Daniel Woods

Injuries to Officers and Suspects in Police Use-of-Force Cases: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation

The Conducted Energy Device (CED) weapon holds the potential to reduce injuries for officers/suspects. However, the dearth of research on CEDs makes it difficult to make informed decisions about its deployment. We conducted a quasi experiment to compare 4 years of data from seven law enforcement agencies (LEAs) with CED deployment with six matched LEAs without CED deployment. Compared with non-CED sites, CED sites had lower rates of officer injuries, suspect severe injuries, and officers and suspects receiving injuries requiring medical attention. Our results suggest that CEDs can be effective in helping minimize physical struggles and resulting injuries in use-of-force cases.

Title Restorative Justice Conferencing (RJC) Using Face-to-Face Meetings of Offenders and Victims: Effects on Offender Recidivism and Victim Satisfaction. A Systematic Review.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.[delete if co-registered] Contributions Heather Strang and Lawrence W. Sherman contributed to the writing and revising of this Review. Daniel J. Woods and Barak Ariel contributed to the statistical analysis. The search strategy was carried out by Evan Mayo-Wilson. Heather Strang will be responsible for updating this review as additional evidence accumulates and as funding becomes available. Potential conflicts of interest The authors have no monetary interest in the results of the review. None of the authors has conducted or published studies that would lead them to slant the evidence on restorative justice in a particular direction. The two senior authors have published studies showing restorative justice both increases crime and reduces it. The Campbell Collaboration (C2) was founded on the principle that systematic reviews on the effects of interventions will inform and help improve policy and services. C2 offers editorial and methodological support to review authors throughout the process of producing a systematic review. A number of C2s editors, librarians, methodologists and external peer-reviewers contribute.

Combating Vehicle Theft in Arizona: A Randomized Experiment With License Plate Recognition Technology

This article focuses on a relatively new innovation for use by law enforcement, license plate recognition (LPR) systems, in fighting auto theft. While it is a promising technology, there has not been much research on the effectiveness of LPR systems. The authors conducted a randomized experiment to study the effects of LPR devices on auto theft. The authors found that the LPR is achieving its most basic purpose of increasing the number of plates scanned by officers (8 times greater) compared to manual plate checking. Further, when compared to manual checking, the LPR was associated with more “hits” (i.e., positive scans) for auto theft and stolen plates, more arrests for stolen vehicles, and more stolen vehicle recoveries. Unexpectedly, the authors found that manual plate checking by a special auto theft unit (but not LPR scanning by the same unit) was associated with less auto theft 2 weeks after the intervention (based on both police crime reports and calls for police service) than the control group (regular nonspecialized patrol without LPR). Finally, the authors found no evidence of crime displacement occurring from their targeted routes to adjacent areas for any of their models. This study provides evidence that LPR use can achieve demonstrable benefits in combating auto theft (i.e., more plates scanned, “hits,” arrests and recoveries with LPR). These results are impressive for the field of auto theft where so little research tested interventions exist. Future work will involve developing strategies that maintains the documented benefits of LPR use by a specialized unit, but also achieve the benefits associated with manual checking by a specialized unit.

Illicit Retail Methamphetamine Markets and Related Local Problems: A Police Perspective

In this paper we examine whether features of the operation of retail methamphetamine markets affects communities in three domain areas (public safety, health, and economy). We use data from a national survey of law enforcement agencies (n= 1,367) with narcotics officers to examine the operational characteristics of methamphetamine markets. We found that the operational features of a market (the source of methamphetamine and the most common location for selling methamphetamine) can have a significant impact on the types of public safety, health, and economic problems that communities are experiencing. In particular, jurisdictions distinguished by largely semi-private markets (strip clubs and bars) are more likely to be characterized as localities that have a large public safety and health problem. Jurisdictions that are supplied by multiple local and international sources (compared to a single source) were more likely to be characterized as jurisdictions that have problems in the three domains.

Evaluating a Police-Led Community Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence in St. Louis

This study evaluated a police-led community initiative that combined various enforcement and prevention efforts to reduce gun violence and other violence in a selected area of St. Louis, Missouri. A quasi-experimental multiple time-series design was used to compare trends in total violence and gun violence in the program neighborhood with the average of these trends in seven matched comparison neighborhoods. Total violence and gun violence declined in the program area relative to trends in the comparison areas during the 9-month program period, and these reductions seemed to be most strongly associated with the program’s heightened enforcement efforts. However, the results were not sufficient to conclude that the program had statistically significant effects beyond its early weeks when enforcement efforts were most intensive and total violence declined significantly. This study adds to the limited evidence based on comprehensive, criminal justice-led initiatives to prevent violent crime, including gun offenses. We suggest that programs like those in St. Louis might be refined through further emphasis on formalized problem solving, high-risk groups, hot spot locations, community participation, and project maintenance.