Tag: Research

New data fill long-standing gaps in the study of policing | Science

Data limitations have long stymied research on racial bias in policing. To persuasively demonstrate bias, scholars have sought to compare officer behavior toward minority versus white civilians while holding constant all other factors in the police-civilian encounter that might provide alternative explanations for enforcement disparities. These comparisons in “similar circumstances” are also critical in litigation concerning discriminatory policing, which can often lead to court-ordered remedies (1). Such “all-else-equal” scenarios are elusive in many realms of social science, but two challenges have made them particularly difficult to find in the study of policing. On page 1397 of this issue, Aggarwal et al. (2) report using data from the ridesharing service Lyft—having obtained vehicle location on more than 200,000 drivers using highfrequency GPS pings from their smartphones—to analyze speeding enforcement by the Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) and to show how such data offer a path forward for addressing both challenges.
— Read on www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adw3618

Radical Civil Service Reform Is Not Radical | Manhattan Institute

For decades politicians and commentators have bemoaned the state of the federal civil service. There are widespread complaints that the system fails to reward good performers and punish bad ones and that it does not nimbly respond to social needs. President Donald Trump’s and the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to dismiss federal employees and […]
— Read on manhattan.institute/article/radical-civil-service-reform-is-not-radical-lessons-for-the-federal-government-from-the-states

Legitimacy Policing In Depth | RAND

Law enforcement officers are more effectively able to carry out their duties and responsibilities if they are perceived as having legitimate authority by the citizenry that they serve. Members of the community are more likely to follow the law (Tyler, 2006; Jackson et al., 2012) and to cooperate with police (Tyler and Fagan, 2008) when they believe that the laws, and the officers enforcing them, are legitimate. Improving relations with the community not only improves legitimacy; it is also a core objective of policing in its own right, as identified by panels of subject-matter experts on policing (Hollywood et al., 2015, pp. 12–13; Hollywood et al., 2017, pp. 36–37).
— Read on www.rand.org/pubs/tools/TL261/better-policing-toolkit/all-strategies/legitimacy-policing/in-depth.html

Patrol officer activity by single- versus double-crewed status: The call-related output of one-officer and two-officer patrol units – ScienceDirect

Highlights
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Patrol officers work in either single-crewed (i.e., one-officer) or double-crewed (i.e., two-officer) units.
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We use electronic police records from the Oakland Police Department to assess the call-related output of patrol units.
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The call-related output of single- and double-crewed units appears generally more similar than different.
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It is possible that double-crewed units may handle more serious calls for service than single-crewed units.
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Scholars and practitioners should continue to assess the implications of crewed status for patrol deployment.
— Read on www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/pii/S0047235224000977

At the time of this post the article was open access.