Dennis P. Rosenbaum

ATTITUDES TOWARD THE POLICE: THE EFFECTS OF DIRECT AND VICARIOUS EXPERIENCE

Researchers have emphasized the importance of direct encounters with the police as a determinant of attitudes toward the police, yet cross-sectional studies allow for limited causal inference. This study includes the measurement of attitudes before and after encounters with the police among African American, Hispanic, and White residents of Chicago. Contrary to previous research, direct contact with the police during the past year is not enough to change attitudes, but vicarious experience (i.e., learning that someone else has had a good or bad encounter with the police) does influence attitudes in a predictable manner. Also, residents’ initial attitudes about the police play a critical role in shaping their judgments of subsequent direct and indirect experiences as well as their future attitudes. The findings are discussed in terms of stereotypes about the police that are resistant to change.

Community crime prevention: A review and synthesis of the literature

In the absence of effective formal means for controlling crime in the Western world, community crime prevention has emerged as a major alternative and supplement to the criminal justice system. This article attempts to review what is known currently about the nature, extent, and effectiveness of community-based efforts to prevent residential crime. Included in this assessment are citizen actions to protect themselves, their property, and their neighborhood, as well as efforts to prevent crime through changes in the physical environmental and through innovations in community policing. The historical, theoretical, and empirical rationale for community crime prevention strategies are discussed, but primary attention is given to the results of evaluation research in the field. Although community-based efforts are supported widely by theory, studies of natural covariation, and by numerous poorly designed evaluations, there is a paucity of strong demonstrations and evaluations showing that such interventions ca...

An Inside Look at Community Policing Reform: Definitions, Organizational Changes, and Evaluation Findings

Community policing is the latest reform in law enforcement and is quite popular among politicians, citizens, and police managers. It evolved, in part, from a growing dissatisfaction with traditional police practices and a recognition of their shortcomings. The concept of community policing is rather nebulous, and in the field, it assumes many forms, including foot patrol, ministations, and community organizing. Both internal and external factors have limited the success of its implementation, and so far, it has never become fully operational on a large scale. Overall, existing evaluations suggest that community policing can have a favorable impact on the perceptions of police officers and neighborhood residents.

Long-term evaluation of drug abuse resistance education☆

Project DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) is the most prevalent school-based drug-use prevention program in the United States, but there is little evidence of its effectiveness. Results from a longitudinal evaluation of the program in 36 schools in Illinois provide only limited support for DAREs impact on students drug use immediately following the intervention, and no support for either continued or emerging impact on drug use 1 or 2 years after receiving DARE instruction. In addition, DARE had only limited positive effects on psychological variables (i.e., self-esteem) and no effect on social variables (e.g., peer resistance skills). Possible substantive and methodological explanations for the relative lack of DAREs effectiveness observed in this study are discussed.

Characteristics of students who bring weapons to school

PURPOSE This study explores the relationships between social, demographic, and behavioral characteristics and self-reported carrying of a weapon to school among middle school students. The results provide a statistical profile of youth most likely to bring weapons to school and help to identify characteristics that are only spuriously related to this behavior. METHODS Study respondents were part of an ongoing randomized evaluation of a school-based drug use prevention program in Illinois. Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 1,503 seventh and eighth graders in the spring of 1992. RESULTS Fifteen percent of respondents brought some type of weapon to school in the past month. In a multivariate logistic regression model, being male, not living with both parents, not feeling close to parents, drinking heavily, participating in fights, damaging school property, and perceiving that at least a few other students brought weapons to school, were significantly associated with weapon carrying. Victimization and fear for safety in school were not significantly associated with weapon carrying in the multivariate model. CONCLUSIONS Study results suggest that both the structure and the dynamics of the family play an important role in weapon carrying behavior. Weapon carrying also appears to cluster with other deviant behaviors. Furthermore, the findings suggest that weapons are not brought to school because of a heightened need for protection, but rather may be in response to normative influences in school.

Cops in the Classroom: A Longitudinal Evaluation of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (Dare)

Although aggressive enforcement programs have been the backbone of our national drug control policy, school-based drug education has been widely praised as the most promising strategy for achieving long-term reductions in the demand for drugs and alcohol. Employing specially trained police officers in the classroom, Project DARE has become Americas most popular and prevalent drug education program. Despite this status, the effectiveness of the program has yet to be demonstrated. A longitudinal randomized experiment was conducted with 1,584 students to estimate the effects of DARE on their attitudes, beliefs, and drug use behaviors in the year following exposure to the program. DARE had no statistically significant main effects on drug use behaviors and had few effects on attitudes or beliefs about drugs. However, significant interactions between DARE and other factors (e.g., metropolitan status) suggest that some program effects varied across subgroups of the target population. This research provides a test of the comprehensive model of school-based prevention and helps to identify possible differential effects of this drug education initiative.

Social control theory: The salience of components by age, gender, and type of crime

Most social control theorists do not consider definitions of delinquency problematic. Beginning with the assumption that “crime” is a unitary concept, researchers have combined a variety of non-normative items to create additive delinquency scales. Rarely is consideration given to whether the causes of crime differ for distinct types of criminal activity. Furthermore, the classic social control model doesnot predict that bonding variables operate differently for distinct age and gender categories. Consistent with the “structuring perspective,” the present research attempts to refine the social control model by specifying conditions under which the model predicts different forms of delinquency. This study examines social control theory using survey data from middle- and high-school students (N=2926). Logit regression analysis revealed that the model which best explains personal crime differs from the model which best explains property crime. Also, certain components of the model were more powerful predictors of criminal behavior for different age-gender groups. The importance of model specification is demonstrated and the implications for social control theory are discussed.

Recanting of substance use reports in a longitudinal prevention study

We analyzed recanting of substance use reports for lifetime use of alcohol, alcohol to get drunk, cigarettes, marijuana and cocaine in an 8-wave panel study designed to evaluate the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program in the State of Illinois. Although this phenomenon has been identified elsewhere, the current analysis of recanting is a unique attempt to track this behavior over the entire course of adolescence. Overall, rates of recanting for specific drugs were extremely high, ranging from 45% for lifetime reports of alcohol use to 81% for lifetime reports of cocaine. Most recanting occurred in the wave immediately following the wave of first disclosure. Paralleling results from other studies, race/ethnicity was an important correlate of recanting in both bivariate and multivariate analyses. African American respondents had higher rates of recanting than White subjects. Even after controlling for the number of follow-up waves, the later the wave of first disclosed lifetime drug use, the lower the probability that drug use would be recanted ever (for all substances) or in the wave immediately following first disclosure (for reports of ever having been drunk or for lifetime marijuana or cocaine use). Alternative causes for this phenomenon are discussed. Implications for the design and interpretation of multiwave school-based panel surveys targeted toward adolescents are also addressed.

Understanding Community Policing and Legitimacy-Seeking Behavior in Virtual Reality: A National Study of Municipal Police Websites

Using a national probability sample of municipal police departments, this study provides the first systematic look at the prevalence, predictors, and content of municipal police websites in the United States. A content analysis revealed that police agencies with websites (42% of all police agencies nationwide in 2008) were more inclined to use websites to “push out” information rather than “pull in” information from the community. The results support the hypothesis that departments with a greater emphasis on community policing (defined by Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics [LEMAS] data) would be more likely to have a website, exhibit greater transparency in the display of data and provide more opportunities for citizen input. Crime rate and population size were also important determinants of website creation and content, respectively. This study concludes that websites are underutilized by both the police and research communities.

Police research: merging the policy and action research traditions

In their recent paper, David Bradley and Christine Nixon (2009) have nicely critiqued two different research traditions in the study of the police and how these traditions have limited our ability to produce useful knowledge and have even harmed the police–academic relationship. They argue that these lines of research – the critical police research tradition and the policy police research tradition – perpetuate a ‘dialogue of the deaf,’ suggesting that both sides are unhappy with the relationship but have been unable to communicate their concerns. Too often the police practitioner views the outside researcher as potentially harmful and, at best, irrelevant. Police executives find themselves facing intense external scrutiny and litigation. In this context, the last thing they want is a group of critical researchers. Even those who welcome outside research (and there are many) find it difficult to locate, read, and translate technical research findings into operational decisions. On the other side, researchers often view police administrators as defensive, unwilling to critically examine existing practices, and not wanting to be ‘confused with the facts.’ Many researchers have been critical of police practices, questioning their decision-making without having detailed knowledge of the internal and external constraints at play. Bradley and Nixon could have gone further to describe how the two sides live in completely different cultures with different goals, methods of operation, and reference groups who reward and punish them for different things. But that might weaken their argument. Some of this tension and suspicion is natural and healthy in a democratic society that values checks and balances. Some of it is unhealthy and dysfunctional, but to change it would require large-scale change in the two cultures that is not likely to happen anytime soon (e.g., changing the reward structure in universities). But some of the dysfunctionality in this relationship can be eliminated, as the authors imply, by changing the way that we do research in a police environment. There is little doubt that the two parties need a better dialogue and possibly a translator. I agree wholeheartedly with Bradley and Nixon that these research traditions have been problematic. The critical tradition has found it easy to throw stones at the police from a distance. I call it the ‘hit and run’ approach to research – collect some data (it can be done from a distance in the USA through ‘Freedom of Information’ requests), write a critical report with little contextual information, and wait for the media, academic journal editors, and other publishers to reward them via publication. Bradley and Nixon are correct in noting that ‘their research interests free them from any formal obligation to meet the research and educational needs of an occupational group.’ Often, it is a one-way street, with researchers receiving data but not giving back to the communities, agencies, and individuals