Suchergebnisse

Despite recent research demonstrating the impact of inmate perceptions of correctional legitimacy on order maintenance, the extant literature has failed to examine the contextual reality of correctional excessive use of force claims. Utilizing legal cases from the U.S. Court of Appeals and U.S. District Courts, this article examines correctional officer excessive use of non-deadly force and identifies recurring themes in these claims. Findings highlight the common occurrence of retaliatory violence, negative attitudes, failure to listen to inmate concerns, inadequate training, and an inability to decipher reliable threat cues consistently present in correctional officer use of non-deadly force claims. Suggestions for future research and policy implications are offered.

Officer-involved killings and racial bias in policing are controversial political issues. Prior research indicates that (perceived) group threat related to political mobilization, economic competition, and the threat of black crime are is an important explanations for variations in police killings across cities in the United States. We argue that a diverse police force that proportionally represents the population it serves mitigates group threat and thereby reduces the number of officer-involved killings. Count models support our argument. They show that group threat is largely driven by the threat of black crime. Black-on-white homicides increase officer-involved killings of African Americans but black-on-black homicides and measures for political and economic threat do not. However, a diverse police force reduces the influence of group threat lowering the number and rate of officer-involved killings of African Americans. The findings represent one of the first analyseis of an highly relevant important contemporary issue based on a recent and high-quality dataset from January 2013 to June 2016. By highlighting the interaction between group threat and the proportional representation of minority groups in police departments, our research advances group conflict and threat theories with important theoretical and policy implications for law enforcement and representative bureaucracies more broadly.

Written by cops for cops, this book is designed to address the needs of the agency, the rights of the employee, and the concerns of the public, and give law enforcement the policies and tools to investigate and document this high profile area. It also includes information on report writing and the handling of media and public information policy

The differing responsibilities of civilian and military control have not always been fully appreciated by those in the operating units who are responsible for implementing policy. I remember my own frustrations in this regard, and in fact the problem has timeless dimensions.

This article explores the use of video data analysis to study escalation processes. Based on an in-depth study of officer-involved shootings in the United States, it first discusses the use of body-worn footage, CCTV camera, mobile phone, and dash cam footage for the analysis of escalation processes and the benefits of triangulating video data and document data for contextualizing situational analyses. The article then examines video data analysis as a fruitful tool to study police use of force and discusses two key aspects in such analyses: validity assessment and focus on specific analytic dimensions and lenses. Both aspects are illustrated by my study of officer use of force. Findings indicate that by triangulating various sources of ready-made videos available online with document data, the role of situational dynamics, as well as biases for officer use of force, can be studied systematically. Officer use of force is a striking and present example for how 21st century video data and video data analysis can allow novel insights into social phenomena. But such data and analysis also increasingly allow for examining other instances of escalation, as well as other types of extraordinary and everyday events.