Large Jurisdictions Research Articles

Shared Race/Ethnicities of Prosecutor and Defendant: A Test of Competing Hypotheses Predicting Case Outcomes

Diversifying prosecutors’ offices and hiring more minority prosecutors have been touted as promising initiatives to address racial disparities in prosecution. However, two theoretical perspectives—social identity and internalized racism—delineate contradictory predictions on the punitiveness of minority prosecutors. The social identity perspective maintains that minority prosecutors are likely to seek better outcomes for defendants of their own race/ethnicity, whereas internalized racism proposes that minority prosecutors will be punitive to defendants of their own race/ethnicity. The present study uses the most recent data from a large urban jurisdiction to test whether the effect of shared minority identities between prosecutors and defendants on case outcomes is consistent with the social identity or internalized racism perspectives. Results suggest that minority prosecutors tend to show leniency to defendants of their own race/ethnicity; however, they are punitive toward minority defendants of a different race/ethnicity. Policy implications and directions for future research are also discussed.

A Qualitative Analysis of Local Health Departments' Experiences With Contact-Tracing Tools in Response to COVID-19.

A Qualitative Analysis of Local Health Departments' Experiences With Contact-Tracing Tools in Response to COVID-19.

Justice by Geography: The Role of Monetary Sanctions Across Communities

Monetary sanctions are a ubiquitous part of court systems. Previous studies have focused largely on these sanctions at the state level or solely on large urban jurisdictions. However, court systems differ considerably across communities of varying population size, composition, and density. This article examines how differences in court structure and organizational dynamics in communities across the rural-urban continuum lead to differences in how court actors consider the role of monetary sanctions. Using interviews with court actors and ethnographic observations in communities across four states, we find that the practical and symbolic nature of monetary sanctions varied by the acquaintanceship density of the court and community. These interpersonal dynamics influenced courtroom considerations, monetary sanctions’ relationship to local finances, and actors’ positioning toward state-level policy. These findings emphasize the importance of court and community context and structure in assessing the law-in-action both when conducting research and designing reform.

Circumventing erosion of professional learner identity development among beginning teachers

ABSTRACT Similar to many other OECD countries, contemporary policy approaches to teacher professional learning in Australia are tied to the standardisation of the profession and characterised by compliance and performativity regimes of teacher participation in prescribed modes, types and quanta of professional learning. In this paper, we argue that such models fail to effectively support early career teachers’ engagement and growth in professional learning and erode the possibility of positive professional learner identity development. Through the lens of identity construction and attribution theory, we report on the ways 16 beginning teachers positioned themselves as professional learners while working in diverse school contexts across one large Australian educational jurisdiction. Findings from the analysis of semi-structured interviews highlight how important balanced and measured attributions of causality are to professional learner identity development. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Community‐based citizen science projects can support the distributional monitoring of fishes

Abstract Effective conservation and fisheries management requires data to capture demographic processes and range limits for each species to maximize population health and productivity. This need is constrained by limited funding and resources, particularly for countries with large land areas and coastlines as well as expansive exclusive economic zones. This imbalance means that monitoring efforts are often focused on targets of commercial and recreational fishing, which results in incomplete distributional records for non‐target, small‐bodied, and/or cryptic species. Community‐based citizen science projects offer one potential alternative for scientists and fisheries managers needing this type of information but lacking sufficient resources to gather it. This study investigated whether data sourced from an online citizen science project (iNaturalist: Australasian Fishes) can assist in the distributional monitoring of a subset of fish species. Given the regional focus of this citizen science project, distributional data in the form of occurrence records for abundant, protected, and threatened fish species as assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Australia and New Zealand were explored. Data for important commercial and recreational fishery targets in New South Wales were also explored, as a case study of a large jurisdiction with extensive monitoring requirements. The occurrence records for some of these categories of fishes were well represented in the quality‐filtered citizen science data set, particularly endemic fishes whose threat status had not yet been assessed and species not currently under any form of management. Despite gaps in coverage between major urban centres, citizen science data for the best represented endemic fishes were qualitatively comparable to the available geographic distributions for these species. We suggest that quality‐filtered citizen science data can in fact be used to improve taxonomic representation and the geographic breadth of species monitoring with increased participation.

What Are Grand Chambers for?

AbstractIn multi-panelled higher jurisdictions, a larger, extended formation of judges tends to be established within the court. It bears various names: the grand chamber, the extended chamber, the expanded composition, the reunion of several chambers, a court sitting en banc, an extended section or a division of a court. In larger but not too large jurisdictions, the same role is adopted by the plenary. For ease of reference, I shall refer to all such extended judicial formations with the generic name ‘grand chamber’.To bear the same name does not necessarily mean to perform the same function. As a Czech lawyer, I have always intuitively assumed that the role of such a body within an apex court is to unify the case law. In the Czech Republic, as well as in a number of other supreme continental jurisdictions for that matter, there tends to be only one reason for the presence of a grand chamber within a supreme court: to unify the diverging lines of case law and to set a clear line of precedent. However, that has never really been the job description, least of all the practice, of the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (‘Court’). This begs the question: what may then be other structural reasons for the existence of such a body within an apex jurisdiction? What is the specific role, function, and ensuing justification for the Grand Chamber of the Court?This article offers some personal reflections on that question. It is structured as follows: it begins with a short comparative overview of some of the grand chambers within European (national) courts, overseas in the common law world, as well as at the European Court of Human Rights, in order to tease out the functional rationale for various types of extended judicial compositions within those systems (Part I). Next, two types of such functional justifications for grand chambers in the form of ideal models are identified (Part II). Finally, those justifications are then considered in light of the legislative design and the current practice of the Grand Chamber of the Court, before concluding with two modest suggestions (Part III).

Do everyday proactive policing activities reduce vehicle crashes? Examining a commonly held law enforcement belief using a novel method

Traffic accidents present a significant challenge to public safety and are a top priority for many law enforcement agencies in the United States. Empirical studies suggest that police agencies commonly engage in traffic enforcement activities to be proactive, spending much of their downtime patrolling areas with heightened risks for vehicle crashes. Despite the ongoing focus on traffic enforcement in daily police work, the impact of these efforts on traffic accidents remains unclear. The current study uses a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) framework to examine everyday police proactive work and its impact on vehicle crashes at “hot spots” of collisions in a large suburban jurisdiction. Findings indicate that routine patrol levels and activities produce short-term reductions in crashes at the most serious crash hot spots but have less impact elsewhere. To generate a more sustained and optimal effect on traffic safety, everyday police proactivity needs to be more carefully calibrated in terms of its targeting, dosage, and types of activities.

Do license plate readers enhance the initial and residual deterrent effects of police patrol? A quasi-randomized test

To determine whether the use and display of license plate readers (LPRs) enhance the crime prevention effects of police patrol, particularly by increasing initial and residual deterrence from patrol presence. Crime hot spots in a large suburban jurisdiction were randomly assigned to receive intermittent patrols (15–30 min each) by officers with or without LPRs on their vehicles for 4.5 months. Data on 785 patrols at 33 hot spots were used to compare initial and residual outcomes of LPR and non-LPR patrols. Outcomes analyzed for each patrol visit via chi-square tests, survival analyses, and/or logistic regression included the following: the likelihood of a vehicle recovery or arrest; the likelihood of a new crime or disorder call in the location while the officer was present (measuring initial deterrence); time until a new crime or disorder call following the officer’s departure (measuring residual deterrence); and first type of call (crime or disorder) following the officer’s departure (measuring residual deterrence). LPR use increased stolen vehicle recoveries but not arrests. LPR use did not reduce the likelihood of a new call in the hot spot while an officer was present, nor did it affect the timing or seriousness of the next call following a patrol. This study provides little clear evidence for the crime prevention efficacy of using LPRs in general patrol, which is a common practice in the USA. Police and researchers should give more attention to testing the relative benefits of different LPR uses and modes of deployment.

Measuring the Impacts of Everyday Police Proactive Activities: Tackling the Endogeneity Problem

To examine how the practice of daily proactivity affects and responds to changes in crime at micro geographic and temporal scales. Police calls for service and automated vehicle location data from a large suburban jurisdiction were used to create comprehensive measures of police proactivity. Panel data and the generalized method of moments framework were applied to tease out the endogenous relationships between crime and police proactivity and understand the unique impact of proactive patrol and crime upon one another. Daily police proactivity in this locality was highly stable at micro places, although police did intensify their activities very briefly in response to recent changes in crime. In turn, increases in proactive patrol generated immediate increases in crime reporting, followed by fleeting residual deterrent effects that were weaker and less robust. The patterns remained relatively consistent when varying the units of analysis or focusing on hot spots with different profiles of proactivity, but the deterrent effects appeared more sensitive to model specification. Of all measures of proactivity, patrols of medium length and non-traffic enforcement activities were associated with stronger evidence of crime reduction effects. Short-term adjustments in hot spot patrols appear to produce both reporting effects and temporary residual deterrent effects as measured through calls for service and police vehicle location data. Police could potentially enhance and prolong their deterrence by adopting more deliberate strategies with their daily proactive behaviors, including making their proactive activities more targeted and sustained.

Mandatory Sexual Assault Kit Testing Policies and Arrest Trends: A Natural Experiment

The present study employs a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the effects of a mandatory sexual assault kit (SAK) testing policy on rape arrests in a large western US jurisdiction. We use a Bayesian structural time-series model and monthly data on arrests for rape from 2010 through 2019. In the post-implementation period, we observed a downward trend in the arrest rate for rape. Based on the results, the most conservative interpretation of our findings is that the policy implementation did not affect rape arrest rates. While mandatory SAK testing policies are often advocated for based on the belief that they will increase arrest rates for sexual assault (among other proposed benefits), we add to growing empirical evidence that policy interventions beyond mandatory SAK testing are needed to increase arrest rates for sexual assault. Jurisdictions that currently use mandatory SAK testing policies are encouraged to assess stakeholders’ experiences to proactively address resource allocation, consider other policies that may increase accountability for sexual assault offenders, and utilize victim service providers to support other measures of success with victims in instances where no arrest is made.

Specialty Probation Officers as Street-Level Bureaucrats: Exploring How Discretion Is Perceived and Employed on a Mental Health Caseload.

This study explores the perceptions of specialty mental health caseload probation officers and their use of discretion in day-to-day supervision of individuals with mental illness in one large jurisdiction in the United States. Scholars have examined overall effectiveness of specialty probation programs, probation officers' roles as street-level bureaucrats, and the impact of the mental health caseload probation officer and probationer relationship on successful completion. Less attention, however, has been placed on examining how the officers supervising these specialty caseloads perceive their roles as mental health probation officers and how they use discretion in their caseload management. The current study examines the narratives of 24 specialty mental health caseload probation officers and supervisors to understand how discretion is used on a problem-solving caseload and how discretionary decision-making may impact probationer outcomes.

Australia’s incipient eviction crisis: No going back

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia was facing an incipient eviction crisis, the gravity of which had been obscured by inadequate data and the gradual mounting of systemic problems of unaffordability and insecurity. This article reviews the legal framework around tenancies and evictions and the sparse data it produces. Tribunal data obtained by the author shows that Australia’s two largest jurisdictions had, prior to the pandemic, a termination application rate somewhat more than half that of the US ‘crisis’ rate. The article concludes with directions for further research and reforms to address evictions in an enduring way, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jurisdictional Size and Residential Development: Are Large-Scale Local Governments More Receptive to Multifamily Housing?

In the United States, particularly in high-cost urban areas, local resistance to multifamily housing development has been widely noted. In many metropolitan areas, legal authority over land-use regulation is assigned to jurisdictions that often are very small, and some scholars argue that this small-scale local control institutionalizes neighborhood-level opposition to new construction. Using census tracts as units of analysis, we assess the relationship between the population size of the city, county, or township that regulates a tract’s land use and the change in multifamily units between two recent waves of the American Community Survey (2008–2012 and 2014–2018). Results of regression analysis indicate that larger jurisdictional population size is indeed associated with increased multifamily construction. However, the relationship applies only for jurisdictions with populations exceeding 100,000 and decays at jurisdictional populations of more than 1 million. This nonlinearity may reflect quasi-monopolistic land-use control in the largest jurisdictions.

Price Elasticity and Beyond: The Determinants of Residential Electricity Consumption in New York

The price elasticity of electricity demand has been the focus of an important literature, because of the potential impact it has on energy and economic policy. We contribute to it by looking at the state of New York case in an innovative way. We construct a three-dimensional (utility × county × year) panel dataset of electricity sales to residential consumers from 21 electric utilities in all 62 counties of state of New York over the years of 1994 to 2013 to estimate the price elasticity of residential electricity average demand (per household). Such data enables us to account for differences within a large jurisdiction, without having to rely on household-level data, which are difficult to obtain, especially over different years. We find that the short-run and intermediate-run price elasticity of demand are respectively in the vicinity of -0.04 and -0.07 and that the long-run elasticity is around -0.60. We also investigate how the price elasticity varies in different contexts, as described by time period, price level, income level, weather indicators, and other variables. We find that once we take into account the heterogeneity of contexts, the multiplicity of significant price elasticities of demand make it difficult to have a valid, global, interpretation of the impact of a price change upon households. There is such an heterogeneity of price elasticities across the different contexts that one should be cautious on its use for policy, as a single value may not represent any consumer at all.

Surveying Surveillance: A National Study of Police Department Surveillance Technologies

Discussions of surveillance practices within U.S. law enforcement agencies often suggest that police departments have ready access to a wide range of high-tech tools. To date, however, most of the empirical evidence regarding police surveillance has come from either qualitative case studies of cities or surveys of the largest departments. While these studies have led to important insights into the surveillance capacities of large police departments located in larger jurisdictions, our current understanding of police surveillance is limited by a lack of empirical data on police departments in smaller jurisdictions. This study fills this gap by using data from an original nationwide survey of police departments. First, we discuss existing studies of police surveillance access and the legal regimes underlying each type of technology. Next, we use descriptive statistics to empirically investigate the variation in police access to surveillance tools when we account for differences in jurisdiction type. Our findings suggest that rates of police access vary widely depending on the type of technology and jurisdiction size. Overall access to and use of cell phone location tracking far outpaces access to facial recognition and Stingray devices. We discuss these findings and their implications for civil rights and liberties and the state of mass surveillance more generally.

Examining the Spatial Concentration of Mental Health Calls for Police Service in a Small City

Abstract In recent years, police services have begun deploying more robust responses to calls for service involving persons with perceived mental illness (PwPMI), but at times do so in a limited capacity because of various challenges. Drawing from established evidence-based policing practices, a more efficient use of these responses may be to proactively deploy them instead, focusing their efforts on hot spots of PwPMI calls. Unfortunately, little is known about PwPMI call concentrations. Therefore, this study seeks to contribute to the literature by not only examining the concentration of these calls within a small city, but also by introducing new methods and a new measure of concentration to the literature. Drawing on 6 years of calls for service data, the results reveal that a high proportion of PwPMI calls are concentrated in few spatial units—more so than in larger jurisdictions. Further analyses also reveal dispersion of these concentrations.

Victims, offenders and victim-offender overlaps of knife crime: A social network analysis approach using police records.

Knife crime is a source of concern for the police in England and Wales, however little published research exists on this crime type. Who are the offenders who use knives to commit crime, when and why? Who are their victims, and is there a victim-offender overlap? What is the social network formation for people who are exposed to knife crime? Using a multidimensional approach, our aim is to answer these questions about one of England and Wales’ largest jurisdictions: Thames Valley. We first provide a state-of-the-art narrative review of the knife crime literature, followed by an analysis of population-level data on central tendency and dispersion of knife crimes reported to the police (2015–2019), on offences, offenders, victims, victim-offender overlaps and gang-related assaults. Social network analysis was used to explore the formations of offender-victim networks. Our findings show that knife crime represents a small proportion of crime (1.86%) and is associated largely with violence offenses. 16–34 year-old white males are at greatest risk of being the victims, offenders or victim-offenders of knife crime, with similar relative risks between these three categories. Both knife offenders and victims are likely to have a criminal record. Knife crimes are usually not gang-related (less than 20%), and experienced mostly between strangers, with the altercation often a non-retaliatory ‘one-off event’. Even gang-related knife crimes do not follow ‘tit-for-tat’ relationships—except when the individuals involved have extensive offending histories and then are likely to retaliate instantaneously. We conclude that while rare, an incident of knife crime remains predicable, as a substantial ratio of offenders and victims of future knife crime can be found in police records. Prevention strategies should not be focused on gang-related criminals, but on either prolific violent offenders or repeat victims who are known to the police—and therefore more susceptible to knife crime exposure.

Challenges in Data Linkage – Experiences from An Upper Gastrointestinal Cancer Data Linkage Study

IntroductionNearly one quarter of a million Australian workers experience a work injury annually and make a benefit claim through one of the nation’s eleven workers’ compensation (WC) systems. The total cost to Australian society has most recently been estimated at $61.8 billion or 4.1% of GDP. The disaggregation of legislative responsibility between jurisdictions has contributed to a lack of common data standards, and thus minimal understanding of the efficiency or effectiveness of service provision in the Australian WC sector.
 Objectives and ApproachThis project developed a new multi-jurisdictional work disability database including detailed information on work disability duration, health and social care service provision. Service level payment data contained in structured WC insurance claims datasets held by five large WC jurisdictions with >60% coverage of the Australian labour force was collected for all cases of work-related low back pain, fractures and limb soft tissue disease over between 2010 and 2015. Database development involved creation and coding of harmonised service-level indicators for individual episodes of healthcare provision and weekly periods of wage replacement.
 ResultsA total of 253,000 cases and 10.7 million service episodes are included in the database. Initial exploratory analyses focused on the frequency, prevalence, timing, intensity and continuity of General Practitioner (GP) services to each of the injury groups. Regression modelling examined occupational, injury, demographic and jurisdictional factors affecting GP service use outcomes. As anticipated, service patterns varied by injury type, age, gender and occupational group. Significant differences in service use between WC jurisdictions were observed.
 Conclusion / ImplicationsThis exploratory study demonstrates the feasibility of developing a population-based service level database for monitoring health service delivery to injured Australian workers. Future studies will examine the impact of jurisdictional policy differences on service delivery, and the relationship between service delivery and outcomes such as disability duration.

Development and Initial Validation of a Harmonised Multi-Jurisdiction Work Injury Compensation Database

IntroductionNearly one quarter of a million Australian workers experience a work injury annually and make a benefit claim through one of the nation’s eleven workers’ compensation (WC) systems. The total cost to Australian society has most recently been estimated at $61.8 billion or 4.1% of GDP. The disaggregation of legislative responsibility between jurisdictions has contributed to a lack of common data standards, and thus minimal understanding of the efficiency or effectiveness of service provision in the Australian WC sector.
 Objectives and ApproachThis project developed a new multi-jurisdictional work disability database including detailed information on work disability duration, health and social care service provision. Service level payment data contained in structured WC insurance claims datasets held by five large WC jurisdictions with >60% coverage of the Australian labour force was collected for all cases of work-related low back pain, fractures and limb soft tissue disease over between 2010 and 2015. Database development involved creation and coding of harmonised service-level indicators for individual episodes of healthcare provision and weekly periods of wage replacement.
 ResultsA total of 253,000 cases and 10.7 million service episodes are included in the database. Initial exploratory analyses focused on the frequency, prevalence, timing, intensity and continuity of General Practitioner (GP) services to each of the injury groups. Regression modelling examined occupational, injury, demographic and jurisdictional factors affecting GP service use outcomes. As anticipated, service patterns varied by injury type, age, gender and occupational group. Significant differences in service use between WC jurisdictions were observed.
 Conclusion / ImplicationsThis exploratory study demonstrates the feasibility of developing a population-based service level database for monitoring health service delivery to injured Australian workers. Future studies will examine the impact of jurisdictional policy differences on service delivery, and the relationship between service delivery and outcomes such as disability duration.

Government Information: Readily Accessible yet Also Grey Literature

ABSTRACT Government information is a unique subset of grey literature. Often governments are the only source of information because they are the only entities that collect or create specific information, such as census data. Government information is usually categorized by level of government (local, state, federal, international), as well as by agency, and is often in the form of serials, such as annual reports. For the larger jurisdictions, there are often repositories or depository programs that index publications, but local government information often must be actively acquired. Currently, government information is published online. Some agencies are conscientious of their historical information and digitize and post older materials, but other agencies focus on access to current, born-digital information, and may not be archiving older material. There are several library community initiatives to combat grey government information. A couple of examples are the Federal Depository Library Program’s Lost Docs Reporting mechanism, and the End of Term Archive that collects federal websites at the change of each presidential term. These are at the federal level, and more needs to be done to index and preserve state, and especially local, government information. This is because issues such as copyright affect the accessibility and preservation of non-federal government information.