Jack McDevitt

The Strategic Prevention of Gun Violence Among Gang‐Involved Offenders

Problem‐oriented policing has been suggested as a promising way to understand and prevent complex gang violence problems. A number of jurisdictions have been experimenting with new problem‐oriented frameworks to understand and respond to gun violence among gang‐involved offenders. These interventions are based on the “pulling levers” deterrence strategy that focuses criminal justice and social service attention on a small number of chronically offending gang members responsible for the bulk of urban gun violence problems. As part of the US Department of Justice‐sponsored Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative, an interagency task force implemented a pulling levers strategy to prevent gang‐related gun violence in Lowell, Massachusetts. Our impact evaluation suggests that the pulling levers strategy was associated with a statistically significant decrease in the monthly number of gun homicide and gun‐aggravated assault incidents. A comparative analysis of gun homicide and gun‐aggravated assault trends in Lowell relative to other major Massachusetts cities also supports a unique program effect associated with the pulling levers intervention.

Situational policing: neighbourhood development and crime control

Over the past two decades, the Broken Windows version of social disorganization theory has had a significant impact on law enforcement practices in the United States. Contemporary sociologists, however, have demonstrated that neighbourhood‐level collective efficacy (or a lack thereof) is a more significant predictor of violent crime than are physical and social disorder (i.e., broken windows). Collective efficacy is viewed as an evolving neighbourhood‐level property. We posit that neighbourhoods pass through, regress to, or get stuck in identifiable stages of development as they move toward (or away from) higher levels of collective efficacy. Giving consideration to both stage of neighbourhood development and level of neighbourhood crime and disorder, we construct four neighbourhood types: Strong, Vulnerable, Anomic and Responsive. The concept of “situational policing”, then, is introduced as a way to address effectively both the development of collective efficacy, and the occurrence of crime and disorder in each neighbourhood type.

Bias-Crime Reporting Organizational Responses to Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and Infrequency in Eight Police Departments

Over the past two decades, significant efforts have established categories of crimes motivated by bias and so enhanced the quality of information about the prevalence of such crimes in the United States. As part of a national reporting system established by the Hate Crime Statistics Act, local police agencies collect information about the prevalence and characteristics of bias-crime incidents. Although the quality of this program has improved since its inception, local police face several challenges to identifying and accurately classifying bias crimes, including the ambiguity of applying legal definitions to cases, uncertainty regarding bias motivation, and infrequency of reported events to law enforcement. Drawing on information from eight case studies, the article examines how local police identify and record bias crimes through various kinds of reporting procedures and organizational structures. The article concludes with best practice recommendations for bias-crime tracking and reporting of incidents of bias crime within local police agencies.

Hate Crime Reporting: Understanding Police Officer Perceptions, Departmental Protocol, and the Role of the Victim is There Such a Thing as a “Love” Crime?

Due to sporadic and often perfunctory compliance with the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, official data on hate crime currently tell us little about the prevalence of hate crime nationally. Reasons for this include lack of departmental infrastructure to support accurate reporting, lack of training, officer disincentives to accurately report, and, perhaps most importantly, hesitation on the part of victims to involve law enforcement in these matters. Using a survey of law enforcement officers from a stratified national sample, as well as interviews with advocacy and human rights professionals, this article will discuss all of these factors and their impact on hate crime reporting. Suggestions for improvement involve working on police/minority group relations, as well as building appropriate departmental infrastructure.

Moving Police and Community Dialogues Forward Through Data Collection Task Forces

Although collection of information about traffic or pedestrian stops is an important part of a departments strategy to address perceptions of bias, taken by itself this data may be insufficient to resolve the controversy about racial profiling. Unfortunately, most jurisdictions have implemented data collection systems with little thought about how information will be disseminated to the public or, more important, used to create an effective policecommunity dialogue about police operations. A model of community-police task forces may be used to facilitate discussions of racial profiling data and enhance a police-community conversation about appropriate police operations. This article discusses the challenges of role definition, representation, leadership, and goals setting that face task forces devoted to understanding the problem of racial profiling.

The rhetoric and reality of community policing in small and medium‐sized cities and towns

Although community policing is still in its formative stages in the USA, much of the research has been directed to programmes being implemented in large cities where high levels of crime and fear are part of the social fabric. Research on community policing in small cities and towns is still in the preliminary stage. To meet this challenge, the present paper reviews data from a survey of 82 police departments in cities and towns having less than 200,000 inhabitants. Emphasis is directed to the kinds of community policing strategies employed by the departments and the opportunities for community residents to participate in the decision‐making processes relating to community policing. Data reveal that the transition of police departments from a traditional reactive philosophy to one of community policing is an evolving process. Structured strategies that provide resident input into community policing are likely to occur as the programmes evolve over time, and generally follow changes in police deployment and the establishment of working relation‐ships with community agencies, both public and private.

Learning to See Hate Crimes: A Framework for Understanding and Clarifying Ambiguities in Bias Crime Classification

Recent empirical research has identified ambiguity in bias crime reporting as a source of confusion and frustration in law enforcement agencies and as a source of error in the national hate crime statistics. The authors develop a framework for understanding and clarifying these ambiguities based on John Dewey’s conception of intension and extension and their own application of mathematical set theory to the issue. The authors discuss the implications of their model for helping law enforcement officials see bias crimes for varied purposes, including prevention, statistical reporting, and criminal prosecution.

One Scale Fits All? Assessing Racial Differences in the Measurement of Attitudes toward the Police

Research consistently shows that minorities have less confidence in the police and perceive less procedural justice during encounters than Whites. This work generally concludes that the differences in perceptions by race are due to actual differences in attitudes, then proceeds to explore the origins of these differences. However, scholarly work has not yet explored the possibility that this finding is related to how members of different racial groups answer and interpret questions about the police; in other words, how measurement properties of scales may contribute to these differences. Using data from the National Police Research Platform’s Police–Community Interaction Survey, we conduct analyses to assess the reliability and validity of two measures of attitudes toward the police and assess differential item functioning (DIF) by race using Rasch analysis. Our findings reveal that few items from the procedural justice scale indicated DIF. All other items comprising the confidence in the police and procedural justice scales exhibited no differential functioning by race, indicating that the historic finding of variation in attitudes toward police by race are likely due to real differences rather than measurement error.

Police supervision: perspectives of subordinates

Purpose Given the central role of supervision in shaping police agency outcomes and the impact of the supervisor-subordinate relationship, the purpose of this paper is to understand subordinates’ ratings of supervisor performance overall and on several distinct dimensions. Design/methodology/approach Descriptive and explanatory analyses are conducted on subordinate views of supervision based on a survey of officers and detectives (n=7,085) in 89-agencies. Findings Reporting high ratings of supervisor performance overall, subordinates also view supervisors as fair, supportive and engaged in practices that set expectations. These dimensions are highly correlated with overall satisfaction; other variables, such as age, race and gender demonstrate weak relationships to overall satisfaction and perceptions of fairness, support and direction. Research limitations/implications The study is based on subordinates’ perceptions of supervisors and does not address the supervisors’ own perceptions or actual behavior. Future studies should collect identical information from supervisors as well as examine agency-level variation in both subordinate and supervisor outlooks and styles. Practical implications The results support modern approaches to police supervision that emphasize not just direction and control but also fair and supportive relationships with subordinates. Originality/value The study examines the views of thousands of line-level police across a large number of representative US agencies and explores relationships using a comprehensive set of variables.