.‐Mexican border region in light of the emergent, but still inchoate policy regime following from the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. Unlike long‐standing challenges rooted in basic economic forces of supply‐and‐demand, the new national security challenges confronted in the post‐9/11 context are the result of the deliberate intent to cause harm. In order to be effective in guarding against this new set of challenges, policy makers and enforcers have therefore begun to adapt existing mechanisms—currently devoted to curbing market driven behaviors—to preventing and reducing harm.

New Challenges for Law Enforcement

New Challenges for Law Enforcement

The Netherlands: Anti Money‐Laundering Programmes — The Case of ING

In the last decade, the forces of globalisation have created new opportunities for organised crime and new challenges for legal systems and law enforcement. While the phenomenon of organised crime is not new, it has grown in recent years and is now generating and laundering huge illegal profits, and subsequently investing them in legal business.

Prosecuting the Money Launderers Who Act for Organised Crime

The forces of globalisation have had a profound effect on the world's economies and it should come as no surprise that they have given new opportunities for organised crime and new challenges for legal systems and law enforcement. While the phenomenon of organised crime is not new, it has been growing in recent years and is now generating and laundering huge illegal profits, subsequently investing them in legal business. Strategies against organised crime will be shaped by the mental models used to understand it, and anyone whose mental model of organised crime is derived from the Chicago gangsters of the 1920s or the Mafia godfather of cinematic fiction is using the mental model of a bygone era. Organised crime today must be understood using a business model and hence viewed as businesses, producing illicit goods and services, which vary in size and scale on a continuum from small, local businesses to multinational corporations. The business model assists in analysing the structures of organised crime and, by applying it, one can postulate for example that, at the latter end of the continuum, organised crime groups will, like all multinational corporations, have their own managing directors, finance directors and other corporate officers. The unprecedented challenge now facing law enforcement authorities is to develop effective strategies to combat these multinational corporations of organised crime.