Enforcement Behavior Research Articles

Attitudes of police officers towards syringe access, occupational needle-sticks, and drug use: A qualitative study of one city police department in the United States

Removal of legal barriers to syringe access has been identified as an important part of a comprehensive approach to reducing HIV transmission among injecting drug users (IDUs). Legal barriers include both “law on the books” and “law on the streets,” i.e., the actual practices of law enforcement officers. Changes in syringe and drug control policy can be ineffective in reducing such barriers if police continue to treat syringe possession as a crime or evidence of criminal activity. Despite the integral role of police officers in health policy implementation, little is known of their knowledge of, attitudes toward, and enforcement response to harm-minimisation schemes. We conducted qualitative interviews with 14 police officers in an urban police department following decriminalisation of syringe purchase and possession. Significant findings include: respondents were generally misinformed about the law legalising syringe purchase and possession; accurate knowledge of the law did not significantly change self-reported law enforcement behaviour; while anxious about accidental needle sticks and acquiring communicable diseases from IDUs, police officers were not trained or equipped to deal with this occupational risk; respondents were frustrated by systemic failures and structural barriers that perpetuate the cycle of substance abuse and crime, but blamed users for poor life choices. These data suggest a need for more extensive study of police attitudes and behaviours towards drug use and drug users. They also suggest changes in police training and management aimed at addressing concerns and misconceptions of the personnel, and ensuring that the legal harm reduction programs are not compromised by negative police interactions with IDUs.

Governmental and Societal Support for Environmental Enforcement in China: An Empirical Study in Guangzhou

The enforcement behaviour of environmental officials in developing countries has not received adequate attention despite enormous challenges to regulatory enforcement in those areas. Accordingly, this article examines the relationship between perceptions of support from local governments and society and evaluations of enforcement effectiveness. A model in which organisational commitment partially mediates these relationships was tested using a sample of 202 enforcement officials in Guangzhou, China. The findings confirm a partial mediating role for organisational commitment and an interaction effect between government and societal support. A plot of this interaction reveals that when enforcement officials perceive high levels of governmental support, societal support further enhances their perceptions of enforcement effectiveness. However, when they perceive government support to be low, higher levels of societal support appear to diminish their assessments of enforcement effectiveness.

German and U.S. Telecommunications Privacy Law: Legal Regulation of Domestic Law Enforcement Surveillance

The legal systems of Germany and the United States contain detailed rules that regulate the surveillance of telecommunications by domestic law enforcement agencies. An initial question about this surveillance concerns the relative levels of such activity in Germany and the United States. This Article demonstrates, however, that the available statistics do not permit the drawing of conclusions about the relative amount of surveillance in the two countries. Any comparison based on these data sets proves to be illusory - the official statistics in Germany and the U.S. measure different phenomenon. Despite an absence of a basis for an empirical exploration of relative levels of telecommunications surveillance in Germany and the U.S., it is possible to compare the applicable legal regulations in the two countries. This Article examines both constitutional and statutory regulations. It finds that the U.S. Supreme Court has developed a restrictive vision of the Fourth Amendment that extends its protections only to telecommunications content, but not telecommunications attributes. In contrast, the German Federal Constitutional Court has interpreted Article 10 of the Basic Law, the postwar German constitution, as protecting not only telecommunications content but also telecommunications attributes. This Article also examines the statutory law that governs telecommunications surveillance in Germany and the U.S. It evaluates six categories: (1) legal protection for telecommunications information; (2) legal protection for connection data; (3) legal protection for stored data; (4) legal requirements for data retention or data erasure; (5) legal protection for contents of telecommunications; and (6) the nature of available remedies. In a final section, this Article examines three possible X factors, beyond the surveillance regulations expressed in legal regulations, that may affect law enforcement behavior in carrying out telecommunications surveillance in the two countries.

Enforcement and Oversight

This research is an extension of the body of work seeking to explain variation in levels of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) enforcement as a function of national and local variation in the agency's political environment. Although we examine a number of relationships, the new question is whether legislative oversight affects the behavior of OSHA compliance officers at the district level. OSHA is an interesting test case of the impact of oversight on bureaucratic output because of the way policy is implemented—enforcement takes place in the field by street-level bureaucrats, far removed from the federal office. Using data gathered at the congressional district level(1983-1995), results suggest that variation within OSHA's enforcement behavior is influenced by oversight committee assignment, overall oversight committee's and appropriations subcommittee's attitudes toward labor, and the district representative's disposition toward labor issues. We conclude legislative oversight indeed imposes limitations on compliance officers' district-level enforcement actions.

Agency governance and enforcement: the influence of mission on environmental decisionmaking

AbstractAdministrative agencies seeking to impose sanctions for regulatory violations can handle matters internally or through civil or criminal courts. Organizational culture, legal constraints, and political and private actors may influence governance and hence choice of enforcement venue. An enforcement behavior model is constructed and tested empirically using a 1990–1997 sample of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air, water, and hazardous waste penalty cases involving individuals. While EPA's enforcement arm embraces the mission of its regulatory arm—minimizing environmental harm—in part, it also has attributes of a police and prosecution force—specifically deterring (and maximizing social welfare) or incapacitating individual violators. Nevertheless, EPA may fail to minimize violations of and generally deter non‐culpable individuals who are affiliated with large firms. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Indigenous people policing indigenous people: the potential psychological and cultural costs

This research reports on the link between feelings of spirituality and how Navajo police officers tend to enforce European-based law. Previous research suggests that a link exists between the officers’ depth of feeling of spirituality and the officers’ attitude toward the effectiveness traditional methods of social control; however, this research goes a step further and examines the impact of cultural dissonance on the stressors faced by Navajo police officers. The enforcement behavior of the Navajo officers was used as a proxy for the intensity of their feelings concerning the usefulness of traditional versus European-based forces of social control; the underlying assumption being tested is that self-determination is not only a state of law but a state of psychological being. A snowball method of sample development was used to select officers for intensive interviews. The findings suggest that the officers’ feeling of spiritual connectedness to his/her culture is inversely related to the strictness of the enforcement of European-based laws. In other words, the more spiritual the officer, the less likely the officer is to rely solely on European-based laws, and the greater the reliance on other methods of problems solving. The finding also suggest that in addition to the stressors normally encounter by all police officers, Navajo officers faced additional stressors that are specific to indigenous officers policing in indigenous communities.

Liquor Law Enforcement: policy and practice in Australia

In Australia, even though there are liquor laws that make it amongst other things, illegal to sell alcohol to persons under 18 years of age and to intoxicated persons, the research shows that there is not a high level of compliance with these laws. This study investigated police reports of enforcement of liquor laws in rural and urban Australia by surveying 270 rural and 336 urban operational police officers. The results showed that police directed most enforcement at individual drinkers in breach of the law rather than the venue that supplied the alcohol. Only 18% of rural and 14% of urban officers claimed to have enforced a breach by a vendor or licensee, whereas 62% of rural officers compared with 52% of urban officers had enforced a breach by an individual in the past 12 months. The enforcement behaviour of both rural and urban officers was significantly influenced by their self-reported knowledge of the liquor laws. In both locations the officers who were the most likely to enforce vendor or licensee breaches were those who claimed they had a very good knowledge of the liquor laws. Our results were consistent with previous research and indicated the need for policy development and training and the enlistment of community support if there is to be a breakthrough in the area of liquor law enforcement at the point of sale.

The Impact of Working in Two Worlds and its Effect on Navajo Police Officers

This paper reports on the link between Navajo Police Officers’ feelings of spirituality and the manner in which they tend to enforce European-based law. The enforcement behavior of Navajo Police Officers is used as indicators of the intensity of their feelings concerning the usefulness of traditional versus European-based forces of social control. The underlying assumption being tested is that self-determination is not only a state of law but a state of psychological being. Previous research suggests that a link exists between the Navajo Officers’ depth of feeling of spirituality and the officers’ attitude toward the effectiveness of the traditional methods of social control, particularly peacemaking as it has been reintroduced to the Navajo Nation. A snowball method of sample development was used to select officers for intensive interviews. The findings suggest that the officers’ feelings of spiritual connectedness to their culture is inversely related to the strictness of their enforcement of European-based laws. In other words, the more spiritual the office, the less likely the office is to rely solely on European-based laws, and the greater the reliance on other methods of problem-solving.

Monitoring and Enforcement of Environmental Policy

This article reviews the economics literature on monitoring and enforcement of environmental policy. In the last few years there has been a rapid growth in both theoretical developments and empirical studies of monitoring and enforcement. Various factors have contributed to this growth, including (1) the growth of the law and economics literature and its interest in issues of law enforcement and penalties, (2) increased emphasis on enforcement by EPA and other regulatory agencies, and (3) the availability of data on firm compliance. The economics literature on environmental monitoring and enforcement has closely followed the related field of optimal penalties in the law and economics literature. The scope of the article includes both public and private mechanisms designed to compel firms (and individuals) to comply with environmental formal regulations and informal rules of conduct or social norms. For purposes of this paper, monitoring and enforcement includes monitoring and inspections by enforcement authorities as well as sanctions, remedial actions, and other mechanisms designed to punish and/or bring a firm into compliance. It also includes non-governmental actions such as citizen suits authorized by the government and informal mechanisms such as public pressure. It does not include the role of liability laws (torts, nuisance actions, etc.) in compelling polluters to reduce emissions. The paper begins with a fundamental question--why do firms comply with environmental laws? Next, I consider the various economic theories of government behavior and how they have been used to help explain observed enforcement behavior. Following these positive analyses, I turn to normative theories of optimal penalties as it relates to environmental regulation, including recent developments that have incorporated the complexities associated with sanctioning both organizations and their employees. The paper continues with an assessment of empirical studies on environmental enforcement. In addition to studies of government enforcement, I examine empirical studies of private enforcement mechanisms (e.g., citizen suits) and the role of market forces in compelling compliance behavior. A concluding section assesses the most critical gaps in our knowledge and contains suggestions for future research.

The Institutional Dynamics of Policy Administration: Bureaucratic Influence over Securities Regulation

Theory: A dynamic systems model of administrative politics that (1) relaxes restrictive causal assumptions among the president, Congress, and an administrative agency, (2) emphasizes aggregate institutional behavior, and (3) analyzes both anticipated and unanticipated policy behavior is set forth as a more general means to investigate agency-political relationships. Hypotheses: The main set of hypotheses focus on the aggregate institutional relationships among the president, Congress, and administrative agency. These four possible hypotheses include bureaucratic influence, bureaucratic autonomy, mutual influence, and political influence. The purpose here is to assess the relative merits of competing explanations for bureaucratic behavior. Securities regulation is a perfect area of inquiry to investigate these competing perspectives since the findings of existing research on this topic are disparate. Methods: Vector autoregressive time series statistical methods are used to empirically test the dynamic systems model of administrative politics by examining three empirical models of SEC enforcement behavior in relation to presidential and congressional budgetary preference signals for the 1949-92 annual period. Results: The SEC sends potent signals of their own (via their changes in regulatory outputs) that will affect the budgetary preferences of its political principles. However, the SEC's administrative outputs are shown to be somewhat less sensitive to political budgetary preference signals than what one would expect. Presidential and congressional budgetary preference signals (with respect to the SEC) are interdependent to a sizeable extent, thus raising doubts about the separate, independent effect democratic institutions have over the bureaucracy. The implications of this study suggest that conventional theories of agency-political relations serve as an oversimplified way to study administrative behavior. Future research on this topic

Regulatory objectives and enforcement behavior

Economic models of enforcing environmental law have incorporated varying assumptions about regulatory objectives. This paper examines the consequences of different attitudes toward the benefits and costs of pollution control on the part of regulators who have limited powers and resources. We find that greater weight given to compliance costs relative to the social damages of the polluting activity will bring outcomes closer to the optimum when the regulator is strong, but may move outcome further from the social optimum when regulatory powers are weak. When negotiated noncompliance is an option, greater consideration of compliance costs will tend to produce better results.

Self-Inflicted Capture

Regulatory theorists propose the possibility of regulatory agency `capture' by external interests. However, the possibility of internal capture, meaning `self-inflicted, `that reflects regulator self-deception has not been expressly considered. This article probes this possibility by reviewing and integrating available literature on self-deception with regulatory enforcement literature. A five-stage model of regulatory enforcement behavior reflecting by a self-deceptive motive is advanced. A series of propositions arising from the model are presented. he article concludes with recommendations for minimizing self-inflicted capture's recurrence in the future.

Expectancy Theory and Police Productivity in DUI Enforcement

This article drew on expectancy theory in industrial/organizational psychology to explain arrest productivity for driving under the influence (DUI) in a sample of Pennsylvania police officers. Expectancy theory is a cognitive model of motivation and performance based on workers' perceptions of their situation. Its major elements are estimated in a regression model: the officer's capability and opportunity for DUI enforcement (performance-reward expectancy), the instrumentality of DUI enforcement behavior for the officer, and the reward-cost balance associated with making DUI arrests. These factors account for 26% of the residual variance in the number of DUI arrests made annually once organizational effects have been removed. The relationships revealed are as expectancy theory predicts, except for instrumentality variables, which show a negative relationship to arrest productivity. This is due largely to the orientation of a small number of “rate busters,” whose exceptionally high arrest rate and negative attitudes toward their peers and the department hierarchy make them a distinct group accounting for a disproportionate number of arrests.

Determining an Agency's Regulatory Style: How Does the Epa Water Office Enforce the Law?

a strict application of the law, while supporters of the negotiated compliance model have called for increased bureaucratic flexibility and a greater reliance on bargaining with the regulated industry. While the merits of these two models have been much debated and discussed, scholars have been less concerned with determining which approach is actually employed by regulatory agencies. Through an analysis of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) data set, we examine how employees of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Water Office have actually enforced the Clean Water Act (CWA). This analysis demonstrates that the enforcement behavior of the EPA Water Office is best represented by the negotiated compliance model.

THE STATES AND DEREGULATION: THE CASE OF SURFACE MINING

The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA), passed to correct the abuses of surface mining, assigned key implementation roles to the states. While the federal government originally enforced SMCRA, states could operate the program themselves. Once states decided to run their own program the federal government would oversee them to insure they properly enforce the Act. This research examines the enforcement behavior of states in the 1980s. The results indicate that early in the Reagan administration eastern states enforced the SMCRA less stringently than other states. Eastern states increased their level of enforcement later in the 1980s in response to pressures for increased federal oversight from Congress, interest groups and others.

Thermodynamics as the continuum limit of statistical mechanics

The thermodynamic limit in statistical mechanics is often equivalent to a properly defined continuum limit, in which Boltzmann’s constant k vanishes together with the microscopic scales of length and time. In this continuum limit, which is the missing link between statistical mechanics and the historical development of thermodynamics, all microscopic fluctuations are suppressed, just as the quantum mechanical uncertainties are in the classical limit; these two limits are similar, but can be taken independently. The continuum limit is to be preferred above the thermodynamic limit when macroscopic dependences on space or time are present and may help to solve conceptual problems. As an example, capillary phenomena are discussed with particular attention to Kelvin’s equation. The enforced behavior of coupling constants in the continuum limit stresses the phenomenological and approximate status of thermodynamics. The relation with other reduction schemes of macroscopic physics is indicated, and possible consequences for ergodic theory are sketched.

Effects of enforced behavior change on attitudes.

Effects of enforced behavior change on attitudes.