Policing Mechanism Research Articles

Turning compositionality into composability

Compositional theories and technologies facilitate the decomposition of a complex system into components, as well as their integration via interfaces. Component interfaces hide the internal details of the components, thereby reducing integration complexity. A system is said to be composable if the properties established and validated for components in isolation hold once the components are integrated to form the system. This brings us the question: "Is compositionality related to composability?" This paper answers this question in the affirmative; it considers a previously known interface for compositionality and shows that it can be used for composability. It also presents a run-time policing mechanism for this interface.

Policing 802.11 MAC Misbehaviours

With the increasing availability of flexible wireless 802.11 devices, the potential exists for users to selfishly manipulate their channel access parameters and gain a performance advantage. Such practices can have a severe negative impact on compliant stations. To enable access points to counteract these selfish behaviours and preserve fairness in wireless networks, in this paper we propose a policing mechanism that drives misbehaving users into compliant operation without requiring any cooperation from clients. This approach is demonstrably effective against a broad class of misbehaviours, soundly-based, i.e. provably hard to circumvent and amenable to practical implementation on existing commodity hardware.

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.

Customer Satisfaction of Policing the Jamaican Society: Using SERVQUAL to Evaluate Customer Satisfaction

Introduction: The Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) established in 1867 as a paramilitary organization and over its 148 year history, the institution has sought to address various crimes and it appears that all its policy efforts have come to nought. In seeking to combat the crime pandemic in the society, the entity has been accused of corruption, abuses, professional misconduct and excessive use of power. With such accusations and claims, there has been a negative image of the JCF and so it has sought to inco-operate the user as a part of policing strategy. To date, there has been no empirical research undertaken on service quality in the JCF. Objectives: The purpose of this research is to evaluate the perception of Jamaicans on the service quality of the JCF following the implementation of any aspect of modernization. In that it is to provide insights into service quality (SERVQUAL), aid policy implementation and highlight the current gap in SERVQUAL between the citizen and the police. There is a clear realist that the present policing strategies and mechanisms require modernization. Assessing service quality in the JCF can provide a perspective and solution on the matter of crime management within the society. Materials and methods: The large volume of data were stored, retrieved and analyzed using the Statistical Packages for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for Windows version 17.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Descriptive statistics were performed on the data as well as percentages and frequency distributions. Service Quality is measured using a simple mathematical equation Eqn 1: SQ = P – E Where, SQ denotes overall service quality; P symbolizes perception and E means service quality expectation. Findings: In all cases in Jamaica, a negative score was recorded for SERVQUAL indicating that JCF is not meeting the needs of users of its service. On desegregating the overall SERVQUAL of JCF members, Jamaicans highest expectations were for assurance and reliability of SERVQUAL. Conclusion: The psychology of dissatisfaction with the service delivery of the JCF is accounting for the failure of its initiatives and unless the negative gaps between perceptions and expectations are addressed, the JCF will be a failed organization.

Community Policing in the Traditional Igbo Society: A Model for Preventing Crime in the Contemporary Nigerian Society

Community policing is neither foreign nor novel to Africa. Long before the coming of Europeans, the traditional Igbo society of the now south-eastern Nigeria had devised means of policing its communities and curbing or preventing crime using primarily the age grade system and masquerade secret society. This approach was very effective in enabling the pre-colonial Igbo society in not just fighting crime but also in preventing crime. Given the current security challenges in the contemporary Nigerian society, there is a need to revisit this model of community policing for the purpose of preventing and curbing crimes such as terrorism, insurgency, armed robbery, commercial hostage taking (kidnapping), militancy, pipeline vandalisation, oil theft (illegal bunkering), etc. The paper also noted that taking into consideration the ‘acephalous’, decentralised, egalitarian, communalistic, ‘gerontocratic’, villagised, largely republican and directly democratic character of the traditional Igbo society is necessary for adapting its mechanism of community policing into the more complex, less decentralised, republican, federal, capitalist and indirect democracy of the modern Nigeria. The study is essentially descriptive, historical and qualitative.

The EPPO Draft Regulation Passes the First Subsidiarity Test: An Analysis and Interpretation of the European Commission's Hasty Approach to National Parliaments’ Subsidiarity Arguments

AbstractThis contribution discusses National Parliaments’ subsidiarity objections raised in the context of the Early Warning Mechanism (EWM) to the European Public Prosecutor Office proposal, and the European Commission response to them. It argues that National Parliaments raised important points, on how does subsidiarity apply respectively, when the wording of the Treaty grants the Council theoptionto act, as opposed to an obligation to act; on how to assess the inefficiency of the national level; on how does subsidiarity apply in a geographically fragmented context, and on the legitimacy for the EU to regulate non cross-border behaviors. It criticizes the Commission's hasty dismissal of all National Parliaments’ objections, and its decision to leave the proposal's text untouched. It further argues that the Commission's interpreted the EWM as an arena where to test the political feasibility of the proposal, as it had occurred in the past, rather than as a proper subsidiarity policing mechanism. It finally provides some observation on how this interpretation of the EWM has negative implications to terms of subsidiarity policing, of understanding the substance of the principle, and of input legitimacy.

Silo

Many cloud applications can benefit from guaranteed latency for their network messages, however providing such predictability is hard, especially in multi-tenant datacenters. We identify three key requirements for such predictability: guaranteed network bandwidth, guaranteed packet delay and guaranteed burst allowance. We present Silo, a system that offers these guarantees in multi-tenant datacenters. Silo leverages the tight coupling between bandwidth and delay: controlling tenant bandwidth leads to deterministic bounds on network queuing delay. Silo builds upon network calculus to place tenant VMs with competing requirements such that they can coexist. A novel hypervisor-based policing mechanism achieves packet pacing at sub-microsecond granularity, ensuring tenants do not exceed their allowances. We have implemented a Silo prototype comprising a VM placement manager and a Windows filter driver. Silo does not require any changes to applications, guest OSes or network switches. We show that Silo can ensure predictable message latency for cloud applications while imposing low overhead.

Commentary: Lax Section 112 Standards Won't Help the Case for Software Patents

Critics of software patents charge that they are too often vague and written in abstract, functional terms. Legitimate in certain cases, the criticism of software patents has gained traction in the U.S. Supreme Court. See Alice Corp. Pty Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int'l, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014); Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U.S. 593 (2010). As the weapon of choice for eliminating suspect software patents, the Court has tendered an exclusion from patent-eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. §101. Unfortunately, the Court’s abstract idea filter is itself abstract, ill-defined, and vague. In Mayo Collab. Servs. v. Prometheus Labs, Inc., 132 S. Ct. 1289 (2012), the Supreme Court rejected the argument that patent law already had a satisfactory statutory rule to rein in vague patent claims — 35 U.S.C. §112, first paragraph, which sets forth the enablement and written description of the invention requirements. The Court failed to appreciate that more rigorous application of §112 standards could result in a significant winnowing of ambiguous, vague software patents. In this brief commentary on a recent Federal Circuit software enablement case, Vasudevan Software, Inc. v. MicroStrategy, Inc., 782 F.3d 671 (Fed. Cir. April 3, 2015), we contend that the appellate court further damaged the cause for greater reliance on §112 standards to police software patents. In our view, the Federal Circuit in Vasudevan Software wrongly resuscitated patents that were likely invalid for failing to comply with the §112 disclosure requirements. Unfortunately, Vasudevan Software tends to prove the Supreme Court’s point — that §112, at least as it is being applied, is not working as an adequate policing mechanism for software patents. This must change.

Video Activity-Based Traffic Policing: A New Paradigm

The constant development of new multimedia applications, which are “greedy” in terms of bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, calls for new approaches to the traffic policing problem. This paper proposes, analyzes and presents an extensive performance evaluation of such a new approach, namely the activity-based video traffic policing. Using as a motivation recent work, which has shown that the classic traffic policing mechanisms provide unnecessarily strict policing for conforming but bursty video users, we propose five simple and efficient new mechanisms, which take into consideration and exploit video activity and the Group-of Pictures (GoP) pattern of the video traces. Contrary to the classic approach, our mechanisms do not use a token generator based on a fixed rate, but vary the token generation rate according to specific video activity-based algorithms. The results show significant improvement for conforming users, and reveal that dynamic traffic policing can provide much higher efficiency than the widely used static mechanisms. One of the new mechanisms, the Frame Size Aware Token Bucket, is shown to clearly outperform all other policing approaches for conforming users, and to provide comparable policing results with the classic mechanisms for non-conforming video users.

Analyzing Crime Displacement with a Simulation Approach

Crime tends to cluster in small areas. Police have taken advantage of this by identifying these ‘hotspots' of crime and concentrating their resources in these locations. This practice has shown evidence of reducing crime in the hotspot area. While it is possible that the benefits of such reduction might be diffused to the surrounding areas, one criticism of this practice is that the crime in the hotspot may also be displaced to the surrounding areas. A number of empirical studies have investigated the spatial pattern of crime displacement. However, few have attempted to uncover the mechanisms that lead to the displacement of crime. In this paper we present a theory-driven approach that applies agent-based modeling to simulate the mechanism of crime and policing. The processes that drive possible displacement of crime are investigated through experiments in a computational laboratory—SPACES. Our results reveal that crime cannot be displaced easily because opportunities for crime are limited in low-crime areas and offenders are often attached to the area where they perform their routine activities.

Transformation of Macau policing: from a Portuguese colony to China’s SAR

This study examines policing in Macau and identifies major forces that have shaped its transformation over past decades. Prior to 1999, Macau was a Portuguese colony. Its criminal justice system inherited key features of the Continental system, including two independent law enforcement agencies: the Judiciary Police and the Public Security Police. In the colonial era, expatriate commanders drawn from the military or legal professions headed both departments, while the rank-and-file was composed mainly of local Chinese. This policing mechanism, together with the ‘laissez-faire’ policing philosophy adopted by colonial leaders, created segregation between policing agencies and the community. Citizens preferred minimal interaction with police, since they were skeptical about their professionalism, capability, and reliability. Macau became part of the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1999. The de-monopolization of the gaming industries in 2002 brought huge GDP growth, but generated internal social conflict. Growing public demand for accountable governance motivated a series of governmental reforms, some of which have extended to policing. These reforms have improved the transparency of policing, but it remains to be seen if they will ultimately succeed in generating public trust in the police forces.

Evolving intergroup cooperation

This paper examines the problem of inter-group cooperation using an agent-based model. Within a single, small group, reputation can be used to promote cooperation. However, reputation fails across groups when the members of the groups cannot identify each other individually. Two mechanisms have been proposed in the literature to foster inter-group cooperation: collective sanctions and in-group policing. I use an agent-based model in an evolutionary environment to determine the effectiveness of these two mechanisms. Examining them separately, I find in-group policing results in high-levels of inter-group cooperation while collective sanctions do not. When employed concurrently, collective sanctions do nothing to enhance the effectiveness of the in-group policing mechanism and may impede its functioning.

Violence and Ethnic Segregation: A Computational Model Applied to Baghdad

The implementation of the United States military surge in Iraq coincided with a significant reduction in ethnic violence. Two explanations have been proposed for this result: The first is that the troop surge worked by increasing counterinsurgent capacity, whereas the second argument is that ethnic unmixing and the establishment of relatively homogenous enclaves were responsible for declining violence in Baghdad through reducing contact. We address this question using an agent-based model that is built on GIS-coded data on violence and ethnic composition in Baghdad. While we cannot fully resolve the debate about the effectiveness of the surge, our model shows that patterns of violence and segregation in Baghdad are consistent with a simple mechanism of ethnically motivated attacks and subsequent migration. Our modeling exercise also informs current debates about the effectiveness of counterinsurgency operations. We implement a simple policing mechanism in our model and show that even small levels of policing can dramatically mitigate subsequent levels of violence. However, our results also show that the timing of these efforts is crucial; early responses to ethnic violence are highly effective, but quickly lose impact as their implementation is delayed.

An Adaptive Fuzzy Type-2 Control Double Token Leaky Bucket and Back-pressure over High-Speed Network

High-speed communication network describes about high bandwidth and low delay communication. The problem in delay occurs traffic congestion. A method to solve this problem, we use a policing mechanism scheme. It is a method help monitor the amount of ingress traffic. If congestion occurs at the buffer before entering the network. Another approach must drop incoming frames from which buffer is not available and has to rely on the end-to-end protocols for the recovery of lost frames. In this way, it may not be able to cope their quality-of-service (QoS) requirements because it must have more delay time. However, one way to solve this problem, we use Fuzzy type- 2 control double token leaky bucket and back-pressure to control network congestion but it is suitable for low traffic.  It could help to improve the performance in policing mechanisms much better than conventional policing one while various types of burst/silence traffic are being generated.

Becoming the Fifth Branch

Observers of our federal republic have long acknowledged that a fourth branch of government comprising administrative agencies has arisen to join the original three established by the Constitution. In this article, we focus our attention on the emergence of perhaps yet another, comprising financial self-regulatory organizations. In the late eighteenth century, long before the creation of state and federal securities authorities, the financial industry created its own self-regulatory organizations. These private institutions then coexisted with the public authorities for much of the past century in a complementary array of informal and formal policing mechanisms. That equilibrium, however, appears to be growing increasingly imbalanced, as financial SROs such as FINRA transform from “self-regulatory” into “quasigovernmental” organizations. We describe this change through an account that describes how SROs are losing their independence, growing distant from their industry members, and accruing rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicative powers that more closely resemble governmental agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. We then consider the confluence of forces that might be driving this increasingly governmental shift, including among others, demographic changes in the style and size of retail investments in the securities markets, the one-way ratchet effect of high-publicity failures and scandals, and the public choice incentives of regulators and the compliance industry. The process by which such self-regulatory organizations shed their independence for an increasingly governmental role is an undesirable but largely inexorable development, and we offer some initial ideas for how to forestall it.

United Nations community policing in conflicted area of Darfur Sudan

ObjectivesTo elaborate community policing model used in conflicted area of Darfur Sudan.MethodsThe study is based upon the UN Security Council resolutions and policy documents of Police of United Nations and...

Gun for hire: Delegated enforcement and peer punishment in public goods provision

This paper compares two methods to encourage socially optimal provision of a public good. We compare the efficacy of vigilante justice, as represented by peer-to-peer punishment, to delegated policing, as represented by the “hired gun” mechanism, to deter free riding and improve group welfare. Small self-governing organizations often place enforcement in the hands of an appointed leader—the department chair, the building superintendent, and the team captain. This hired gun, we show, need only punish the least compliant group member, and then only punish this person enough so that the person would have rather been the second least compliant. The hired gun mechanism is an example of a low cost device that promotes complete compliance as the unique Nash equilibrium. We find that subjects are willing to pay to hire a delegated policing mechanism over 70% of the time and that this mechanism increases welfare between 15% and 40%. Moreover, the lion's share of the welfare gain comes because the hired gun crowds out vigilante peer-to-peer punishments.

Service Violation Monitoring Model for Detecting and Tracing Bandwidth Abuse

Bandwidth abuse is a critical Internet service violation. However, its origins are difficult to detect and trace given similarities between abusive and normal traffic. So far, there is no capable and scalable mechanism to deal with bandwidth abuse. This paper proposes a distributed edge-to-edge model for monitoring service level agreement (SLA) violations and tracing abusive traffic to its origins. The mechanism of policing misbehaving user traffic at a single random early detection (RED) gateway is used in the distributed monitoring of SLA violations, including violations carried out through several gateways. Each RED gateway reports misbehaving users who have been sent notifications of traffic policing to an SLA monitoring unit. Misbehaving users are considered suspicious users and their consumed bandwidth shares are aggregated at every gateway to be compared with SLA-specified ratios. Bandwidth is abused when SLA-specified ratios are exceeded. By reporting bandwidth abuse, illegitimate users can be isolated from legitimate ones and source hosts of abusive traffic may be traced. Approximate simulation results show that the proposed model can detect any SLA violation and identify abusive users. In addition, the proposed model can trace user violations back to their source machines in real time.

Festival of Curses: A Traditional Crime Control Method in Edo State – Nigeria

Festivals and ceremonies are part and parcel of African culture, usually in all its pump, merriment and pageantry. However, with the increasing wave of criminal activities in Nigeria especially in Edo state, festivals and ceremonies are being redefined and conceptualized in practice. Only recently a new festival ‘Festival of Curses’ was brought to the fore in combating crime in Edo state. The study therefore seeks to explain the festival as a traditional mechanism in crime control, the nature of the festival, the factors that led to its emergence in the 21st century, the level of acceptance and its impact in reducing criminal activities in the State. The study employed principally secondary literature and in-depth interviews among a cross section of the Bini. Major findings revealed that immediately after the festival of curses, a lot of criminals in the state besieged the Bini Monarch’s Palace to confess their atrocities; and pleaded for forgiveness. There was an overwhelming acceptance of the festival irrespective of the people’s religious affiliations to Christianity and Islam as a result of the potency and sudden drop in crime during the period. The study concludes that the festival should be taken as a mechanism of crime control and policing in Nigeria.

Policing the Empires: a Comparative Perspective on the Institutional Trajectory of the Inquisition in the Portuguese and Spanish Overseas Territories (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)

This paper examines aspects of the political and social functions of the Inquisition in the overseas colonies of Portugal and Spain as they emerge through archival sources. The discourse of power is of course vital in understanding how the Inquisition operates; and its global expressions of power are also local expressions of power. By understanding how and if the Inquisition was used as a policing mechanism of the political and ideological development of the colonial worlds, we understand not only something of the articulation of power within this institution but also how, if at all, this constituted a modern institution in being both global and local. This paper addresses these vital institutional questions by looking at the Portuguese and Spanish overseas empires in comparative perspective, looking at Latin America in the case of Spain, and Goa and West Africa in the case of Portugal. The key role of the Inquisition in maintaining ideological conformity on both a secular and religious basis emerges in both cases, together with the Inquisition's fundamental connection to non-religious questions of finance and control over trade through which it asserted secular power.