County Sheriff Research Articles

University of Michigan First to Test APA Model for Assessing Psychiatric Bed Needs

University of Michigan First to Test APA Model for Assessing Psychiatric Bed Needs

Get a dog and walk it

Get a dog and walk it Clare Paniccia (bio) from McCallis Magazine's 1958 article, "129 Ways to Get a Husband" Bobo, then 20, was abducted on the morning of April 13, 2011. She was last seen being led into the woods away from her home by a man dressed in camouflage. Chip Washington with the Shelby County Sheriff's Office said their department sent a cadaver dog to assist in the search. Tennessean, March 2014 holly All month I feed Decatur hair-grease & canine. I feedthe county from my bullet hole from my lunchbox my mossy oak mouth. Somebody please go& find out what my mother meant when she asked why I never lefttown. Is it because of the spirits? The silence? Once, I watched my brother flick a lighter under aspoon & breathe each ghost like a treat—first the father & son, then the blessed lamb himself.When I tried it, I felt amaranthine, my head a bucket full of rubies& rare earth. Did you know [End Page 126] there's a god in everything if you listen long enough to conjureone? Put your ear down near the dirt—I overheard a man saying this in a bar by the interstateright before blackout, the shell in my sinus, hush-a-bye my baby waydown in Missouri playing through the pickup stereo like a lullaby. Here's a list of evidence: onerotten molar, a stick of lip balm, a condom; in Parsons they found a snake that had swalloweda tongue. Each dark strata becomes an inventory. In the morning, myheadache triggers a landslide. alert Marge sends us home with a windpipe & we spend our night apologizingto each muscle individually. I'm sorry, you say before cutting the throat. I'm sorry to the cricoid, cartilage—in Cairo, we tack the dog in Kevlar & run him through an abandonedplayground for practice. I'm sorry we say to the slush piles, the kiddie slide, to the hyoid bone hidden inthe ginseng patch. Radio silence. Dead air. You whisper something [End Page 127] about evidence & I picture a totemof a girl, her glass eye & all its film-shot angles, each negative an open mouthon repeat. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But, what can we do? At home, I have to stop myself fromsetting her a place at the table. Even the dog senses some deception —a vision reoccurring: policebursting onto the scene, steam still rising from dinner plates;your fingers wrapped around the paring knife. Don't shoot! you yell, we're good guys &you point to the dog & say Tell 'em, boy. Tell 'em we're good. & here, bed-locked in morninghaze, who's to know? Just yesterday, I siphoned drug money fromthe emergency fund. I watched you beat the dog for tracking mud onto the carpet, your mantra I'm sorry,I'm sorry. As if the trigger pull isn't ingrained, the way he sits outside the door on alert. I knew beforehe'd pawed at the dirt that there'd be an unearthing. I take him out, his nosea polygraph. I follow. The dog walks. [End Page 128] Clare Paniccia Clare Paniccia received her doctorate in poetry and digital rhetoric from Oklahoma State University. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from Radar Poetry, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, Best New Poets, and Tri-Quarterly, among others. She lives and works near Minneapolis, Minnesota. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press

Should cities disband their police departments?

This paper finds that disbanding police departments leads to fewer police-related deaths, fewer reported crimes, and lower law enforcement expenditures. However, the number of crimes reported by the sheriff for the entire county increases by an amount commensurate to the decrease in the number of crimes reported by cities that disbanded their police department. Furthermore, disbanding police departments is associated with an increase in county sheriffs spending which offsets the city savings. Thus, disbanding police departments does not appear to impact overall crime, shifts responsibility for law enforcement onto other governments, and reduces the available information about cities’ crimes.

Evaluation of Law Enforcement Agency Injury Severity Assessments

Across the United States large discrepancies have been found between law enforcement officers’ injury severity assessments and medically assessed health outcomes of crash victims. This research investigated injury severity discrepancies across law enforcement agencies, analyzing linked crash and medical data for each crash victim from 2010 through 2019 for 520 Wisconsin law enforcement agencies. Serious injury (KABCO “A”) assessments were overestimated in 45% to 90% of crash victims, depending on the agency. Statewide the overestimation rate was 65% across all agencies; the State Patrol overestimated 65% of serious injury assessments, 60% for county sheriff offices, and 64% for municipal police departments. These discrepancies can skew safety estimates and affect the allocation of funds. KABCO definitions were changed to a federally mandated uniform standard in Wisconsin in 2017. Results from an interrupted time series analysis found no significant effects from the changed KABCO definitions, either immediate or over time. At county sheriff’s offices overestimation increased as a function of county population size, and decreased with increasing total reported crashes from a jurisdiction, suggesting workload negatively affects overestimation rate, whereas relative familiarity with crashes and their severities improve overestimation rates. Different trauma scales (MAIS and ISS) and serious injury thresholds were investigated, and ISS of nine was proposed for future KABCO comparisons. Findings show that although KABCO “A” assessment overestimation is an issue everywhere, the magnitude of the issue varies from agency to agency and underscores the importance of uniform injury severity training to ensure accurate serious injury surveillance across the United States.

Foucault's Strange Eros

Foucault's Strange Eros

After Action Report: Lessons Learned From Simulating Unified Command In Response to an Active Shooter Incident Using a Command Competency Laboratory.

On October 10, 2019, the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office (LCSO) and Loudoun County Fire and Rescue (LCFR) led one of the largest act of violence (AVI) exercises ever conducted in Loudoun County, Virginia. Over 300 participants and 50 role-players participated across 15 county departments and agencies within Loudoun County. The exercise identified an important recommendation: "future joint unified command trainings are needed throughout the fire and law enforcement command structures." Effective, unified command is an essential NFPA 3000 principle of responding to an AVI. "The success or failure of the response will hinge on the quality of unified command." After-action reports from AVIs across the United States emphasized the importance of unified command. A second exercise recommendation proposed "a joint AVI unified command competency scenario between LCFR and LCSO should be developed and delivered across all levels of supervision... this scenario should demonstrate 'best practices' for establishing and operating unified command between LCFR and LCSO." The authors developed two active shooter command competency simulations that require LCSO and LCFR to form unified command and manage the initial response. The simulations reinforced accepted response practices, such as identification of cold/warm/hot zones, early unified command, rescue task force team deployment, and protected corridor establishment. The simulations were packaged into a unified command competency training and simulation program. Through the facilitated debriefings with participants and facilitator debriefs, three types of lessons learned were identified: 1) high threat incident response lessons, 2) lessons for conducting AVIs in the command competency lab, and 3) active threat operational considerations for command officers.

A Collaborative Approach to Safety, Equity, and Fairness by Medical Staff, Graduate Medical Education, Human Resources, and Law Enforcement.

A Collaborative Approach to Safety, Equity, and Fairness by Medical Staff, Graduate Medical Education, Human Resources, and Law Enforcement.

Foreign-born arrestees and recidivism: a multilevel analysis of arrest data from a Florida county Sheriff’s office

Foreign-born arrestees and recidivism: a multilevel analysis of arrest data from a Florida county Sheriff’s office

Jury Selection in Victorian England

Abstract The process of empanelling a jury in nineteenth-century England was controlled in most of the country by the County Juries Act 1825. At a formal level, the process was orderly and followed three stages: the preparation of a jury panel from the county jurors’ books, the summoning of the men on the jury panel, and the selection of the trial jury from the panel. In practice, the county sheriffs and undersheriffs were able to exert some influence on the process, an influence that at times ran directly contrary to legislative requirements, and sometimes was even corrupt. Contemporaries complained continually about these informal practices, and their impact upon the perceived quality of the trial juries. This article examines each of the three stages in the jury selection process, including both the legislative requirements and the implementation of those requirements, and it charts the complaints made by contemporaries. The article also attempts to assess some of these complaints by reference to archival materials from the counties of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. Some of these complaints were well-founded, but others – especially the alleged removal from the jurors’ books of men who qualified as special jurors – appear to have been overstated. Nevertheless, the influence of the sheriffs and undersheriffs is clear, and justified or not, the dissatisfaction with the quality of jurors may have contributed to the decline in the use of jury trial over the course of the nineteenth century.

SHOULD CALIFORNIA'S PUBLIC POLICY ON JUDICIAL NON-JURISDICTION OVER GAMBLING DEBTS BE REVISITED? BREAKING DOWN THE KELLY AND POSTLE DECISIONS

SHOULD CALIFORNIA'S PUBLIC POLICY ON JUDICIAL NON-JURISDICTION OVER GAMBLING DEBTS BE REVISITED? BREAKING DOWN THE <i>KELLY</i> AND <i>POSTLE</i> DECISIONS

Outbreak of COVID-19 and interventions in a large jail — Cook County, IL, United States, 2020

BackgroundCorrectional and detention facilities are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 due to shared space, contact between staff and detained persons, and movement within facilities. On March 18, 2020, Cook County Jail, one of the United States’ largest, identified its first suspected case of COVID-19 in a detained person.MethodsThis analysis includes SARS-CoV-2 cases confirmed by molecular detection among detained persons and Cook County Sheriff's Office staff. We examined occurrence of symptomatic cases in each building and proportions of asymptomatic detained persons testing positive, and timing of interventions including social distancing, mask use, and expanded testing and show outbreak trajectory in the jail compared to case counts in Chicago.ResultsDuring March 1-April 30, 907 symptomatic and asymptomatic cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection were detected among detained persons (n = 628) and staff (n = 279). Among asymptomatic detained persons in quarantine, 23.6% tested positive. Programmatic activity and visitation stopped March 9, cells were converted into single occupancy beginning March 26, and universal masking was implemented for staff (April 2) and detained persons (April 13). Cases at the jail declined while cases in Chicago increased.Discussion/ConclusionsAggressive intervention strategies coupled with widespread diagnostic testing of detained and staff populations can limit introduction and mitigate transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection in correctional and detention facilities.

DuPage County sheriff allows methadone after lawsuit

Before the lawsuit filed by the Legal Action Center and colleagues demanding that the DuPage County sheriff and jail allow Christine Finnigan to get her methadone throughout her 30‐day stay in jail for a 2016 DWI conviction (before she was in treatment), things looked grim (see “Jail may force methadone patient to detox when she goes in next week,” ADAW Feb. 15, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adaw.32969). But days before Finnigan was due to report to jail, the sheriff changed course. “It feels great to tell you that this morning, the DuPage County Jail reported to the court that it will permit Chris Finnigan to get her methadone throughout her stay at the jail,” the Legal Action Center's Sally Friedman told ADAW Feb. 26.

OTP partners with county sheriff for jail‐based MAT

Rhode Island–based CODAC Behavioral Healthcare is partnering with the Hampden County Sheriff's Department (HCSD) to provide medications for opioid use disorder (OUD) — methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone — as well as counseling and behavioral therapy to people in the county jails. The partnership, announced last week, strengthens an already‐existing medication‐assisted treatment (MAT) program in the county.

A Legal Right to Clozapine Therapy for Incarcerated Individuals With Treatment-Resistant Schizophrenia.

People with serious mental illnesses increasingly are being treated in jails and prisons, and during incarceration are afforded a constitutional right to medical care. This right pertains to both general medical and mental illnesses and both acute and chronic conditions. However, incarcerated patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia (TRS) often are not offered clozapine, the only medication for this debilitating illness approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In this column, the authors argue that incarcerated individuals with TRS have a statutory and constitutional right to treatment with clozapine.

A Tale of Two Jails: Leveraging Electronic Consultation to Address the Specialty Care Needs of the Vulnerable County Jail Population

Summary The Inland Empire Health Plan (IEHP), located in San Bernardino County, California — one of the largest not-for-profit Medicare-Medicaid plans in the United States — implemented an eConsult (electronic consultation) program in 2018 to improve care coordination and facilitate timely access to specialty care for all IEHP members. The program was soon expanded to include incarcerated individuals in two southern California county jail systems: Riverside County Correctional Health Services and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. The health plan’s Multi-County eConsult Initiative enabled primary care physicians (PCPs) serving the jail systems to consult promptly with specialists at regional health centers regarding care issues for inmates and to determine whether in-person referrals to specialists were warranted. IEHP’s review of eConsult’s impact on the care of inmates at these jails showed that over a 12-month period, 20% of all cases typically referred for in-person specialist visits were deemed unnecessary and were instead treated onsite by PCPs after consultation with the specialists. With this approach, access to specialists was more timely, efficient, and cost effective.

Make campus safe for students with disabilities by collaborating with police, safety personnel

Students with disabilities face unique challenges on college campuses. One of those challenges is how to recognize and react appropriately to an emergency or violent incident, such as an active shooter. In New Jersey, the Bergen Community College Office of Specialized Services partnered with campus safety personnel and the Bergen County Sheriff's Office to develop a training program to address this need.

Understanding the Implications of Partnerships in Vocational Correctional Education Programs: A Case Study of the Relationship Between a Community College and County Sheriff’s Department

ABSTRACT With the recent approval of the Second Chance Pell Program and a proposal to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, a shift is occurring in favor of expanding educational opportunities to incarcerated adults. As reform to the criminal justice system becomes a focus, there is an immediate need to study the dynamic relationship between community colleges and correctional facilities. In response, this study set out to understand how a partnership between a community college and county sheriff’s department can affect the daily decisions and implementation of a vocational program. This study asked: How do a community college and the local sheriff’s department partner to make decisions and implement a correctional education program? Additionally: What factors facilitate or impede the success of the partnership? This study used the case study approach to better understand the implications of a longstanding partnership between a community college and county sheriff’s department that oversees the jail operations. Four key administrative staff members were interviewed, and numerous administrative documents were analyzed. Results highlight how the collaborative decision making nature of this partnership contributes to decision making. Secondly, interview and document analysis exposed how cultural differences impact decision making. This study adds to the limited research on partnerships between community colleges and correctional facilities; therefore, informing policymakers and administrators on how to best serve incarcerated students. This study also provides implications for future partnerships between community colleges and county sheriff’s departments. Suggestions on how to leverage collaborative decision making to battle cultural differences are discussed.

Community Capitals Policing merges food economy and public safety, repairing decades of harm

A local, circular food economy like the one we are building in Alameda County, California, will not only alleviate food insecurity, create jobs, and improve the environment, it is also a center­piece of our 15-year-long effort to strengthen social cohesion, repair trust, and improve public safety through a revolutionary new approach to policing. More than 15 years ago, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office launched a new brand of public safety, called Community Capitals Policing,[1] in Ashland and Cherryland, two unincorporated communities just south of Oakland, California. These communities have experienced dispropor­tionate levels of crime, poverty, disinvestment, disease, unemployment, and blight since the late 1970s. Our work, based on the community capitals framework (Fey, Bregendahl, &amp; Flora, 2006), is taking a systems-level approach to repair the harm done to the community over decades of systemic racism and neglect. The work is informed by a seven-year project called Food Dignity, funded by a US$5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

COVID-19 and treating incarcerated populations for opioid use disorder

The Franklin County Sheriff's Office (FCSO), in Greenfield, Massachusetts, is among the first jails nationwide to provide correctional populations with access to all three medications to treat opioid use disorder (MOUD, i.e., buprenorphine, methadone, naltrexone). In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, FCSO quickly implemented comprehensive mitigation policies and adapted MOUD programming. Two major challenges for implementation of the MOUD program were the mandated rapid release of nonviolent pretrial individuals, many of whom were being treated with MOUD and released too quickly to conduct continuity of care planning; and establishing how to deliver physically distanced MOUD services in jail. FCSO implemented and adapted a hub-and-spoke MOUD model, developed telehealth capacity, and experimented with take-home MOUD at release to facilitate continuity-of-care as individuals re-entered the community. Experiences underscore how COVID-19 accelerated the uptake and diffusion of technology-infused OUD treatment and other innovations in criminal justice settings. Looking forward, to address both opioid use disorder and COVID-19, jails and prisons need to develop capacity to implement mitigation strategies, including universal and rapid COVID-19 testing of staff and incarcerated individuals, and be resourced to provide evidence-based addiction treatment. FCSO quickly pivoted and adapted MOUD programming because of its history of applying public health approaches to address the opioid epidemic. Utilizing public health strategies can enable prisons and jails to mitigate the harms of the co-occurring epidemics of OUD and COVID-19, both of which disproportionately affect criminal justice populations, for persons who are incarcerated and the communities to which they return.

Understanding the Motivations of Citizens to Join a Community Posse Initiative: A Qualitative Analysis

This qualitative study examines a community posse initiative initiated by the Clearfield County Sheriff’s Office in Pennsylvania in 2015. In this research, we aimed to understand the motivations of volunteers who joined the posse initiative and identify the factors that affect citizens’ decisions to contribute to a volunteer policing effort. To do this, we collected data through semi-structured interviews with posse members and also obtained official data from the Sheriff’s Office. The major findings suggest that participants were motivated to join the posse out of feelings of duty/attachment to the community, a desire to help law enforcement, and a heightened fear of crime. Findings of our research and its contribution to the volunteer policing literature are discussed and implications for future research are suggested.