Good Police Research Articles

How Rape Should be Reported by the Victims: Opinion Survey of the Female Students of Crawford University in Nigeria

The act of reporting rape to the police is considered a difficult task to undergo for the victims of this crime. With female respondents from a private university in Nigeria (n=40), this research explored the way through which rape is reported. Multi-stage sampling method (convenience and purposive sampling methods) was used in the sampling of the research setting and the female respondents who participated in the study. The study discovered that the respondents preferred that the reports on rape should be made to the parents, religious leaders and friends and not to the police who, of course, should be the ones that the victims need to contact first after such crime incident. The study recommended that there should be massive educational campaigns, seminars and public talks on the needs for the victims to report the crime of rape to the police. The study also recommended total support and encouragement from the family members of the victims and the entire public in forms of love, care, affection, moral support, advice and counseling to the victims so that the rape stigma may be entirely eradicated from the Nigerian society. Finally, training and retraining of police officers on how to handle rape cases, good police - community relationships, eradication of corruption and brutality from the police, in-door trial of rape cases and severe punishment for the offenders, found guilty of rape would go a long way in encouraging the future victims of rape to come against the offenders that have wronged them sexually in our society.

The Nigeria Police and the Search for Integrity in the Midst of Diverse Challenges: An Effective Police Management Approach

This paper examines the challenges that threaten the integrity of the Nigeria police. Corruption, police brutality, bad discretion during investigations, stress, questionable recruitment and promotion, and poor police–community relations are identified and explained as factors that have seriously damaged the image and integrity of the Nigeria police. The paper proceeds to offer solutions to the problems through the eradication of corruption from the police and the whole of Nigerian society, effective management of police accountability, good salary and welfare packages for officers in the Nigeria police, complete professionalisation of the Nigeria police, further education and training for officers, and the establishment of good police–community relations. The implementation of these solutions will produce the ideal police institution, yearned for by the Nigerian people.

What is Good Police Performance

The persistence of crime and detection rates as police performance indicators not only undermines the peacekeeping role of the police in which they invest huge resources, but also makes the rank and file police officers corrupt, beginning with “noble cause” corruption in their efforts to reduce crime and increase detection, and deteriorating to corruption for personal gain as a consideration for risking criminal sanctions, with police leadership becoming complicit in all their wrong doings. It is concluded that police performance should be evaluated continuously by the quality of police response to various situations where they are required to intervene, in terms of values of justice, due process, diligence, best practices, and respect for life, property, dignity and rights of all human beings.

Doing, Redoing, and Undoing Gender

For a study of police women’s identities, qualitative data were generated from in-depth interviews with 21 women working in two metropolitan police departments and varying in race, ethnicity, rank, and tenure. Most women identified female-male differences but noted exceptions. Many felt characteristics concentrated among women enhanced job performance, and men’s characteristics damaged performance. Several insisted that sex-category differences in key attributes accounting for good police work were nonexistent or minimal. Women do not simply reproduce old female-male stereotypes and the hierarchies that devalue female-associated traits. They fashion complex, positive occupational identities that are not necessarily tied to their sex category.

Harm reduction for the supply-side: Its time has come

f use. Once the market is large and well-established, supplyriented interventions can be a terribly inefficient way to suppress se. Yet, even then enforcement agencies remain the only viable way o address many associated harms. Some years ago when the apartent of an elderly gentleman living downstairs was strafed in a rive-by shooting, he called the police. He didn’t demand that a reatment centre be set up next door. He didn’t ask the schools hether they were implementing a model prevention curriculum. e called the police, and as the Boston Gun Project, High-Point, nd other initiatives have demonstrated, good policing can temer the behaviour of even the most noxious gangs (Kleiman, 2009). he police can say, in effect, “Tone it down or take your fight elsehere.” For those living cheek by jowl with drug distributors, law nforcement is not a futile anachronism, but a welcome bulwark gainst brutal violence. So before asking leaders and rank and file of supply-oriented gencies to change their practices and self-image, we might first hank them sincerely for keeping away all the drug markets that ave not matured. And it might be worth reassuring them that we now they’re still the ones we’ll call in a scrape. We appreciate hem and their efforts, and it is precisely because we know they are and have so much to offer, that we grant them permission to no longer chase the Quixotic dream of a drug-free nation, allowing them instead to focus on fulfilling their oath, “To protect and serve.” I have pitched this vision to law enforcement at multiple levels in multiple countries, and it is very well received. I believe law enforcement will embrace Greenfield and Paoli’s message if it is presented positively and delivered on their terms. It would be a tragedy if ideas with so much potential were squandered because of unwillingness to present the harm reduction message in a way that is “culturally appropriate” to the people whose behaviour it seeks to change.

Two theories on the police – The relevance of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim to the study of the police

The work of Weber and Durkheim is regularly mentioned in police science, but the relevance of these two scholars to the field of study often remains implicit. Weber’s perspective concentrates on the police’s power to use force, highlighting the moral dilemmas involved with this power. The differences between a definition of the police in terms of force and the notion of ‘good policing’ as the limitation of violence suggest that this view neglects important elements. This becomes clear when one considers Durkheim’s approach, which views the police as a moral agency. The differences between these two perspectives are illustrated with an appeal to the concept of police legitimacy, which shows that they refer to different interpretations of the relation between the police and the public. Each perspective concentrates on one of the two core elements that characterise the police: the power to use force and the moral-symbolic meaning. The relations between these two elements illuminate a fundamental aspect of modern policing.

Police responses to diversity: A social representational study of rural British policing in a changing representational context

AbstractIn the first decade of the 21st century, British policing faced two new challenges in how it responded to social diversity: As well as instituting reforms in response to a highly publicized report describing the British police as ‘institutionally racist’ (Macpherson, 1999), they faced challenges associated with rapid increases in numbers of immigrants into the UK. Studying social representations at such times of change allows access into processes, themes and value systems that may otherwise remain hidden. This paper uses social representations theory to explore interview accounts provided by regular police officers of interactions with members of minority groups. Empirically, we focus on an area of diversity policing that has received relatively little previous attention: Police work in a rural context that has recently played host to large numbers of migrant workers. Our analysis shows that interviews operate as a site of resistance in which respondents attempt to rework hegemonic representations of the police as prejudiced and to re‐present themselves and their work as able to respond appropriately to diversity. Fairness as a defining characteristic of good police practice is a central representational theme that links identity construction processes to police work with minority groups. Recent immigrant groups are represented as both needing and deserving help to assimilate into British culture: Their lack of acculturation and language difficulties provide additional challenges to police work and to how this is judged as ‘fair’. We discuss the broader origins and implications of police officers' understandings of fairness and the use of social representations theory to study representational fields within organizational settings. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Stop and Search: Disproportionality, Discretion and Generalisations

It has long been recognised that discretion is vital to good police work. However, in Britain (and many other countries), practices of discretion in the stop and search context have come under much scrutiny as it has widely been linked to racist practices, i.e. a disproportionate amount of Black and minority ethnic individuals are stopped and searched compared to White people. In a bid to counteract the discretionary practices that are seen to be linked to racist stops and searches, police officers are required (in stops and searches under section 1 of the PACE code A) to have ‘reasonable grounds for suspicion’. This article evaluates what has been claimed as the tension between the required reasonable grounds for suspicion and the need to draw on generalisations (police discretion) for effective policing.

WHAT HAS GONE RIGHT IN INDONESIA OVER THE LAST FIVE YEARS?

The article considers Indonesia's democratic advance over the last five years, effectively the first term in office of President Yudhoyono. Focussing on the three threats which seemed most acute in 2004 - Fragmentation, Macroeconomic Instability and Terrorism, the author suggests that the handling of the post-tsunami situation in Aceh was a turning point which will need to be consolidated by decentralisation; that prudence by technocrats and responsibility by the political leadership ensured economic success; and that the terrorist threat was overcome, partly by a political recognition that a real threat existed which had to be faced, and partly by good police work.

POLICE CHIEF PERCEPTIONS OF GOOD POLICING IN NON-URBAN DEPARTMENTS

ABSTRACT This qualitative study identifies what police chiefs consider to be the distinguishing characteristics of their best police officers. To combat the shortcomings of traditional performance appraisals, police chiefs in small, non-urban departments were asked to rank each of their police officers from best to worst. This provided a clear demarcation between high and low-performing officers. The chiefs were then administered a structured interview in order to identify themes in personality and behavioral characteristics of their best-performing police officers. Three themes surfaced in the interviews: the relative unimportance of quantitative measures of performance, a generation gap in officer loyalty, and the importance of maturity to good police work. The findings suggest that police executives are looking for officers with a combination of common sense, technical skills, and emotional intelligence.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Transnational Crime and Transnational Policing

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Transnational Crime and Transnational Policing

Embedding HPT: Improving police performance by implementing human performance technology in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Good police performance enables social capital, strengthens communities, and helps build civil society. Since 2003, Canada's national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), has used human performance technology to improve performance in more than 300 sites across Canada and also as a core part of the RCMP leadership talent pipeline. The lessons learned may be of interest to others contemplating a large-scale distributed use of this powerful methodology.

False Confessions From 53 Persons With Intellectual Disabilities: The List Keeps Growing

Today, persons with intellectual and related disabilities are being seen as citizens in full standing in their own neighborhoods. We see them on the street, on buses, in restaurants—even attending classes in their own neighborhood schools and working at jobs they are able to do. It wasn’t always that way. In earlier years they were seen as objects of rejection. Most were removed from their communities and sent to live in large, out-of-the-way, state-funded institutions. Now that they are back in the midst of our neighborhoods, we are learning to understand and support them as never before. Most—but not all—seek to be friendly with local police officers. They do it because they need to depend on authority figures around them to live in the community successfully. Police officers need to know that some tend to be overly vulnerable and pliable when placed under pressure in interrogation rooms. In such a situation they may say whatever these authority figures want to hear. They will even confess to crimes they did not commit. Today, 53 persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities have confessed to serious felonies—murder, rape, arson, and robbery—that they did not commit. These cases have been extracted from three sources: They come from my own 30year collection of files and from sifting through a list of all false confessors produced earlier by two of the top experts on all false confessions (Drizin & Leo, 2004). More recently they have been sifted from a constant stream of false confession reports flowing out of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s School of Law. All of the 53 individuals have been legally exonerated. The number of persons on this list will increase in the years to come. For example, I can name 15 other false confessors with intellectual disabilities I believe to be innocent, but they will not be placed on this list until they have been exonerated by a formal legal action. Six factors gleaned from this list may be worth pondering:

What makes a good police officer? Phenomenological reflections from the African‐American community

This paper reports the results of a study using a phenomenological method. The study investigates two questions: (1) what are African‐Americans’ perceptions of the police following contact with a police officer, and (2) what are the qualities that African‐Americans think are important for police officers to possess. Data were gathered through semi‐structured interviews over a three‐month period with 32 African‐American participants. The findings suggest that African‐Americans viewed a positive contact with the police when the officer utilized human relations traits such as cultural sensitivity, empathy, and fairness. The qualities deemed important by African‐Americans for a police officer to possess were congruent with human relations qualities. The implications for police practice and research are discussed.

Using personality traits to predict police officer performance

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to evaluate the usefulness of personality traits, namely the Big Five, as a means of selection in good police officers.Design/methodology/approachThe current study examines a sample of 96 police officers from eight non‐urban police departments.FindingsAge and attitude were found to be better predictors of job performance measures than were personality traits. A cynical work attitude was negatively related to ratings of job performance. Officer age was found to have a non‐linear relationship to job performance.Research limitations/implicationsDifficulties in measuring police performance are discussed, as is the relative importance of individual officer personality versus organizational culture.Originality/valueThe study extends the research on police officer selection and issues of job performance and measurement.

Identifying Good Cops Early

Police departments have traditionally assessed their performance through crime-related activity measures that often have little to do with good police work and offer little hope for prediction of exemplary performance. This article suggests some progress can be made in predicting superior performance by considering an earlier stage in a police officer's career where performance is well-defined and measurable: the police academy. Using recruit performance data ( n = 1,556) from a large metropolitan police department, the article uses linear and logistic regression, as well as Chi-square Automatic Indicator Detector (CHIAD), to identify predictors of superior performance in the academy. A number of interesting findings emerge with regard to factors that offer predictive value—reading level, age, gender, and race—and those that do not—college education, military experience, and residency. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for recruitment, selection, and training, as well as for measuring and predicting performance on the street.

KEEPING THE PEACE

This paper locates the emerging professional police force in Copenhagen both in a European‐wide context and in the context of Danish absolute monarchy between 1660 and 1799. The surviving source material on the activities of the new police force itself (from 1683) is reviewed, but the notion of ‘good police’ is placed in a much broader early modern framework involving not only daily security in the city, and matters of criminal and civil law arising naturally in a growing urban environment, but also the relationship between the police master and the many other existing agents of domestic policy in early modern Denmark. The role of ‘good police’ in terms of begging, vagrancy and the workhouse conform largely to contemporary European patterns, but when the police was also (from 1773) given powers to control newspapers and the press, questions of civil rights and obligations were bound to be raised – not least once public opinion became fully aware that the mental condition of Christian VII meant that absolutism could not operate in the normal way. Although the Copenhagen police provided a tool for more co‐ordinated implementation of social policy in the 18th century, there were no sudden changes in domestic agenda.

Introducing Recommendations on Policing in Multi-Ethnic Societies — a new tool for the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities

The purpose of this article is to introduce to and provide some explanation about the Recommendations on Policing in Multi-Ethnic Societies, their initiation, origins and background, their political and legal bases, the drafting process and an outline of their most important content. It has been emphasised that the Recommendations have been aimed at creating yet another tool for the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities for the effective implementation of his conflict-prevention mandate. Elaborated at the request of and endorsed by the HCNM the Recommendations are addressing the topical issue of the role of policing for de-escalating tensions arising in the context of inter-ethnic relations. Considering their possible applications the Recommendations are designed for the enhanced formation by governments of specific policies for good and professional policing in regard to ethnic communities in the whole OSCE-area, thus both East and West of Vienna.

Biliary Injury in Laparoscopic Surgery: Part 2. Changing the Culture of Cholecystectomy

1 his article simultaneously discusses prevention of biliry injury and reduction of the possibility of litigation rising from nonnegligent injury. These are considered ogether during the three periods of encounter with a atient having cholecystectomy: preoperative, operative, nd postoperative. The goals of this article are prevenion of biliary injury and institution of a practice aproach that will make it apparent when injury is not rom negligence. Plaintiffs’ attorneys are guided, undertandably, by the aphorism “Where there’s smoke there’s ire,” and patients may seek out attorneys when care eems deficient even when it is not. Costly, timeonsuming legal actions, as a result, may be initiated to iscover evidence that might have been placed in the hart in the first instance. Improving the current probem of steeply spiraling costs of malpractice insurance hrough actions of those outside the profession, such as egislatures, is a worthy goal. But to pursue only that trategy is akin to asking for a good police department in community, but having faulty locks at home. It is my pinion that we, as surgeons, can have great impact on alpractice litigation in this area by focusing on our wn actions. The following are suggestions for what I onsider “good practice.” These are within the standard f care, but they do not purport to represent the stanard of care in the sense that they exclude other aproaches from also being appropriate. General issues uch as evaluation of patients suitable for surgery based n comorbidities are omitted.

Police officers' credibility judgments: Accuracy and estimated ability

A study was conducted to examine Spanish police officers' and nonofficers' lie‐ and truth‐detection accuracy, as well as their estimated detection ability. The participants were 121 police officers and 146 undergraduates who watched videotaped truthful and deceptive statements. They had to indicate: (1) whether each statement was truthful or deceptive, and (2) how good police officers were, in comparison with the general population, at detecting the truthfulness or deceptiveness of a statement. Results indicate that police officers' accuracy was not higher than that of nonofficers, rather, while the officers reached an accuracy rate close to chance probability, the undergraduates surpassed that probability. Officers had a very strong tendency to judge the statements as deceptive; this made them less accurate than the students in judging the truthful accounts, while both groups reached a similar accuracy when judging the deceptive ones. Both occupational samples considered that the police are more capable of identifying truths and lies than the general population. However, this belief was stronger among the officers themselves than among the nonofficers. No significant correlation between estimated ability and accuracy was found for either sample. The results are explained in terms of the participants' wrong beliefs about the cues to deceit and the socialization process that police officers undergo, which would increase their confidence and perceived ability while hindering their learning of the actual indicators of deceit. The need for officers to receive training is emphasized, and some directions are given on how this training should be carried out.