Police Behavior Research Articles

Policing practices as a structural determinant for HIV among sex workers: a systematic review of empirical findings.

IntroductionSex workers are disproportionately infected with HIV worldwide. Significant focus has been placed on understanding the structural determinants of HIV and designing related interventions. Although there is growing international evidence that policing is an important structural HIV determinant among sex workers, the evidence has not been systematically reviewed.MethodsWe conducted a systematic review of quantitative studies to examine the effects of policing on HIV and STI infection and HIV-related outcomes (condom use; syringe use; number of clients; HIV/STI testing and access) among cis and trans women sex workers. Databases included PubMed, Embase, Scopus, Sociological s, Popline, Global Health (OVID), Web of Science, IBSS, IndMed and WHOLIS. We searched for studies that included police practices as an exposure for HIV or STI infection or HIV-related outcomes.ResultsOf the 137 peer-reviewed articles identified for full text review, 14 were included, representing sex workers' experiences with police across five settings. Arrest was the most commonly explored measure with between 6 and 45% of sex workers reporting having ever been arrested. Sexual coercion was observed between 3 and 37% of the time and police extortion between 12 and 28% across studies. Half the studies used a single measure to capture police behaviours. Studies predominantly focused on “extra-legal policing practices,” with insufficient attention to the role of “legal enforcement activities”. All studies found an association between police behaviours and HIV or STI infection, or a related risk behaviour.ConclusionsThe review points to a small body of evidence that confirms policing practices as an important structural HIV determinant for sex workers, but studies lack generalizability with respect to identifying those police behaviours most relevant to women's HIV risk environment.

Police must join the fast track to end AIDS by 2030.

World leaders have committed to ending AIDS by 2030, but stigma and discrimination remain significant obstacles. In particular, police are critical, front-line determinants of risk for many people living with HIV (PLHIV) and members of other key affected populations (KAPs). The negative impact of adverse police behaviours and practices on HIV risk is well documented, and these risks undermine global efforts to end AIDS. Far less well documented, and less common, are attempts to ameliorate this impact by working to change police behaviours. This Special Issue seeks to help redress this imbalance by presenting a selection of original, provocative and important interventions from academics, police officers and other stakeholders concerned with documenting the potential for constructive, progressive and evidence-based approaches to the reduction of HIV risk. We recommend urgent boosting of efforts and funding to engage police in the HIV response. Among other strategies, this needs sustainable funding of programmes and their evaluation, and increased and continuing advocacy and education at all levels to match policy and law reform.

Sexual violence from police and HIV risk behaviours among HIV-positive women who inject drugs in St. Petersburg, Russia-a mixed methods study.

IntroductionPolice violence against people who inject drugs (PWID) is common in Russia and associated with HIV risk behaviours. Sexual violence from police against women who use drugs has been reported anecdotally in Russia. This mixed-methods study aimed to evaluate sexual violence from police against women who inject drugs via quantitative assessment of its prevalence and HIV risk correlates, and through qualitative interviews with police, substance users and their providers in St. Petersburg, Russia.MethodsCross-sectional analyses with HIV-positive women who inject drugs (N=228) assessed the associations between sexual violence from police (i.e. having been forced to have sex with a police officer) and the following behaviours: current drug use, needle sharing and injection frequency using multiple regression models. We also conducted in-depth interviews with 23 key informants, including PWID, police, civil society organization workers, and other stakeholders, to explore qualitatively the phenomenon of sexual violence from police in Russia and strategies to address it. We analyzed qualitative data using content analysis.ResultsApproximately one in four women in our quantitative study (24.1%; 95% CI, 18.6%, 29.7%) reported sexual violence perpetrated by police. Affected women reported more transactional sex for drugs or money than those who were not; however, the majority of those reporting sexual violence from police were not involved in these forms of transactional sex. Sexual violence from police was not significantly associated with current drug use or needle sharing but with more frequent drug injections (adjusted incidence rate ratio 1.43, 95% CI 1.04, 1.95). Qualitative data suggested that sexual violence and coercion by police appear to be entrenched as a norm and are perceived insurmountable because of the seemingly absolute power of police. They systematically add to the risk environment of women who use drugs in Russia.ConclusionsSexual violence from police was common in this cohort of Russian HIV-positive women who inject drugs. Our analyses found more frequent injection drug use among those affected, suggesting that the phenomenon represents an underappreciated human rights and public health problem. Addressing sexual violence from police against women in Russia will require addressing structural factors, raising social awareness and instituting police trainings that protect vulnerable women from violence and prevent HIV transmission.

Identity, Legitimacy and Making Sensee of Police Violence

This paper examines the extent to which police legitimacy and social identity predict public acceptance of police use of force. The study draws upon cross-sectional data from a 2015 survey of a representative sample of adults in England & Wales. Structural equation modeling is used to model conditional correlations between latent constructs. There are two main results. First, identifying more strongly with a social group that the police plausibly represent to people was consistently associated with greater acceptance of police use of force, whether or not that force seemed to be legally justified. Second, beliefs about the legitimacy of the police were associated with acceptance, but primarily in relation only to the use of force in situations where it appeared prima facie justifiable. Results suggest one possible set of reasons explaining why police retain public support in the face of scandals concerning excessive use of force. In terms of originality, this is one of only a very few investigations into (a) the association between legitimacy and public acceptance of apparently illegal or unethical police action and (b) the extent to which identification with a particular social group predicts judgments of police behavior. It is also one of the few papers that has explored the possibility of perverse outcomes arising from procedurally just policing.

Children spontaneously police adults’ transgressions

Maintaining social order requires the policing of transgressions. Prior research suggests that policing emerges early in life, but little is known about children’s engagement in such behavior in live interactions where there is uncertainty about the consequences. In this study, 4- to 11-year-old children (N=158) witnessed an unfamiliar adult confederate intentionally destroy another adult’s property. Of interest was whether children would engage in policing behavior by protesting to the transgressor or by spontaneously reporting the transgression to a third party. Some children engaged in these behaviors spontaneously; nearly half (42%) protested the transgression, and 27% reported it without being prompted. Even when children did not spontaneously report the transgression, they almost always reported it when asked directly. The findings show that children commonly engage in policing even in the face of potentially negative consequences.

Instrumental and affective influences on public trust and police legitimacy in Spain

Two approaches to the nature and sources of public trust and police legitimacy can be distinguished: the instrumental and the affective. On the first account, people trust in police when they judge it effective in enforcing the law and fighting crime; and they hold police more legitimate when they believe these things to be true. On the second account, trust and legitimacy are bound up with relational concerns about the quality of police behavior, and expressive factors relating to the perceived ability of communities and police to maintain and reproduce social cohesion and order. Studies in Anglophone contexts tend to conclude that this ‘affective’ account provides greater explanatory power. This paper explores these ideas in a new context. Using data from a nationwide survey conducted in Spain we examine: (a) the relative strength of instrumental or affective predictors of trust; and (b) whether trust in police fairness is a more or less important predictor of legitimacy than trust in police effectiveness. Adding to the weight of international evidence concerning the ways people think about and experience policing, evidence for the primacy of the affective account is presented.

The Impact of Procedurally-Just Policing on Citizen Perceptions of Police During Traffic Stops: The Adana Randomized Controlled Trial

Objectives The process-based model of police legitimacy suggests, when police are perceived to make fair decisions and treat people with respect, they will be viewed as legitimate authorities. A randomized controlled trial was used to test the impact of a procedural justice policing intervention, relative to routine police behavior, during traffic stops for excessive speeding in Adana, Turkey.

Protest Policing in Hong Kong: Maintaining Professionalism and Solidarity in the Face of Renewed Political Challenges

SummaryProtest has been a feature of Hong Kong political life since the mid‐1950s. The structure of protest policing in Hong Kong should be seen from institutional, organizational, and individual levels. We examine the norms and values, staffing, professionalism, and individual motivation of police officers. Based on a questionnaire and performance data, we seek to understand police behavior in the context of increasing protest in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Legitimating Practices: Revisiting the Predicates of Police Legitimacy

Procedural justice theory predicts a relationship between police behaviour, individuals’ normative evaluation of police and decisions to comply with laws. Yet, prior studies of procedural justice have rather narrowly defined the potentially relevant predicates of police behaviour. This study expands the scope of procedural justice theory by considering a broad array of policing components, including unobserved actions such as electronic surveillance, respecting the limits of one’s legal authority, and the unequal or equal distribution of policing resources between different groups. Analysing data from a national probability sample of adults in England and Wales, we (1) present a comprehensive investigation of the heterogeneous elements of policing related to legitimacy judgments and (2) contribute to debate about the nature of legitimacy.

Experienced and novice officers' generalized communication suspicion and veracity judgments.

Deception detection research has shown that police officers are less truth-biased and make their veracity judgments with greater confidence than do nonofficers. Here we examined nonofficers, novice officers, and experienced officers' response bias, confidence, and generalized communicative suspicion. In Experiment 1, novice officers aligned with nonofficers in terms of both generalized communicative suspicion scores and confidence, with both these groups scoring lower than experienced officers. Generalized communicative suspicion scores and veracity judgments were not significantly related for either sample. However, novice officers aligned with experienced officers in terms of judgments: both police groups were lie-biased, whereas nonofficers were truth-biased. These findings suggest that unlike experienced officers, who have embraced the police culture to a greater degree, novice officers are not dispositionally suspicious (generalized communicative suspicion); however, they are able to mirror the prototypical police behavior (deception judgments) in police-related contexts. Experiment 2 supported these notions.

Donut time: the use of humor across the police work environment

Purpose– The purpose of this research is to examine ritualistic humor or joking that exists in a small, rural police department in Western New York.Design/methodology/approach– Data were collected through participatory observations and interviews during the summer of 2014. Both authors worked in tandem to capitalize on individual expertise to maximize data collection and analyses.Findings– Results suggest that humor is leveraged by officers to socialize, cope and demarcate authority. Depending on the circumstance, humor can be orchestrated or spontaneous, given the intentions of the officer.Originality/value– Humor is an important lens through which to view police behavior. The current research underscores the importance of levity as a gauge of organizational and individual health.

To Serve and Collect: The Fiscal and Racial Determinants of Law Enforcement

We exploit local deficits and state-level differences in tax and expenditure limits to estimate how incentives to raise revenues influence policing. In a national sample, we find that black drug arrests increase with local deficits when institutions allow officials to more easily retain fine and forfeiture revenues. Using a panel of Colorado jurisdictions, we find similar increases in black drug and DUI arrests. We also find increases in white drug arrests, but only for those who are not residents in the arresting jurisdiction. Our results show how revenue-driven law enforcement can distort police behavior and have systematically unequal racial effects.

Can New Procedures Improve the Quality of Policing? The Case of 'Stop, Question and Frisk' in New York City

A spate of high-profile incidents of police violence have led to widespread calls for law enforcement reforms. However, much prior research on police misconduct offers few viable policy remedies because of its focus on potentially immutable officer traits like personality. I advance an alternative, institutional perspective, and demonstrate that police officers -- sometimes characterized as autonomous -- improve their behavior in response to managerial directives. Using millions of records of police-citizen interactions, alongside officer interviews, I evaluate the impact of a change to the protocol for stops of criminal suspects on police performance. An interrupted time series analysis shows that the directive produced an immediate increase in the rate of justified stops. Officers said the order signaled increased scrutiny from commanders, leading them to adopt more conservative tactics. This result shows that police behavior is in fact controllable, suggesting a reform strategy that is sometimes forestalled by psychological and personality-driven accounts of policing.

Police, Equity, and Child Health.

From Oakland and Ferguson, to Cleveland and Baltimore, cities across the country mourn young African-Americans whose tragic deaths, following contentious encounters with police, illustrate the violent exchange that can erupt between law enforcement and people of color. Because police are vital pillars of community safety, these events raise important questions about how they influence the life course of children of color.Despite public concern for how police impact black lives, few publications in the medical literature contextualize police behavior within a clinical framework. Those that do, rarely explore the extent to which police treatment functions as a social determinant of health, with unique implications for children.1 These implications provide pediatricians an opportunity to examine and address how police exposure affects child and adolescent health.Police exposure begins in neighborhoods, where police discretion determines who is suspicious and sets the latitude with which the law is enforced. That latitude varies based on public policy, institutional culture, and budget pressures. When subject to explicit and implicit racial bias, this structures how police engage communities. For example, from 2002 to 2013, policies permitted New York City police to “stop-and-frisk” pedestrians if the officer had reasonable suspicion the pedestrians committed or were about to commit a crime. Of the ∼5 million stops, almost 9 in 10 were innocent. And though blacks and Hispanics only represented 50% to 53% of the population, they comprised >80% of those stopped.2 While no longer legal, the impact of similar policing strategies contributes to a continuum of trauma that cannot be disentangled from the trauma associated with the disproportionate arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of individuals of color.Today, while nearly 1 in 100 adults are behind bars, >60% are people of color, and most are men of color. Imprisonment rates for black males are 3.8 to 10.5 times greater, at every age group, than for white males, and greatest for black males aged 18 to 19 years.3 If unchanged, of those born in the year 2001, 1 in 3 black men will be jailed in their lifetime, compared with 1 in 6 Hispanic men and 1 in 17 white men. This also applies to women. Black women now face a 1-in-18 lifetime risk of imprisonment, compared with a 1-in-45 risk for Hispanic women and 1-in-111 risk for white women.4These disparities reflect how local crime rates, concentrated poverty, structural racism, and institutional bias shape representation in the correctional system. For youth experiencing them as caregiver absence, custody transitions, or the criminalization of peers, these disparities also reveal how police exposure can be linked to events associated with loss or stress. This transforms routine police encounters into experiences that, in quantity or severity, may affect youth health.Three types of police exposure can influence child and adolescent health:The nature, frequency, and outcome of police encounters for youth and their caregivers are powerful social determinants of health that would benefit from investment and expertise across disciplines in pediatrics.The symptoms of adverse police exposures may present in primary care, school-based clinics, juvenile justice facilities, and emergency departments. Existing screenings may overlook these patients because although many Adverse Childhood Experience questionnaires inquire about caregiver incarceration, few ask about police contact.As local governments explore community policing strategies, research is critical to minimize child health impacts.Partnering with other leaders in child advocacy enables pediatricians to support legislative and community-based interventions that reduce the health impact of adverse police exposures.Ultimately, issues of equity are issues of health. Pediatricians now have an opportunity to produce new screening guidelines, research agendas, and policy statements that structure how police exposure relates to disease prevention, health maintenance, and treatment strategies. Advancing pediatric knowledge, attitudes, and skills in this way affirms the pursuit of equity as foundational to pediatric practice.We thank and recognize Dr Irene Mathieu for her assisting in the research of secondary sources and for her commitment to elevating the pediatrician’s role in addressing police violence.

How Private Insurers Regulate Public Police

A string of deadly police-citizen encounters, made public on an unprecedented scale, has thrust American policing into the crucible of political conflict. New social movements have taken to the streets, while legislators have introduced a wide array of reform proposals. Optimism is elusive, though, as the police are notoriously difficult to change. One powerful policy lever, however, has been overlooked: police liability insurance. Based on primary sources new to legal literature and interviews with nearly thirty insurance industry representatives, civil rights litigators, municipal attorneys, and consultants, this Article shows how liability insurers are capable of effecting meaningful change within the agencies they insure — a majority of police agencies nationwide. The Article is the first to describe and assess the contemporary market for liability insurance in the policing context; in particular, the effects of insurance on police behavior. While not ignoring the familiar (and potentially serious) problem of moral hazard, the Article focuses on the ways in which insurers perform a traditionally governmental “regulatory” role as they work to manage risk. Insurers get police agencies to adopt or amend written departmental policies on subjects like the use of force and strip searches, to change the way they train their officers, and even to fire problem officers, from the beat up to the chief. One implication of these findings is that the state might regulate the police by regulating insurers. In this spirit, the Article considers several unconventional legal reforms that could reduce police misconduct, including a mandate that all municipalities purchase insurance coverage, a ban on “first-dollar” (no-deductible) policies that may reduce municipal care, and a requirement that small municipalities pool their risks and resources before buying insurance on the commercial market. At bottom, the Article establishes that liability insurance has profound significance to any comprehensive program of police reform. The Article also makes three important theoretical contributions to legal scholarship. First, it inverts the ordinary model of governance as public regulation of private action, observing that here, private insurers regulate public police. Second, it illustrates how insurers not only enforce the Constitution, but also construct its meaning. Among other things, in the hands of insurers, liability for constitutional violations and other police misconduct becomes “loss” to the police agency, which must be “controlled.” Perhaps surprisingly, by denaturing the law in this way and stripping it of its moral valence, insurers may actually advance the law’s aims. Finally, the Article helps to pry open the black box of deterrence. In fact, given widespread indemnification of both individual and entity liability for constitutional torts committed by police, an understanding of how insurers manage police risk is essential to any persuasive theory of civil deterrence of police misconduct.

Social coercion of larval development in an ant species.

Ants provide one of the best examples of the division of labor in animal societies. While the queens reproduce, workers generally refrain from laying eggs and dedicate themselves exclusively to domestic tasks. In many species, the small diploid larvae are bipotent and can develop either into workers or queens depending mostly on environmental cues. This generates a conflicting situation between the adults that tend to rear a majority of larvae into workers and the larvae whose individual interest may be to develop into reproductive queens. We tested the social regulation of larval caste fate in the fission-performing ant Aphaenogaster senilis. We first observed interactions between resident workers and queen- and worker-destined larvae in presence/absence of the queen. The results show that workers tend to specifically eliminate queen-destined larvae when the queen is present but not when she is absent or imprisoned in a small cage allowing for volatile pheromone exchanges. In addition, we found that the presence of already developed queen-destined larvae does not inhibit the development of younger still bipotent larvae into queens. Finally, we analyzed the cuticular hydrocarbon profiles of queen- and worker-destined larvae and found no significant quantitative or qualitative difference. Interestingly, the total amount of hydrocarbons on both larval castes is extremely low, which lends credence on the chemical insignificance hypothesis of larval ants. Overall, our results suggest that workers control larval development and police larvae that would develop into queens instead of workers. Such policing behavior is similar in many aspects to what is known of worker policing among adults.

Does Minority Representation in Police Agencies Reduce Assaults on the Police?

Following recent high-profile deaths of unarmed African American suspects at the hands of police, a number of reforms have been proposed, among them improved minority representation in the ranks of law enforcement organizations. Previous research has explored the effects of minority representation on complaints against the police and other behaviors, but very few studies have examined violence toward the police. We merged several data sources together and tested the hypothesis that minority representation within police departments is inversely associated with assaults against the police. In an extension of prior research, we also conducted separate analyses for African American, Hispanic, and Asian officer representation. The results did not support the expectation that diversity within police organizations results in improved police-citizen interactions, as measured by assaults on police. This study is one of the few to examine how different measures of minority representation in police agencies relates to assaults on the police.

Social power, conflict policing, and the role of subordination signals in rhesus macaque society.

Policing is a conflict-limiting mechanism observed in many primate species. It is thought to require a skewed distribution of social power for some individuals to have sufficiently high social power to stop others' fights, yet social power has not been examined in most species with policing behavior. We examined networks of subordination signals as a source of social power that permits policing behavior in rhesus macaques. For each of seven captive groups of rhesus macaques, we (a) examined the structure of subordination signal networks and used GLMs to examine the relationship between (b) pairwise dominance certainty and subordination network pathways and (c) policing frequency and social power (group-level convergence in subordination signaling pathways). Networks of subordination signals had perfect linear transitivity, and pairs connected by both direct and indirect pathways of signals had more certain dominance relationships than pairs with no such network connection. Social power calculated using both direct and indirect network pathways showed a heavy-tailed distribution and positively predicted conflict policing. Our results empirically substantiate that subordination signaling is associated with greater dominance relationship certainty and further show that pairs who signal rarely (or not at all) may use information from others' signaling interactions to infer or reaffirm the relative certainty of their own relationships. We argue that the network of formal dominance relationships is central to societal stability because it is important for relationship stability and also supports the additional stabilizing mechanism of policing.

Collateral Damage: The Health Effects of Invasive Police Encounters in New York City.

The health effects of police surveillance practices for the community at-large are unknown. Using microlevel health data from the 2009-2012 New York City Community Health Survey (NYC-CHS) nested within mesolevel data from the 2009-2012 NYC Stop, Question, and Frisk (NYC-SQF) dataset, this study evaluates contextual and ethnoracially variant associations between invasive aspects of pedestrian stops and multiple dimensions of poor health. Results reveal that living in neighborhoods where pedestrian stops are more likely to become invasive is associated with worse health. Living in neighborhoods where stops are more likely to result in frisking show the most consistent negative associations. More limited deleterious effects can be attributed to living in neighborhoods where stops are more likely to involve use of force or in neighborhoods with larger ethnoracial disparities in frisking or use of force. However, the health effects of pedestrian stops vary by ethnoracial group in complex ways. For instance, minorities who live in neighborhoods with a wider ethno racial disparity in police behavior have poorer health outcomes in most respects, but blacks have lower odds of diabetes when they live in neighborhoods where they face a higher risk that a stop will involve use of force by police than do whites. The findings suggest that the consequences of the institutionalization of the carceral state are far-reaching.

The Reverse Racism Effect

Research SummaryRace‐related debates often assume that implicit racial bias will result in racially biased decisions to shoot. Previous research has examined racial bias in police decisions by pressing “shoot” or “don't‐shoot” buttons in response to pictures of armed and unarmed suspects. As a result of its lack of external validity, however, this methodology provides limited insight into officer behavior in the field. In response, we conducted the first series of experimental research studies that tested police officers and civilians in strikingly realistic deadly force simulators.Policy ImplicationsThis article reports the results of our most recent experiment, which tested 80 police patrol officers by applying this leading edge method. We found that, despite clear evidence of implicit bias against Black suspects, officers were slower to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White suspects, and they were less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects. These findings challenge the assumption that implicit racial bias affects police behavior in deadly encounters with Black suspects.