James J. Nolan

An Analysis of Factors that Affect Law Enforcement Participation in Hate Crime Reporting

This study examines the social forces that affect law enforcement participation in hate crime data collection initiatives. Focused interviews were conducted in a stratified sample of police officers from various departments in 2 East Coast states. The findings from these interviews were used to create a survey instrument that was distributed to a sample of police officers and civilian employees in 4 police agencies, 1 from each region of the United States: Northeast, West, South, and Central. The survey findings reduced to 60 interrelated variables identified at the focus groups to 10 common factors (or constructs). These factors are: (a) organizational attitudes/beliefs; (b) utility in community relations; (c) organizational self-preservation; (d) efficacy of police involvement; (e) priority of resource allocations; (f) supportive organizational policies and practices; (g) individual attitudes/beliefs; (h) professional self-preservation; (i) work-related difficulties; and (j) organizational commitment. The results of this study provide valuable insight into ways to improve law enforcement participation in hate crime reporting.

Policing the Platonic Cave: Ethics and Efficacy in Police Training

This article seeks to understand the form, content and broader implications of police academy ethics training. We begin by detailing the mechanisms borrowed from (near) total/greedy institutions that are key elements in the academy training structure. These are noted in an ethnographic account that points out the importance of obedience to authority, and the resultant shame and honour, which function as the core of police socialization. We conclude by explicating the theoretical foundation of the police function and then move on to question how ethics training supports, or resists, this structure. Findings suggest that, even at its best, ethics training is likely to serve in restraining the professional vision of incoming police officers. Despite what can only be assumed to be the best of intentions, a traditional model of police as law enforcers is (re)generated within a recruit cohort while more progressive notions of the police role (i.e., working toward neighbourhood efficacy) are ignored. With this, truly ethical behaviour is structurally inhibited by theatrical efforts at maintaining the collective fiction of the police mandate.

Methods for Understanding and Analyzing NIBRS Data

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is an incident-basedcrime reporting program for local, state, and federal law enforcementagencies. Within each criminal incident, NIBRS captures information onoffenses, victims, offenders, property, and persons arrested, as well asinformation about the incident itself. The ability to link and analyze thisdetailed information is a significant improvement to the existing UniformCrime Reporting (UCR) summary reporting system. As one might expect,however, this increase in crime data significantly complicates the life ofthe data analyst, particularly when cross tabulating the NIBRS data. To dealwith the complexity of NIBRS data, one must understand its structure. Thisarticle provides an overview of the NIBRS structure and methods formaneuvering within it to present and interpret correctly cross tabulationsof the NIBRS data.

Scorekeeping versus storytelling: Representational practices in the construction of “hate crime”

The paper addresses the issue of contrasting constructions of social problems. Using “hate crime” as an example, we focus on portraits of the problem in the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports and in the New York Times. The analysis illumines how fundamental contrasts in representations of hate arise from differences in the underlying, and institutionalized, sense-making practices of scorekeeping and storytelling. We conclude by discussing the larger implications of the findings for further development of the theoretical model of “dialogical constructionism.”