Policing Issues Research Articles

The Challenges and Rewards of Carrying Out Qualitative Research on the Police in the African American Community

In this paper, we discuss the challenges and rewards of carrying out qualitative research on the police in the African American1 community. Using data drawn from interviews with seventy-seven African American adults in Durham, NC, we found that community member hostility toward research(ers) and fear of both neighbors and the police lowered African Americans’ willingness to be interviewed about their perceptions of and experiences with U.S. police. These findings were observed primarily in public housing and middle-income communities. On a positive note, we found that greater awareness of policing issues increased African Americans’ willingness to participate in research about the police. This finding was more common among upper-middle-income African Americans. The implications of our findings for future research and improved policing in the African American community are discussed.

Future Role of Digital Platform of Community Policing in Malawi

Internet evolution and digital platform popularity have revolutionized citizens participation in public security administration. However, digital platform ecosystem and functionality remains underexplored. Study examines the future role of digital platform for citizens participation in community policing in Malawi. Within frame work of exploratory sequential mixed methods, focus group discussion interviews purposively selected four groups of 10 respondents each, and used interview guide for data collection. Survey randomly sampled 432 households using Yamene (1969) formular to distribute structured questionnaires for data collection. Interviews were written on script then coded, later grouped into sub themes and finally into themes which corresponded to research questions aided by NVivo application. The survey was analyzed through SPSS version 20 to come up with descriptive statistics. Using pragmatics philosophical paradigm, broken window, democratic participation and social-disorganization theories, the study revealed that citizens may be encouraged to participate on digital platform in community policing by; (a) providing training to citizens on digital crime prevention and safety measures, (b) offering incentives or rewards to citizens who participate in neighborhood safety and security digital initiatives, (c) using social media and other digital platforms to raise awareness and encourage citizen participation, (d) creating more opportunities for citizen-police collaboration and dialogue through social media. Multinominal logistic regression shows gender may have impact on the future role of digital platform of community policing; (i) gain communications between police and community, (ii) detect a wider variety of insecurities (Transparency), (iii) promote the effective use of limited resources, (iv) move beyond the customary bureaucratic procedures at p=.017, (v) gain participation of women, minorities, and vulnerable population at p=.459, (vi) contribute to empowerment of the community at p=.003. Solutions to challenges of digital platform of community policing use are; (1) awareness (Sensitization) Campaign, (2) capacity building on the usage of ICT tools, (3) make available ICT merchant selling and maintenance points, (4) usage of Solar Powered ICT and (5) Place coordinated governance mechanisms. While previous scholars have argued that digital platform has allowed formal and non-formal wide participation, as well as increase transparency and accountability to police officers in handling policing issues and empowering citizens to take part in security of their times. Current revelation points that harnessing and promotion of digital platform gives chance to revolution for transformation that may influence accountability of public security administration to provide quality public services for better life to the challenges of the time.

The Influence of Performance Effectiveness, Procedural Justice and Social Capital on Public Trust In The Police In The Central Jakarta Metro Police Jurisdiction

Public trust in the police is a problematic issue for modern police everywhere, including in Indonesia. The police agency needs a high level of trust to be able to carry out its duties and functions as the person in charge of social order and law in society. This study intends to examine the influence of performance effectiveness, procedural justice and social capital on public trust in the police in Central Jakarta. The survey was conducted to 400 respondents using the cluster purposive random sampling method at the sub-district level. The results showed that the performance effectiveness variable had a significant effect (0.275), the procedural justice variable had no significant effect, and the social capital variable had a significant effect (0.133).

Dress Policing at Higher Learning Institutions in Zimbabwe: Discourses on the Bulawayo Polytechnic College Dress Code Declaration

In November 2022, the administrators at Bulawayo Polytechnic College instituted a new dress code at its campus, sparking public outrage. This college dress code reinvigorated debates on the age-old questions of morality and rights. On one hand, there is a strong belief that the implementation of dress codes may lead to the violation of students’ rights and self-expression. On the other hand, others contend that ‘revealing’ dresses may disrupt teaching and learning. This article uses this Bulawayo Polytechnic ‘moment’ to explore the discourses and debates surrounding dress codes in higher education institutions. Drawing upon Foucault’s theorisation on discourse, discipline and governmentality, we consider school dress codes as technologies of power. Data were collected from college students. At the core of these debates on choices of clothes are issues of policing and disciplining female bodies, rape culture, body shaming, victim-blaming and surveillance.

Wytyczne dotyczące czynności służbowych dla funkcjonariuszy Gestapo pracujących w komendzie Sicherheitspolizei und SD w Radomiu z 1940 r.

The Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) – Secret State Police – is considered one of the most criminal formations of the Nazi German state. In the years 1939–1945, it formed a department at the Sicherheitspolizei und SD (Security Police and Security Service) headquarters in Radom, which was the capital of one of the districts of the General Government. Extremally brutal extermination activities carried out by Gestapo officers against the Polish and Jewish population were accompanied by duties related to office work. Completing the fi les as well as creating and systematically supplementing fi les of various types was supposed to ultimately lead to obtaining the complete knowledge of the structures of the Polish resistance movement, and then to its annihilation. The guidelines for offi cial activities issued in 1940 were to systematize the work of Gestapo offi cers, making it more eff ective. Said guidelines cover a range of policing issues, from clerical activities to dealing with agents.

Special Issue: Contemporary Policing Issues Addressed Through Collaborative Partnerships

Special Issue: Contemporary Policing Issues Addressed Through Collaborative Partnerships

The “goldfish bowl”: a qualitative study of the effects of heightened surveillance on people who use drugs in a rural and coastal Canadian setting

BackgroundA growing body of research has focused on contextual factors that shape health and well-being of people who use drugs (PWUD). However, most of this research focuses on large cities and less is known about the effects of social and structural contexts on drug use and associated risks in rural Canadian settings. Therefore, we undertook this study to examine rural-specific contextual factors that affect the day-to-day experiences of PWUD.MethodsTwenty-seven qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with PWUD in a rural and coastal setting in British Columbia, Canada. Participants had to be ≥ 19 years old, used illegal opioids and/or stimulants regularly, and lived in the qathet region. Interview transcripts were coded based on themes identified by the research team.ResultsParticipants described progressive shifts in politics and culture in the qathet region while also identifying resource scarcity, homelessness, and changes in the drug supply, where illicit drug contents have become highly toxic and unpredictable. Participants discussed the qualities of a small community where everyone knows each other and there is a lack of privacy and confidentiality around drug use, which resulted in experiences of stigma, discrimination, and surveillance. Participants also reported rural-specific policing issues and experiences of surveillance on ferries when traveling to larger cities to purchase drugs. This led to significantly higher drug prices for PWUD due to the time dedication and criminalized risks associated with drug possession and trafficking.ConclusionsOur findings illustrate the unique experiences faced by PWUD in a rural and coastal setting. The “goldfish bowl” effect in this rural community created heightened social and structural surveillance of PWUD, which led to a variety of negative consequences. There is a clear need for interventions to address the larger contextual drivers affecting people who use drugs in rural settings, including decriminalization and peer-led anti-stigma strategies, in order to improve the lives of PWUD.

Mapping the Police-Media Institutional Relationship

The relationship between police and media has been and remains one of the most significant for both institutions. The modern police and modern newspaper developed contemporaneously, each influencing the form, function, and popular appeal of the other. Theories of media and power, however, often address the police as part of larger power structures and ignore the unique police-media institutional relationship.
 This research paper establishes essential characteristics of the police-media relationship and identifies frequent sites of interaction between them, with a focus on crime reporting. Media effects, dominant ideology, and institutional approaches are then assessed as interpretive frameworks, concluding that institutional theory provides the strongest theoretical model for analyzing internal and interorganizational behaviours.
 The professional norms and practices that compose police and media institutional logics are defined, and their historical origins and evolutions are investigated. These long-established logics continue to direct how police and media construct and respond to crime, and consequently how crime is perceived by the public and treated by legal authorities. Because the habits of crime reporting shape policing practices, altering routine media coverage of crime and police issues may help address systemic problems in policing.

POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

Small world can alleviate the social dilemmas originating from self-regulation or community policing issues

Self-regulation and government regulation, community policing and external powerful forces, respectively, form vital part of today’s global economy and social management. The implementation of regulation from self-regulation or community policing requires considerable disciplined members to share the costs of execution, while government or external powerful forces are more likely to make an strong intervention as the industry or community is being widely eroded, which are thus two definitely different feedback regulation schemes. Together with those wrong-doers, the organizations of the two feedback regulation schemes consist of both first-order and novel second-order social dilemma. It still remains a significant challenge to identify an optimal structure to simultaneously alleviate the two dilemmas, and even to additionally favor the altruistic individuals. To address this issue, in this paper we adopt an evolutionary game model within the framework of the public good model, by considering defector-driven and cooperator-driven punishment to map the two feedback regulation schemes, respectively. Through a series of extensive Monte Carlo simulation experiments and mean-field analysis based on replicator dynamics, we finally uncover the combination of clustering and shortcuts, say the small-world structure, is required to largely alleviate both first-order and novel second-order dilemma, which can not only yield optimal public goods by successfully eliminating defectors through strong network reciprocity from dense local connections, but also provide sufficient shortcuts to promote the dominance of defector-driven punishers. Our findings can be beneficial for improving self-regulation or community policing systems by constructing novel monitoring networks.

Understanding cybercrime in ‘real world’ policing and law enforcement

Cybercrime is a growing issue, still not fully understood by researchers or policing/law enforcement communities. UK Government reports assert that victims of cybercrime were unlikely to report crimes immediately due to the perception that police were ill-equipped to deal with these offences. Additionally, these reports identify policing issues including a lack of cybercrime knowledge. This paper reviews current research, providing a comprehensive account of cybercrime and addressing issues in policing such offences. We achieve this by describing the technological, individual, social and situational landscapes conducive to cybercrime, and how this knowledge may inform strategies to overcome current issues in investigations.

Awe: Helping leaders address modern policing problems

Policing in America is facing unprecedented issues, including surges in violent crimes, record-low levels of morale, recruitment and retention issues, COVID-19 as the leading cause of death in policing in 2021, police suicide described as an epidemic, and an overall increase in mental health conditions. As the resilience of police officers is pushed to the limits, police leaders must develop innovative approaches to enhance and sustain their workforce’s mental health and well-being. This paper shares how one aspect of resilience—reflecting on and experiencing awe—can assist police leaders in exploring creative and meaningful ways to address current policing issues.

The plurality of police oversight: a method for building upon lessons learned for understanding an evolving strategy

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to describe an innovative research methods framework designed to address some of the persistent challenges to a social scientific understanding of civilian-led police oversight commissions.Design/methodology/approachThe project design begins by acknowledging that oversight commissions take multiple and varied forms, which are contingent on local histories, institutional dynamics and discursive strategies for indexing racial inequality. The authors find such variation not to be an impediment to insightful research design. Rather, the methodological frame makes use of multi-sited ethnographic methods, organized at the county level across three research clusters (in this example, Milwaukee Co, WI; San Diego Co., CA; and Washtenaw Co, MI), to draw attention to the effects of such multiplicity to complicate, localize and render visible the specific practices of policing and its critique through civilian oversight.FindingsAmongst an increasing national concern with the racialized nature of police violence, one evolving strategy for police reform among municipalities is to establish civilian oversight boards that can monitor, make recommendations for, and potentially direct police policy. However, there is very little research on such commissions, leaving many unanswered questions for proponents of evidence-based criminal justice policy. One reason for this lack is that the tremendous variability of such commissions has led some researchers to abandon hope for a comparative analysis which might offer generalizable conclusions beyond individual case studies. Lessons learned from previous reform efforts suggest that without a solid evidentiary basis, such reform efforts can easily succumb to institutional inertia or even failure. This danger is especially present when policy and practice recommendations are not based on research designs particularly attuned to making audible the experiences and concerns of the most marginalized targets of police attention.Originality/valueThe value of this method rests in its ability to provide comparative insights into the ways in which oversight commissions operate within a broader pluralized security landscape that both makes possible and constrains democratic participation along racial lines. The method contextualizes and renders audible ways of understanding, evaluating, and practicing democratic community as it is articulated through the issue of police and its oversight.

Abolition Dramaturgies: Reformance, Waywardness, and the End of the World

This essay places the penal abolition movement in conversation with dramatic literature, in order to understand how dramatists engage issues of policing and systemic racism, and how abolition can be envisioned onstage. Abolition dramaturgies are divisions of space and time in which a world without policing and imprisonment can be envisioned, practiced, experimented, innovated, sounded, felt, spread, and collectivized. Despite this revolutionary potential, the end goals of much performance for racial justice profoundly misrepresents the problem with US policing—a misrepresentation that crystallizes a broader view of police and prison reform in the era of "post-racialism," as well as reflecting deeper insights into the foundation of theatre and performance studies. For example, the play American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown enacts reformance, a structure of repetition, in which change is proposed without transforming foundational carceral structures. In contrast, the plays Pass Over by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu and In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks explore dramatic engagements with abolitionist theories and practices. Further, these plays written by Black women envision how "waywardness" frames the possibility of political transformation after the end of the world. Such performances of ungovernability defy the seeming non-representability of abolition, staging images of violence in such a way that presents new opportunities for reparative relationality.

1862년 성주농민항쟁과 읍리층의 동향 : 서택현의 『변무록』을 중심으로

The Seongju Peasant’s Struggle in 1862, according to a very concise report by the Country’s Officer, it was an ordinary process among numerous incidents at the time. Then, when I discovered a material called 『Byeonmurok』 written by a person named Seo Taek-hyeon a former yibang(吏房), the content became very rich. He wrote this article because his house was destroyed in the conflict between between Local Official Class. Although it is an individual’s Works. it is helpful in understanding the development process of the Seongju Uprising and the trends within the Local Official Class(邑吏層). Furthermore, it is also very important that the eupri personally wrote their rituals, behaviors, terms, etc. naturally.<BR> In Seongju in 1862, along with the influence of Jinju, which occurred earlier, there was a protest under the pretext of correcting the 12 articles. However, the mainstream Bae clan, led by Bae Sul-ho, a former yibang(吏房) in Seongju county, and Yoo Young-ha, who supported him, were attributed to Seo Taek-hyeon, who was connected to the protest leader(狀頭), who provided ‘Eubpye 12 Articles(邑弊12條)’, attacked him and destroyed the house, complaining about injustice. To this end, Seo Taek-hyeon wrote 『Byeonmurok』 and protested.<BR> ‘Correcting the 12 Articles(邑弊12條)’ was brief and well organized. According to this, it can be seen that there are evils throughout the Seongju Tax Administration. In addition, it can be seen that Seongju’s divergence is very large through 『Byunmurok』 and the appeal of Lee Won-jo. In the end, in order to resolve the dissatisfaction of the townspeople in Seongju and to manage the township well, there was no choice but to change the current management method of the township centered on Bae Sul-ho. On the other hand, external conditions also had an influence on this. The Bae Sul-ho system, which was maintained despite the 1st and 2nd protests in Seongju in 1862, was significantly overthrown by the central government inspectorate who could no longer neglect the police issue in 1864. It was eventually destroyed by the punishment of Yeong-eup(營邑) again in 1868.<BR> As a result, the Bae clan suffered a heavy blow. With this, it can be considered that the case that occurred in 1862 following the abolition of the Eupri Class was completed one step. On the other hand, Seo Taek-hyeon, who had been targeted by them, survived, and new powers took on important posts.<BR> Although it is already known that there were conflicts and fights over the position within the Local Official Class, it can be inferred that the Seongju case has a tendency to challenge the forces that seek to weaken or improve exploitation over ‘social issues’. After that, there were changes in the management of the Local Officer Class(邑吏) of Seongju, and it led to various incidents surrounding the appointment of yibang(吏房) in the 1880-1890s.

Features of detection and documentation of violations of the order of stay of children in entertainment facilities

The scientific article is devoted to a topical issue for the Ukrainian police - the peculiarities of detecting and documenting violations of the order of children's stay in entertainment facilities.&#x0D; The paper describes the composition of the administrative offense, the responsibility for which is provided by Article 180-1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses. The author emphasizes that the analyzed composition of administrative offenses affects, first of all, the health of minors, and therefore such offenses have a high degree of harm.&#x0D; Police officers most often find violations of children's stay in entertainment or catering establishments due to planned raids in such institutions at a time when children's stay is prohibited or the implementation of operational information. However, after receiving operational information, the police officer still inspects the institution. The author proposes an algorithm for inspecting entertainment establishments or catering establishments at night.&#x0D; The paper also identifies the difficulties encountered by police officers in identifying violations of the order of stay of children in such institutions, as well as recommendations for improving the activities of juvenile prevention units to detect and document administrative offenses under Article 180-1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses.&#x0D; In order to optimize the activities of the National Police of Ukraine to identify violations of the order of children in entertainment or catering establishments, the author proposed to develop joint programs between bodies and units of the National Police of Ukraine and local governments aimed at joint measures to prevent and detect such facts.&#x0D; Attention is drawn to the contradictory point between the disposition of Article 180-1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses and the norms of the Law of Ukraine "About Child Protection" and in the content of the Law itself. Amendments to this Law have been proposed, which will ensure the observance of children's rights and freedoms and limit the impact of anti-social manifestations on them.

PROTESTS UNDER TRUMP, 2017–2021

The Trump presidency featured a high volume of contentious mobilization. We describe the collection and aggregation of protest mobilization data from 2017 to 2021 and offer five observations. First, the protests were sustained at a high level throughout the Trump presidency, with the largest subset of protests positioned against Trump and the administration’s policies. Second, the grievances that drove the protests varied. Third, the National Student Walkout and the antiracism protests in 2020 had the broadest geographic spread of any reported protests in U.S. history. Fourth, the vast majority of protests did not have arrests or injuries; they were nonviolent protests. When there were arrests, most people who were arrested were committing nonviolent civil disobedience, not aggression or interpersonal violence. Fifth, in 2020, a sustained period of right-wing countermobilization began around the issues of COVID-19 lock-downs, policing and race, and Trump’s false claim about the presidential election.

Identifying the adoption of policing styles: A methodology for determining the commitment to problem-oriented policing amongst police forces in England and Wales

AbstractPrevious research consistently demonstrates that problem-oriented policing (POP) can address a range of policing issues; hence its continued appeal and relevance to current practice. However, there are well-documented challenges in terms of its implementation and sustenance within police forces. Studies of policing styles have yet to thoroughly assess the long-term commitment to POP within police forces in England and Wales. To this end, we first revisit and revise previous research findings on policing styles. Then, we advance a methodology for retrospectively measuring police force POP commitment using two novel indicators—problem-oriented projects submitted to the Tilley Award and those applied as part of the Crime Reduction Programme. We then rank police forces in terms of POP commitment. The empirical evidence and methodology presented here can be used to further examine contemporary adherence to POP as well as the role of policing styles in long-term crime falls or other policing outcomes in England and Wales.

R/ProtectandServe: an exploration of the virtual canteen culture regarding police misconduct

ABSTRACT This study examined a specific online community of verified law enforcement personnel to uncover how police officers frame issues of police misconduct among other law enforcement on the social media website, Reddit. This study engaged in three stages of grounded theory analysis on 223 posts from the subreddit, r/ProtectandServe. This study found four major themes that emerged from conversations within this subreddit of verified law enforcement personnel and their perceptions of police misconduct: (1) negativity towards the media and politicians, (2) trust in their police administrators and organisations, (3) solidarity with fellow police officers, and (4) scepticism (at minimum) towards civilians. How officers use the Reddit platform and what they gain is consistent with the characteristics of police culture found within the existing literature, including solidarity with colleagues, the ‘us versus them’ mindset, the code of silence, and ‘canteen culture’ at the police station but in an online format [Waddington (1999). Police (canteen) sub-culture. British journal of criminology, 39 (2), 287–309, Skolnick (2011). Justice without trial: law enforcement in democratic society. New Orleans, LA: Quid Pro Books, Van Hulst (2013). Storytelling at the police station. British journal of criminology, 53, 624–642, Alpert, Noble, and Rojek (2015). Solidarity and the code of silence. In: R.G. Dunham, and G.P. Alpert, eds. Critical issues in policing: contemporary readings. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc, 106–121, Kappeler, Sluder, and Alpert (2015). Breeding deviant conformity: police ideology and culture. In: R.G. Dunham, and G.P. Alpert, eds. Critical issues in policing: contemporary readings. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc, 79–105] – with some notable nuances. Likewise, these officers apply an aggressive scepticism toward the civilians with whom they interact online and within the stories they tell. In conclusion, police officers are using informal, online spaces to take control of certain police narratives different from official departmental pages while simultaneously cultivating a space where they can offer topical commentary on policing issues and build virtual solidarity. More research is needed in these informal, online spaces where law enforcement personnel are the focus.

In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in the Age of Urban Consolidation by Andrew Heath

Reviewed by: In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in the Age of Urban Consolidation by Andrew Heath Catherine McNeur In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in the Age of Urban Consolidation. By Andrew Heath. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 287 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $49.95.) When we consider the expansion of city boundaries from a bird's-eye view, it can seem like a natural, even inevitable, response to population growth. If the city limits were a belt, it needed to be loosened to encompass the larger urban belly. Depending on the city and the scenario, we might even smirk at the idea of officials strategically embracing rural districts and calling them urban in hopes of seeming demographically larger than rival cities. In his book In Union There Is Strength, Andrew Heath does a fantastic job of showing how Philadelphia's Consolidation Act of 1854 was anything but inevitable. Over a period of a few weeks in the summer of 1844, Philadelphia was shaken by riots that pitted nativist Protestants against Catholic immigrants, with the city and a local militia struggling to gain control. These [End Page 98] uprisings inspired many of Philadelphia's leaders and bourgeois residents to look hard at the shaky social foundation of the city. It was past time, they felt, to confront issues of policing and governance. While the riots were notable, every election involved violent shows of partisanship in the streets. Even groups of volunteer police and firefighters acted like gangs, battling for control of territories. While some Philadelphians enjoyed engaging in this rowdy chaos, others saw in it a desperate need for change. Heath's book centers around the visions that White, powerful men had for Philadelphia's future and how they sculpted it in their image, seeing consolidation of the larger region into the city proper as a way to centralize control, refine the culture of politics, and make Philadelphia more cosmopolitan. While men from bourgeois and radical backgrounds saw different origins for the problems plaguing Philadelphia, their solution was ultimately the same: consolidation. Heath rarely touches on issues of race and gender, so readers will perhaps feel the absence of the perspectives of Black and female Philadelphians, let alone what they stood to gain or lose from the new boundaries. While the consolidators saw themselves as modernizers, Heath is careful to note that this is not a linear story of modernization. Like the United States more broadly during the mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphia was politically and socially fragmented, which impacted the ways people considered the pros and cons of expanding the city limits. Heath works assiduously to make sense of the messy politics of the city at this moment, weaving in urban design and the central role that real estate played in visions for a unified Philadelphia. Where Heath really soars, though, is in placing Philadelphia within its larger national context. While Philadelphia's leaders considered the city's expansion and what that would mean for its prosperity and politics, national leaders debated the impact of expanding the nation while struggling to keep it united. Throughout the book, Heath does a fantastic job of tracing the cultural climate that embraced growth politics as a solution for all sorts of problems, local and national. Ultimately, the 1870s would show the limits of growth politics, as consolidation failed to alleviate the social upheaval that came with the 1873 economic depression. Still, the Consolidation Act of 1854 and Heath's account of it reveal the hopes of Philadelphia's leaders at a moment of dramatic change that continues to echo in the city we know today. [End Page 99] Catherine McNeur Portland State University Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Pennsylvania