Tag: Police Operations

Police-Community Relations in Baltimore – The Abell Foundation

2 reports available at the bottom of the webpage.

Part 1- What Can Be Done To Improve Police- Community Relations In Baltimore? Exploring the experiences and perspectives of Black residents

Part 2- Improving Baltimore Police Relations With the City’s Black Community: Alternate response to non-criminal emergency calls for service

Police-Community Relations in Baltimore – The Abell Foundation
— Read on abell.org/publication/police-community-relations-in-baltimore/

De-escalation Training: What Works, Implementation Lessons, and Taking It to Scale; Plenary at the 2023 NIJ Research Conference

There is a video of the panel discussion at the website below.

Police use of force, while infrequently used, is a tremendous concern to public safety in the United States when officers employ it excessively or inappropriately, causing injury or death and eroding public trust in law enforcement. This plenary from the 2023 NIJ Research Conference describes the Integrating, Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) de-escalation training program developed by the Police Executive Research Forum to guide officers in defusing critical incidents. A rigorous evaluation of ICAT found it reduced overall use of force as well as injuries to both officers and members of the public. Panelists will describe how research evidence was used to develop the training curriculum; discuss strategies to ensure training implementation fidelity and secure the buy-in of all ranks; describe preliminary findings from complementary NIJ-sponsored replication evaluations; and explore strategies to take ICAT to scale. Led by Karhlton Moore, director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the plenary was a discussion among Robin Engel, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, National Policing Institute Maris Herold, Chief, Boulder Police Department, Colorado Chuck Wexler, Executive Director, Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) Justin Witt, Sergeant, Louisville Metro Police Department, Kentucky
— Read on nij.ojp.gov/multimedia/de-escalation-training

NYPD monitor tracking stop and frisk abuses has cost $36 million | News | flcourier.com

NEW YORK — The New York Police Department monitor, in place more than a decade after a federal judge said officers abused the stop and frisk tactic, violating the constitutional
— Read on www.flcourier.com/news/nypd-monitor-tracking-stop-and-frisk-abuses-has-cost-36-million/article_d44c7062-24ce-11ef-abb0-43172fb12a19.html

Do digital technologies reduce racially biased reporting? Evidence from NYPD administrative data | PNAS

Recent work has emphasized the disproportionate bias faced by minorities when interacting with law enforcement. However, research on the topic has been hampered by biased sampling in administrative data, namely that records of police interactions with citizens only reflect information on the civilians that police elect to investigate, and not civilians that police observe but do not investigate. In this work, we address a related bias in administrative police data which has received less empirical attention, namely reporting biases around investigations that have taken place. Further, we investigate whether digital monitoring tools help mitigate this reporting bias. To do so, we examine changes in reports of interactions between law enforcement and citizens in the wake of the New York City Police Department’s replacement of analog memo books with mobile smartphones. Results from a staggered difference in differences estimation indicate a significant increase in reports of citizen stops once the new smartphones are deployed.
— Read on www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2402375121

Culture of Policing and Police Reform | Urban Institute

There is a video of expert discussion available at the website.

Modern policing has been the subject of significant public debate and academic scholarship over the past several decades for its role in advancing community safety effectively and being a legitimate actor in the production of durable community safety. There is significant empirical evidence on the role that police can play in reducing crime, particularly violent crime, but there is also evidence demonstrating that policing is overly violent and that there are racial disparities in use of force. Police violence and related racial disparities undermine the legitimacy of the police and therefore efforts to control crime, particularly in Black and Brown communities.
— Read on www.urban.org/events/culture-policing-and-police-reform

Distrust of police persists. This Georgia city may have a solution. – CSMonitor.com

Note: This is behind a paywall but the magazine allows 3 articles a month.

It could have all ended very badly.

After a LaGrange resident’s car was repossessed, the man’s entire family – his son, his son’s fiancée, and their baby – engaged in a high-speed chase through downtown LaGrange, with the family using another car to chase the person who repossessed their car, weaving through traffic at high speed.  

When police finally stopped the cars, emotions ran high. Their faces deep in concern, the LaGrange Police Department officers talked calmly with all involved until passions subsided.
— Read on www.csmonitor.com/USA/2024/0529/police-violence-distrust-cops-safety

Banning most low level traffic stops would deliver benefits to people, police and communities • Minnesota Reformer

Imagine a law that could make Minnesota’s roadways safer, reduce the number of dangerous interactions between the public and police, and help understaffed police departments. 

It seems too good to be true — but it’s not. 

In fact, a bill to do all of those things — by limiting when police can make traffic stops for low-level offenses — was introduced earlier this year by Rep. Cedrick Frazier, DFL-New Hope.

But the Legislature didn’t pass that bill, just like it didn’t pass similar bills in 2023, 2022 and 2021. Each delay has denied Minnesotans the benefits of safer roadways and communities.
— Read on minnesotareformer.com/2024/05/30/banning-most-low-level-traffic-stops-would-deliver-benefits-to-people-police-and-communities/

Can We Get Back to Tougher Policing

More than 40 years have passed since the publication of one of the most important public-policy essays ever written. Its title, “Broken Windows,” captured the essence of a simple but deeply insightful idea: public order matters. “[I]f a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” wrote the late authors, political scientist James Q. Wilson and longtime Manhattan Institute senior fellow George L. Kelling, in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic. Visible signs of chaos were like warnings: you’re not safe here. If left unaddressed, the chaos made those areas more vulnerable to further disorder, including serious crime. “ ‘[U]ntended’ behavior,” the authors maintained, “leads to the breakdown of community controls” and causes residents to “think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and . . . modify their behavior accordingly.” The areas where disorder festers become more “vulnerable to criminal invasion” than “places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls.”

Read more by Rafael Mangual – HERE