Police Incident Reports Research Articles

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on treatment for domestic violence injuries: evidence from medical claims

AbstractPrevious studies have observed heterogeneous changes in domestic violence-related 911 calls, police incident reports, and arrests at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we use a large-scale medical claims database with coverage of over 100 million patients to examine the impact on domestic violence victims’ use of emergency department care for their injuries in the early weeks of the pandemic compared to the corresponding weeks in previous years. We find a 23–35% decrease in utilization of emergency medical services by domestic violence victims between March and June of 2020. Based on this finding, it is essential to use caution when using medical claims to measure domestic violence in future research covering this time period. Decreases in care utilization also have important implications for the detection, screening, and treatment of domestic violence injuries during future public health crises.

Exploring associations between built environment and crash risk of children in school commuting

Understanding how built environment are associated with crash risk (CR) in school commuting is essential to improving travel safety through land use and transportation policies. Scholars often assume that this relationship is consistent across space, but this may lead to inconsistent estimates. To address this issue, using data in Shenzhen, China, the data covers traffic accident data of children taken from police incident reports and supplemented with local land use, transportation network and specific school information. The measurement model of crash scale was conducted to represent crash severity, and the CR was further quantified. The study applies three models, spatial dubin model (SDM), geographically weighted regression (GWR), and mixed GWR (MGWR), to explore spatio-temporal heterogeneity relationships between built environment attributes and CR of children in school commuting. The findings reveal that the crash scale can better represent crash severity of school commuting than a single indicator. Policy interventions should be targeted at specific spatial scales, school types, and time windows to effectively improve travel safety. However, there are some common findings. It is recommended to use a scale of 200 m to explain the relationship between the variables. The MGWR model outperforms the other two models. To reduce CR, it is important to consider lower road network density, a reasonable layout of educational facilities, fewer bus routes, and more on-street parking spaces. Our findings can help to enrich the understanding of associations between land use and CR of children, as well as offer local planning and operating guidance for creating child-friendly environment.

LMPD's Blank Incident Report: The erasure of Breonna Taylor as a curriculum of conviviality

ABSTRACT This article includes a description and discussion of physical violence and identity-based discrimination. I acknowledge that this content may be difficult. I encourage you to care for your safety and well-being. This article examines ‘conviviality’ in the context of police violence and systemic racism in the United States. Through an analysis of police incident reports and media interviews, the article argues that discourses of conviviality perpetuate colonial legacies and order Black lives. The article challenges the idea that conviviality is without consequence and highlights its limits in the face of ongoing discrimination and violence against Black people.

Reasons police respond in schools: An analysis of narrative data from police incident reports

BackgroundCommunities across the U.S. have acted to eliminate or curb police presence in schools. These efforts have primarily focused on School Resource Officers. However, school staff also call upon local police to respond in their buildings, for example by calling 911. The reasons that police are called upon to respond in schools has rarely been studied. ObjectiveThe current study aimed to identify the primary reasons that local police were asked to respond to incidents in one urban school district, and the outcomes of those responses. Participants and settingWe analyzed 882 police incident report narratives, selected from a stratified sample of 57 schools in one urban school district during the 2017–18 school year. Incident reports, which were written by officers responding in schools, included narrative descriptions of officer intervention, the events precipitating police involvement, and outcomes of incidents. MethodsBy coding incident report narratives, we identified categories describing the reasons for police response to events in schools and the outcomes of those events. ResultsMost incident reports originating from school addresses (n = 730; 82.8 %) involved students. Among those reports, police most frequently responded to instances of sexual physical violence (17.5 %), physical assault (15.8 %), dysregulated behavior (11.2 %), threatening language (10.8 %), and threat of or actual school violence (4.4 %). Incidents involving students most often resulted in: (1) parents/guardians being contacted (57.3 %), (2) schools engaging in disciplinary actions (39.7 %) or school safety actions (27.0 %), and (3) child maltreatment reports being made to Crimes Against Children (a subdivision of the police department focused on child maltreatment; 26.0 %) or to the Department of Children and Families (26.2 %). ConclusionsFindings indicate that many events leading to police responses in schools are related to maltreatment and behavioral health. These events rarely result in a criminal justice response, and most often result in action by families and schools (e.g., contacting parents/guardians, school disciplinary/safety actions), and filed reports of maltreatment. Additional supports in these areas may have the potential to reduce the perceived need to call upon police and to provide more direct access to services for students.

An Examination on the Consistency of Forensic Information in Criminal Courts in India

The study aims to examine how forensic science and law interact, as well as to evaluate the role and significance of forensic evidence in the criminal justice system. The research will emphasise the many uses of incidental evidence. The primary method used to collect the data for this project was a prospective study of official record data that followed criminal cases in two jurisdictions (Los Angeles County, Indianapolis, Evansville, Fort Wayne, and South Bend) from the time police incident reports were filed until the case was finally resolved in court. Municipal, county, and state crime laboratory services are represented by the sites selected. Data for the study were gathered using a random sample of the population of recorded crime occurrences for the year 2021, stratified by crime category and jurisdiction. We solely focused on the violent assault crime episodes out of 4,205 overall instances, which included 859 violent assaults, 1,263 burglaries, 400 homicides, 602 rapes, and 1,083 robberies. An arrest was made in 49% of assault incidents. Bivariate analyses of instances with and without evidence from the crime scene revealed statistically significant increased rates of arrest, prosecutor referral, charge, and conviction in cases with forensic evidence. Using multivariate analysis, it was shown that acquiring physical evidence was a statistically significant predictor of arrest. Despite the increased focus given to forensic evidence in recent years, little empirical information is available about the types of evidence that are often acquired as well as how frequently they are submitted to and analysed in forensic crime laboratories. Even little research has been done to clarify how such evidence affects the criminal justice process.

Data-Driven Optimization for Atlanta Police-Zone Design

We present a data-driven optimization framework for redesigning police patrol zones in an urban environment. The objectives are to rebalance police workload along geographical areas and to reduce response time to emergency calls. We develop a stochastic model for police emergency response by integrating multiple data sources, including police incident reports, demographic surveys, and traffic data. Using this stochastic model, we optimize zone-redesign plans using mixed-integer linear programming. Our proposed design was implemented by the Atlanta Police Department in March 2019. By analyzing data before and after the zone redesign, we show that the new design has reduced the response time to high-priority 911 calls by 5.8% and the imbalance of police workload among Atlanta’s zones by 43%.

Impact of an unsanctioned safe consumption site on criminal activity, 2010–2019

BackgroundHealth and social impacts of safe consumption sites (SCS) are well described in multiple countries. One argument used by those opposed to SCS in the US is that findings from other countries are not relevant to the US context. We examined whether an unsanctioned SCS operating in the US affected local crime rates. MethodsControlled interrupted time series (ITS) analysis of police incident reports for five years before and five years after SCS opening, comparing one intervention and two control areas in one city. ResultsNarcotic/drug incidents declined across the pre- and post-intervention periods in the intervention area and remained constant in both control areas, preventing an ITS analysis but suggesting no negative impact. On average, incident reports relating to assault, burglary, larceny theft, and robbery in the post-intervention period steadily decreased at a similar rate within both the Intervention area and Control area 1. However the change in rate of decline post-intervention was statistically significantly greater in the Intervention area compared to Control area 1 (difference in slope -0.007 SDs, 95 % CI: −0.013, −0.002; p = 0.01). The Intervention area had a statistically significant decline in crime over the post-intervention period compared to Control area 2 (difference in slope −0.023 SDs, 95 % CI: −0.03, −0.01; p < 0.001). ConclusionsDocumented criminal activity decreased rather than increased in the area around an unsanctioned SCS located in the US in the five years following SCS opening.

Performance evaluation of decision tree classification algorithms using fraud datasets

Text mining is one way of extracting knowledge and finding out hidden relationships among data using artificial intelligence methods. Surely, taking advantage of different techniques has been highlighted in previous researches however, the lack of literature focusing on cybercrimes implies the lack of utilization of data mining in facilitating cybercrime investigations in the Philippines. This study therefore classifies computer fraud or online scam data coming from Police incident reports as well as narratives of scam victims as a continuation of a prior study. The dataset consists mainly of unstructured data of 49,822 mainly Filipino words. Further, five (5) decision tree algorithms namely, J48, Hoeffding Tree, Decision Stump, REPTree, and Random Forest were employed and compared in terms of their performance and prediction accuracy. The results show that J48 achieves the highest accuracy and the lowest error rate among other classifiers. Results were validated by Police investigators where J48 was likewise preferred as a potential tool to apply in cybercrime investigations. This indicates the importance of text mining in the field of cybercrime investigation domains in the country. Further work can be carried out in the future using different and more inclusive cybercrime datasets and other classification techniques in Weka or any other data mining tool.

Comparing Violent and Non-Violent Gang Incidents: An Exploration of Gang-Related Police Incident Reports

Prior research has established a strong link between gangs and violence. Additionally, this connection is demonstrated across multiple methodologies such as self-report surveys, qualitative interviews, as well as official records. Officially recorded gang data can be increasingly hard to obtain because data collection approaches differ by agency, county, city, state, and country. One method for obtaining official gang data is through the analysis of police incident reports, which often rely on police officers’ subjective classification of an incident as “gang-related.” In this study we examine 741 gang-related incident reports collected over four years from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. This study will explore reasons why incidents were attributed to gangs as well as compare the characteristics of violent, drug, and non-violent gang-related incidents. This work has implications for understanding the complexities associated with gang incident reports as well as for the commonality of violent gang crimes.

Police Exposure As a Determinant of Structural Racism: An Exploration of the Association between Preterm Birth in Neighborhoods with High Police Exposure

Research ObjectiveIn the United States, Black infants are twice as likely than their white counterparts to experience preterm birth (PTB)—an inequity that has existed for decades. Forms of structural racism such as residential segregation have recently been associated with PTB. Segregated communities are often disproportionately exposed to police contact. Little is understood about how simply living in a community that experiences disproportionate police contact may impact PTB. Our objective is to assess whether high exposure to police contact is associated with PTB.Study DesignNeighborhood police exposure was measured at the census tract level with police incident data extracted from the Minneapolis Police Incident Report (2012‐2016). The 5‐year cumulative count of police incidents of all offense types was calculated for each census tract. This cumulative count ranged from 10 to more than 9000 incidents during these 5 years which likely reflects heterogeneity in neighborhood vigilance or that census tracts with a larger number of residents were more likely to have more police incidents. To account for the latter, we categorized each census tract into neighborhoods with high (fourth quartile) vs low (first to third quartile) police exposure and included census tract population estimate as a covariate along with marital status, maternal age at the time of delivery, insurance status, diagnosis of diabetes (prepregnancy and gestational), and hypertension. All population estimates were from the 2016 American Community Survey 5‐year estimates. We mapped 5‐year cumulative police incident count and proportion of Black residents to visually assess relationships. We also test for correlation of the incident count and the proportion of Black residents. To examine the association between the neighborhood police exposure and PTB, we constructed multivariate multilevel generalized linear regression models, adjusting for correlated data of women who lived in the same census tract, and estimated robust standard errors with the sandwich estimator.Population StudiedThe analytic sample included Black and White women who gave birth to live singletons from January 1 to December 31, 2016 and lived in one of the 116 census tracts that make up the City of Minneapolis plus the 15 bordering census tracts.Principal FindingsWhen the measure of neighborhood police exposure, census tract population estimate, and the woman’s racial group were regressed on PTB, we observed an 83% increase in the odds of PTB among those who resided in the neighborhood with high police exposure relative to those in the low exposure neighborhood (OR = 1.83, CI: 1.01‐3.32). When maternal and census tract median household income was controlled for, we observed a slightly larger magnitude of our association of interest (OR = 1.99, CI: 1.00‐3.96).ConclusionsA high level of neighborhood police exposure increases the risk of PTB among women of all racial groups. However, since neighborhoods with greater proportion of Blacks residents are more likely to be policed, the higher incident of PTB among Black than White women may be attributed to racialized pattern of exposure rather than differential effect between the two groups.Implications for Policy or PracticePolice contact, specifically routine stops conducted by police departments as a crime deterrent measure, may impact health outcomes.Primary Funding SourceUniversity of Minnesota Institute for Diversity, Equity and Advocacy Multicultural Research Award.

Records covered under the maria da penha law by the military police in border areas

OBJECTIVE: The study’s main purpose has been to characterize the services performed by the Military Police of the 1st Border Area Policing Battalion (1st BAPB) covering violence against women under the Maria da Penha Law. METHODS: It is a documentary research with a quantitative and retrospective approach, addressing the police incident reports from the Military Police over 2014. RESULTS: Considering the 3,094 cases covered by the Military Police of the 1st BAPB, 565 (18.26%) of the cases were related to violence against women under the Maria da Penha Law, and 426 (13.76%) cases reported where related to Qualified Theft events. Concerning the 565 reported cases, 205 (36.30%) of the women who were victims of violence remained under protective measures during 2014. Only 278 (49.20%) of the offenders were forwarded to the Civil Police to register the occurrence. CONCLUSION: It was concluded that, when knowing how much violence is present in the municipal area, new social practices and health actions can be structured, as well as, subsidize or direct public policies aimed at border regions with similar characteristics.

Sharing reports about domestic violence and abuse with general practitioners: a qualitative interview study

BackgroundDomestic violence and abuse (DVA) is common and damaging to health. UK national guidance advocates a multi-agency response to DVA, and domestic homicide reviews consistently recommend improved information-sharing between agencies. Identification of patients experiencing DVA in general practice may come from external information shared with the practice, such as police incident reports and multi-agency risk assessment conference (MARAC) reports. The aim of this study was to explore the views of general practitioners (GPs) and the police about sharing reports about DVA with GPs.MethodsQualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with GPs, police staff and a partnership manager. Participants were located across England and Wales. Thematic analysis was undertaken.ResultsInterviews were conducted with 23 GPs, six police staff and one former partnership manager. Experiences of information-sharing with GPs about DVA varied. Participants described the relevance and value of external reports to GPs to help address the health consequences of DVA and safeguard patients. They balanced competing priorities when managing this information in the electronic medical record, namely visibility to GPs versus the risk of unintended disclosure to patients. GPs also spoke of the judgements they made about exploring DVA with patients based on external reports, which varied between abusive and non-abusive adults and children. Some felt constrained by short general practice consultations. Some police and GPs reflected on a loss of control when information about DVA was shared between agencies, and the risk of unintended consequences. Both police and GPs highlighted the importance of clear information and a shared understanding about responsibility for action.ConclusionGPs regarded external reports about DVA as relevant to their role, but safely recording this information in the electronic medical record and using it to support patients required complex judgements. Both GPs and police staff emphasised the importance of clarity of information and responsibility for action when information was shared between agencies about patients affected by DVA.

Suicide mortality in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil: a cross-sectional analysis of cases, 2017-2018.

to analyze the epidemiological and toxicological profile of suicide cases in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 2017 and 2018. this was a cross-sectional study with data from police incident reports and state General Forensic Institute records; multiple correspondence analyses were performed and logistic regression models were built. there were 2,564 suicides (11.3/100,000 inhabitants/year), mostly involving males (79.4%), and the 50-54 years age group (10.3%); the main method was hanging (72.5%); positive results for ethanol were found in 29.1% of cases and for other psychotropic drugs in 36.1% of cases; young people were 4.5 times (95%CI 2.7;7.7) and 2.4 times (95%CI 1.5;3.6) more likely to be the victims when there were positive results for an illegal substance or parental absence, respectively. male and adult victims predominated, hanging was the most common means, and, in one third of the cases, psychotropic drugs were present.

A model of policing strategy choice

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop a method for the discovery of knowledge in emergency response databases based on police incident reports, generating information that identifies local criminal demands that allow the selection of the appropriate policing strategies portfolio to solve the problem.Design/methodology/approachThe developed model uses a methodology for the discovery of knowledge involving text mining techniques using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) integrated with the ELECTRE I multicriteria method.FindingsThe developed method allowed the identification of the most common criminal demands that occurred from January 1 to December 31, 2016, in the policing areas studied. One of the crimes does not occur homogeneously in a particular locality. In this study, it was initially observed that 40 per cent of the crimes identified in the Integrated Public Safety Area 5, or AISP-5, (historical city center of RJ) had no correlation with AISP-19 (Copacabana - RJ), and 33 per cent of crimes crimes in AISP-19 were not identified in AISP-5. This finding guided the second part of the method that sought to identify which portfolio of policing strategies would be most appropriate for the identified demands. In this sense, using the ELECTRE I method, eight different scenarios were constructed where it can be identified that for each specific criminal demand set there is a set of policing strategies to be applied.Research limitations/implicationsThe collected data represent the social dynamics of neighbourhoods in the central and southern zones of the city of Rio de Janeiro during the specific period from January 2013 to December 2016. This limitation implies that the results cannot be generalised to areas with different characteristics.Practical implicationsThe developed methodology contributes in a complementary way to the identification of criminal practices and their characteristics based on reports of police occurrences stored in emergency response databases. The knowledge generated through the identification of criminal demands allows law enforcement decision makers to evaluate and choose among the available policing strategies, which best suit the reality they study, and produce the reduction of criminal indices.Social implicationsIt is possible to infer that by choosing appropriate strategies to combat local crime, the proposed model will increase the population’s sense of safety through an effective reduction in crime.Originality/valueThe originality of the study lies in the integration of text mining techniques, LDA and the ELECTRE I method for detecting crime in a given location based on crime reports stored in emergency response databases, enabling identification and choice, from customized policing strategies to particular criminal demands.

Violência doméstica contra a mulher e os profissionais da APS

Introdução: As notificações de casos de violência doméstica contra a mulher são essenciais para o dimensionamento epidemiológico dessa questão. As unidades de saúde brasileiras devem realizá-las, embora essas notificações compulsórias tenham sido repetidamente apontadas pela literatura da área da saúde como não efetivadas ou realizadas com muitas incompletudes. Objetivos: Contribuir para compreender as dificuldades subjetivas de notificar a violência doméstica contra a mulher por profissionais da atenção primária à saúde no Brasil. Métodos: Uma amostra intencional de 14 profissionais da atenção primária à saúde foi entrevistada; eles tinham diferentes formações educacionais e trabalhavam em uma cidade do interior do estado de São Paulo, Brasil. As transcrições das entrevistas semiestruturadas, com questões abertas, foram submetidas a uma análise de conteúdo. Resultados: A análise resultou em seis categorias temáticas: falta de conhecimento dos meios de notificação; serviços de saúde “apropriados” para notificar; boletim de ocorrência policial como principal instrumento de notificação; a notificação seria opcional; o papel da notificação para a prevenção; e a burocracia excessiva. Discussão: Levanta-se a hipótese de uma oposição entre uma disposição atitudinal positiva para atender as mulheres vítimas de violência e aprender como relatar essas situações e, por outro lado, a falta de preparação profissional para realizar as notificações; a oposição entre notificar e denunciar também é discutida, dada a ambiguidade dos termos utilizados na ficha de notificação e no próprio Código Penal brasileiro. Discute-se também se a violência contra a mulher é considerada pelos entrevistados como uma questão de atenção básica à saúde.

Noxious Housing: The Influence of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) Facilities on Neighborhood Crime

Certain establishments (e.g., alcohol outlets or pawnshops) attract or generate crime because they operate with little oversight and are often located in poor or disordered neighborhoods. Single room occupancy (SRO) facilities share some of these characteristics. SROs tend to be rundown motels or apartment buildings that offer affordable housing for low-income clientele. It is likely that SROs also generate and attract criminal activity that affects the neighborhood. Using police incident report data for St. Petersburg, FL, this study examines the impact of SROs on violent, property, and nuisance crimes at the neighborhood level. Negative binomial regression models suggest that the presence of an SRO in the focal or nearby neighborhood increases local crime, with the impact varying by crime type.

Risk Factors for Severe Violence in Intimate Partner Stalking Situations: An Analysis of Police Records.

Stalkers can be violent, and empirical studies have sought to identify factors associated with violence perpetrated by the stalker. Most of these works view physical violence as a homogeneous construct and do not differentiate between moderate and severe violence. The present study aims to identify correlates of nonviolent, moderate, and severe physical violence within an archival sample of 369 domestically violent police incident reports, where stalking behavior was indicated. The incident reports utilized in this study occurred between 2013 and 2017, among intimate or ex-intimate partners. The present study explored 12 independent variables that have yielded mixed findings in previous stalking violence literature, as well as two previously untested factors of nonfatal strangulation and child contact. The police records were coded for severity of physical violence using the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale and analyzed using a logistic regression. The regression analysis revealed significant independent associations between the outcome variable of severe physical violence and child contact, history of domestic violence, separation, nonfatal strangulation, jealousy, previous injury, and victim belief of potential harm. These results may help produce pragmatic recommendations for law enforcement agencies and other relevant bodies who seek to identify victims at risk of severe violence, increasing the potential for early intervention and prevention of physical harm. The awareness of factors that are shown to be related to serious physical violence may assist first responders in recognizing which victims may be at risk of serious harm, as well as effectively allocating any appropriate resources to reduce and prevent harm.

Evaluation of a local government \u201cshelter and van\u201d intervention to improve safety and reduce alcohol-related harm

BackgroundThe entertainment precincts of cities, while contributing to local economies, need to be carefully managed to mitigate harms. Individual behaviours and government regulation have typically been the foci of interventions aimed at reducing alcohol-related harm. Little is known about how changes to the built environment might influence alcohol-related harms in these settings. The aim of this study was to explore how a public shelter and a volunteer-funded and staffed mobile van in a regional city influenced perceptions of safety and reduction in alcohol-related harm.MethodsAn intrinsic case-study approach was used. Document reviews, qualitative interviews with 16 key informants (volunteers, licensees, police, local business owners, patrons, community members and security guards), observation, and secondary data analysis were conducted in 2016. A conceptual framework of the causative pathways linking the drivers of alcohol consumption with social and health outcomes was used to inform the analysis.ResultsThe shelter and van were frequently utilised but there was no significant association with a reduction in the proportion of alcohol-related hospital emergency department presentations or police incident reports. Occupational health and safety risks were identified for the volunteers which had no management plan.ConclusionsThe findings highlight the challenge faced by local governments/authorities wanting to provide community-based interventions to complement other evidence-based approaches to reduce alcohol-related harm. Local governments/authorities with restricted regulatory oversight need to collaborate with key agencies for targeted upstream and evidence-based alcohol prevention and management interventions before investing resources. Such approaches are critical for improving community safety as well as health and social outcomes in communities at greatest risk of alcohol-related harm.

Recruitment, enrollment & data collection with victims of elder abuse and neglect identified from police incident reports

ABSTRACTThis study evaluated the success of researcher-generated recruitment, enrollment, data collection, and safety protocols for field research with victims of elder abuse and neglect (EAN) identified from police incident reports in terms of their success including cost-effectiveness, ability to generate a representative sample, and safety. After reviewing 492 police incident reports involving victims age 65 years or older to identify cases of EAN 62 victims were identified. Mail, phone, and in-person recruitment strategies were used. After 259 recruitment attempts, 52 (84%) eligible victims were contacted, of which 24 (46%) consented to participate. Phone calls were the least expensive mechanism to produce a successfully enrolled participant. Findings from a regression show completion of a research interview could not be predicted by victim, suspect, or offense characteristics, indicating that the recruited victims likely represent the population they were drawn from. No safety or adverse events occurred.

A partially randomized field experiment on the effect of an acoustic gunshot detection system on police incident reports

To examine whether the introduction of an acoustic gunshot detection system (AGDS) allied to CCTV cameras increased the frequency of confirmed incidents of shots fired by bringing to notice gunfire events in public places that were not reported by the public. In a partially block-randomized experimental design, 17 acoustic sensors were co-located with CCTV cameras in a balanced design that matched the sensor camera sites with equivalent control locations. Gunshot-related incidents within 900 ft of both intervention and control sites for 8 months pre- and post-intervention were examined with multilevel negative binomial regression models. After implementation of the AGDS, gunshot incidents increased by 259%; however, there was no significant increase in the number of confirmed shootings. The AGDS did not significantly affect the number of confirmed shootings, but it did increase the workload of police attending incidents for which no evidence of a shooting was found. While awaiting technological improvements and considering the operational goals, police departments may wish to reconsider the current operational plan and objective of an AGDS.