The issue of educational entry requirements for police officers has been a perennial one. Since August Vollmer first broached the topic of police education as a serious consideration, there have been opinions on both sides of the subject. A number of presidential commissions have examined the question of a police minimum education requirement, and numerous academic studies have attempted to empirically define predictor variables which correlate higher education and different training methods with police performance. Although progress has been made in training and educating police differently, policy on police training continues to remain an important subject.
Article
Stephen T. Holmes, Ross Wolf, and Bryan M. Holmes
Private and public policing agencies share a rich history. Each was set up, designed, and organized to address specific problems, whether street crime or corporate security. Each organization type has its strengths and weaknesses depending on its environment and the types of duties assigned. However, it is only in the early 21st century that city government actors have begun to look at private police agencies as a way to supplement traditional policing services at a lower cost. The extant literature is replete with articles detailing the scope, nature, and legal authority of private police agencies, but little real-world experimentation has been done where private police agencies have been used to supplement police services in diverse high-crime neighborhoods. This article examines the history of both public and private police agencies and then details the results of an experiment in Orange County, Florida, where the sheriff contracted with one of the world’s largest private police agencies to patrol and provide additional police services to two communities in need. The results can be generalized to communities that are most in need of police services.
Article
Jacques de Maillard and Jan Terpstra
Community (oriented) policing has become one of the most popular models of policing worldwide. After its initial implementation in many Western countries, community policing has also been transferred to transitional societies, which often lack strong democratic traditions. The international diffusion of community policing should not make us forget that community policing comes in all shapes and sizes and is highly varied in its operations.
After having defined the concept and analyzed its rise in Anglo-American countries, this diversity is illustrated by scrutinizing its implementation in different national configurations: a continental European country relatively open to Anglo-American influences (the Netherlands), socially homogeneous countries with a high level of trust in the police (the Nordic countries), a centralized country with an administrative Napoleonic tradition (France), and postconflict societies (South Africa and Northern Ireland).
These various national trajectories highlight the common drivers and barriers in community policing reforms: political priorities (through emphasizing crime fighting or zero tolerance policing), socioeconomic disparities and ethnic tensions (which may imply a history of mistrust and vicious circles between the police and some segments of the public), professional identities and interests (disqualifying community police officers as “social workers”), and organizational resources (managerial procedures, lack of training and human resources) that may hinder the reform process. These diverse experiences also draw attention to the variety of context-dependent factors that impact the fate of community policing reforms. Political climates, police–government relations, socioeconomic inequalities, and police traditions may differ, which requires further analysis of the various political, historical, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts of specific community policing reforms.
Article
Alyce McGovern and Nickie D. Phillips
The relationship between the police and the media is complex, multidimensional, and contingent. Since the development of modern-day policing, the police and the media have interacted with one another in some way, shape, or form. The relationship has often been described as symbiotic, and can be characterized as ebbing and flowing in terms of the power dynamics that exist. For the police, the media present a powerful opportunity to communicate with the public about crime threats and events, as well as police successes. For the media, crime events make up a significant portion of media content, and access to police sources assists journalists in constructing such content. But the police–media relationship is not always cosy, and at times, tensions and conflicts arise. The increasing professionalization of police media communications activities has further challenged the nature and scope of the police–media relationship. Not only has the relationship become more formalized, driven by police policies and practices that are concerned with managing the media, but it has also been challenged by the very nature of the media. Changes to the media landscape have presented police organizations with a unique opportunity to become media organizations in their own right. The proliferation of police reality television programming, together with the rise of social media, has served to broaden the ways in which the police engage with the media in the pursuit of trust, confidence, and legitimacy; however, this has also opened the police up to increasing scrutiny as citizen journalism and other forms of counterveillance challenge the preferred police image.
Article
Jennifer H. Peck and Richard L. Elligson
The relationship between race, ethnicity, and police–community relations can be traced through the historical development of the United States. Through the eras of slavery, the Civil Rights movement, and, most recently, the Black Lives Matter movement, police–community relations with racial and ethnic minorities are a complex and complicated area of inquiry. Although research has shown that Blacks hold the most negative perceptions of police, followed by Hispanics and then Whites, understanding race relations between minority citizens and law enforcement is tied to numerous issues. The individual and combined effects of disadvantaged neighborhood characteristics, personal and vicarious experiences with police, and media exposure to high-profile incidents of police–citizen encounters are only a few of the factors that relate to differences in police–community relations across racial/ethnic groups. To mitigate the negative effect of media exposure of high-profile incidents related to police perceptions and behaviors, organizational justice is one component of law enforcement that may offer some perspective.
Additional issues that are correlated with police–community relations for Blacks and Hispanics are greater levels of mistrust between minorities and the police, over- and underenforcement in minority communities, and negative perceptions of police legitimacy and procedural justice held by minorities. Problems surrounding police culture, cynicism, and misconduct (e.g., use of force) are further areas that connect to police–community relations and are more salient for minority residents than for their White counterparts. Practices such as the use of evidence-based policing, invested partnerships between social services and law enforcement, the fair and effective use of authority and force by police, and understanding the specific needs of minority communities may provide promising areas for the enhancement of police–community relations with minorities.
Article
Andrea M. Headley and Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill
Racial disparities abound in policing, and police misconduct is no exception. Literature on race and police misconduct can be categorized into three sub-themes: race and (a) civilian complaints about police misconduct, (b) public perceptions about police misconduct, and (c) officer perceptions of police misconduct. Racial disparities are apparent in the resolution of civilian complaints, and in perceptions of the ubiquity and severity of police misconduct. People of color may not always view accountability systems as legitimate or feel comfortable using formal complaint processes as a means of resolve. Officers of color report being disadvantaged by internal compliant processes, observing more misconduct than do their White peers, and feeling less comfortable with informal codes of silence. All officers generally rate misconduct involving use of force against civilians of color as more serious when compared to similar incidents involving white individuals. Officers of color, in particular, are more likely to admit beliefs that police treat people differently based on race and income. As with police outcomes more generally, race-based disparities in measures of misconduct likely persist due to a combination of complex and interconnected individual-, institutional-, and societal-level factors. Further research is needed. Lack of comprehensive reporting mechanisms nationwide poses challenges for scholars studying misconduct. There needs to be a greater diversity of methods used to study misconduct, including qualitative methods, and more evaluative studies of the variety of policies proposed as solutions to misconduct. The contexts of misconduct research must also be expanded beyond the United States and the Global North/West to offer international and comparative insights.
Article
John L. Worrall and Zachary A. Powell
Charged with enforcing the law and regulating human behavior, the police have considerable leeway in their ability to control the population. On occasion, situations arise in which police officers misuse their authority, resulting in racially discriminatory practices, illegal searches and seizures, abusive use of force, or other forms of misbehavior. In some cases, unconstitutional practices are isolated incidents that are restricted to the actions of a small group of officers; in other cases, misbehavior may be more emblematic of a systemic problem within a criminal justice agency. To the extent that a pattern or practice of unconstitutional behavior exists, the interest of any government, and the people governed, is in limiting official misconduct.
One method of correcting unconstitutional behavior is through a consent decree, a court-ordered agreement following a major U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation that is designed to correct long-standing unconstitutional practices within police departments.
Despite the fact that consent decrees have been available to the DOJ for nearly 25 years, their use is somewhat limited (especially lately, in light of the Trump administration’s resistance to their use). A small body of evidence suggests there is promise for consent decrees as a tool for correcting police misbehavior. Existing studies show consent decrees are correlated with boosted citizen perceptions of treated police departments, lower counts of civil rights litigation, and improved methods for recording and disciplining police misbehavior. The influence of a consent decree may gradually build up over time before lapsing post-treatment. In addition, focus group interviews with law enforcement officers suggest that many express apprehension about the goals of reform and the impact on the day-to-day lives of police officers. A number of questions remain unanswered that require further exploration from the field.
Article
Taryn Zastrow and Danielle S. Rudes
Civilian oversight of police is a tool commonly used in cities across the United States to hold police accountable for misconduct. Law enforcement agencies have a history of violence, brutality, and misconduct, specifically toward marginalized populations. Thus, oversight of police by civilians can be traced to the early 20th century, but models for implementing oversight have evolved over time. Literature on civilian oversight identifies three contemporary oversight models: investigative agencies, review boards, and auditor/monitor agencies. These models play different roles in providing oversight of police, including independently investigating civilian complaints, reviewing internal investigations of complaints, developing recommendations for police executives, and overseeing department practices and patterns. However, oversight agencies and boards often lack any legal power to enforce their recommendations, making them virtually ineffective. The lack of power held by oversight agencies can be traced to political pushback as well as conflicting organizational models within police departments. Given the variability between and within different oversight models, scholars have struggled to adequately study these agencies. However, some proposed solutions to ineffective oversight have been identified in the literature, including making the oversight agencies more autonomous. Further, when civilian oversight agencies are improved and public confidence in them increases, agencies should be provided with adequate resources to deal with the potential influx of civilian complaints.
Article
Katharine L. Brown and Natalie Todak
Given policing’s hypermasculine subculture, organizational structure based on hegemonic masculinity, and persistent lack of diversity among police forces nationwide, it is clear that gender has been an influential force in policing since its inception. However, while the issue has interested scholars for decades, countless questions persist surrounding its role in perpetuating many of the social problems facing policing today, such as the following: Would hiring more women and gender-nonconforming officers improve citizen perceptions of police? Would it result in more positive interactions and outcomes between citizens and police officers? How do citizen and officer gender dynamics shape the outcomes of interactions and cases, particularly gendered cases such as intimate partner violence and sexual assault? Can LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) liaison officers help to mend decades of tension between police and queer communities? Each of these gender-related questions and more have implications for the experiences of police officers, organizations, and communities and for the future of American policing overall.
Article
Eric L. Piza and Rachael A. Arietti
Crime analysis involves the use of data to study crime-related problems. This includes identifying spatial and temporal patterns of crime events, understanding the characteristics of crime scenes, and identifying high-risk victims and offenders. Work products of crime analysts provide police the ability to understand the nature of crime problems in their jurisdiction. This information is then used to develop crime prevention interventions. Crime analysis is a requirement of the types of proactive, focused, problem-solving activities that work best in policing. Crime analysis can be categorized into four broad types: crime intelligence analysis, tactical crime analysis, strategic crime analysis, and administrative crime analysis. Crime mapping has become an important skill that cuts across the different crime analysis types and informs many activities of modern police agencies. The crime analysis profession has increased in size and scope over the early 21st century. However, some core components of crime analysis have existed in policing as far back as the mid-1800s in Great Britain and the early 1900s in the United States. The evidence-based policing movement—which advocates for policy solutions to be based on scientific evidence about what works best in preventing crime—presents opportunities for further advancement of the crime analysis profession. Barriers to maximizing the benefits of crime analysis relate to inconsistent training standards, reliance on outdated models of policing, and a lack of clarity regarding roles and agency standing for crime analysts. An increased commitment to applied research efforts may help navigate these barriers in the future.
Article
Thaddeus L. Johnson, Natasha N. Johnson, Sarah Sepanik, and Maria H. Lee
Raising the educational standards for police officers represents a perennial police reform theme in the United States. Among other benefits, proponents herald college degree requirements as key to improving the quality and fairness of policing outcomes, including the chief formal response to crime: arresting suspected lawbreakers. However, the evidence base regarding college education requirements’ consequences for agency arrest behaviors is formative for various reasons, namely, the absence of studies examining whether these policies contribute to racially equitable arrest outcomes.
The presented data show steeper decreases in the racial gap in Black and White people arrested for degree-requiring agencies compared to nondegree-requiring agencies between 2000 and 2016. Albeit encouraging news, the disparity rate for agencies with a college standard remains relatively higher. While what is implied is that college degree requirements alone will not resolve racial disparities in police arrests, it is premature to draw concrete conclusions about this often taken-for-granted association until more rigorous research is conducted.
Article
Lorna Ferguson and Aiden Sidebottom
Each year millions of people go missing across the globe. They do so for a number of reasons, including social conflict, natural disasters, political unrest, various personal and economic stressors, mental health issues, and as a result of an accident, foul play, or natural death. In most countries, and for most incidents, it is the police who are called upon to investigate reports of missing persons. This typically involves a process of risk assessment, investigation, and search and rescue, similar in many ways to a criminal investigation. Responding to reports of missing persons is a major source of demand for the police service, and a significant challenge, owing to common weaknesses in relevant data, the complexities in assessing risk, and a general lack of police-oriented applied research on the subject of missing people. Moreover, although most missing persons return swiftly, safely, and without the need for police intervention, a small but considerable proportion of missing people experience harm when missing, including an immediate threat to life. Further research is needed to better identify what works to reduce missing incidents and associated harms.
Article
Rick Ruddell
Although many city residents think of life in the countryside as peaceful, there are rural and remote communities with very high crime rates. In addition, some rural populations, such as Indigenous peoples and women, are at higher risk of victimization than their urban counterparts. Regardless of where one lives, levels of crime in the countryside and the formal and informal responses to those acts—including policing—have been shaped by a series of historical, political, geographic, economic, and demographic factors, and many of those factors are interconnected. Rural crime is further distinctive as some offenses, including illegal hunting (poaching) or environmental crimes, rarely occur in cities. Moreover, responses to those acts may be carried out by military organizations, nonpolice authorities, and police officers. The involvement of these quasi-police organizations in responding to rural crime is increasing in some nations. Rural is defined in this entry as a community or place with fewer than 2,500 residents located at least 30 miles from the nearest metropolitan area.
Despite recognizing that crime in the countryside is unlike what occurs in cities, there has been comparatively little scholarship on rural or remote policing. Instead, most police research is conducted and disseminated by urban researchers—what some call an urban-centric focus—and as a result knowledge about rural policing is underdeveloped. There has been even less scholarship focusing on policing remote communities, and that is a significant limitation given the distinctive patterns of crime in some of these places. Although policymakers have developed a diverse range of interventions to respond to antisocial behavior, disorder, and crime in rural and remote jurisdictions, the people in these places have a common expectation: They want the same quality of policing city residents receive. The nature of rural policing, however, makes that a very difficult goal to achieve, as officers are often stretched thin and work in more dangerous conditions than their urban counterparts. Rural officers are also expected to respond to every conceivable call for service even though they often work alone and have limited backup. This is because many stand-alone rural police services are cash strapped as they draw from sparsely populated or impoverished tax bases. Inadequate funding also limits their ability to recruit officer candidates and inhibits the sophistication of investigations, opportunities for officer training, officer retention, and the ability to provide safe working conditions for their personnel.
Four issues are of key importance to understanding rural and remote policing: (a) Rural crime differs from urban crime, and in some jurisdictions, the volume of crime is similar to (or greater than) city crime rates, although the nature of crime differs (e.g., some types of crimes occur more often in rural places); (b) rural officers carry out their day-to-day duties in a distinctively different manner than municipal officers; (c) the informal and formal expectations for rural officers are higher than their counterparts working in urban areas; and (d) the challenges of rural policing are magnified in remote locations.
Article
Jenna Milani, Ben Bradford, and Jonathan Jackson
The ability of the police to assert social control and reproduce social order depends, crucially, on the capacity to use force to achieve these ends—whether when restraining someone attempting to self-harm or shooting dead an armed terrorist. But what do we know about police use of force in the United States and England and Wales? Why does unjustified police use of force occur? And why do citizens have different views on the acceptability and unacceptability of various forms of police violence?
Article
Susan Dewey
Regulatory and legal approaches to prostitution are subject to considerable debate among researchers, policymakers, and those tasked with the everyday enforcement of measures intended to control, abate, or otherwise manage the sex industry. Law, policy, and everyday policing practices all contribute to the de jure and de facto organization of the sex industry at the levels of policy formulation, coordination between police, social services, and other socio-institutional forces, and encounters between sex workers and criminal justice professionals. Despite considerable cultural-contextual variations, researchers have ascertained three predominant approaches to regulating prostitution worldwide: criminalization, legalization, and decriminalization. Each of these approaches takes a unique form in the specific cultural context in which local authorities implement them, thereby generating special issues for policing with respect to ideological frameworks and police–sex worker encounters. Taken together, the philosophical and pragmatic concerns raised by policing or otherwise regulating prostitution encompass an extraordinary gamut of deeply human concerns regarding political power, sexual behavior, individual rights, historically rooted inequalities, and state responsibility
Article
Street gangs are prevalent throughout the United States. Recently, law enforcement agencies estimated there are approximately 30,000 gangs and 850,000 gang members across the United States. Gang members commit assaults, street-level drug trafficking, robberies, and threats and intimidation. However, they most commonly commit low-level property crime and marijuana use. Rival gang members or law-abiding citizens are often the targets of these crimes. Other than crime, the influence of gangs can disrupt the socializing power of schools, families, and communities. These institutions help socialize young people to learn and follow the appropriate rules of a law-abiding society. The presence of gangs and gang-related activity induces fear in the local community and great concern among citizens, impacting the quality of life of neighborhoods and cities. To confront these concerns, law enforcement is often considered the first line of defense. Despite the tenuous relationship between law enforcement and gangs, police officers have special knowledge and access to gang members and at-risk youth, which puts law enforcement in a unique position to reduce juvenile gang violence through prevention, intervention, and suppression efforts.
There are several ways in which law enforcement responds to gang violence. In its efforts to prevent gang violence, law enforcement plays a crucial role in regulating gang activity and in preventing those at risk of joining gangs. Primary prevention is broad in scope as the programs and strategies focus on the entire community. Primary prevention programs, such as the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) program, target a wide population and attempt to teach youths the skills to resist peer pressure to join a gang. Secondary prevention programs narrow their focus by identifying and reaching out to youths at risk for joining gangs. Secondary prevention programs, such as Los Angeles’s GRYD Secondary Prevention Program, offer psychological and substance abuse counseling, tutoring, and employment training, among other services. Law enforcement can also reduce gang violence through intervention by implementing strategies that provide alternatives to gang membership and strategies that prevent gang activity. Gang alternative programs, such as the Gang Employment Program (GEP), aim to get individuals to leave their gangs, but also provide opportunities to prevent the individual from rejoining the gang. Gang activity prevention strategies, such as the Dallas Anti-Gang Initiative’s enforcement of curfew and truancy laws, focus on specific activities, places, or behaviors associated with gang activity. These strategies typically include special laws, mediation, and situational crime prevention strategies. As a last resort, law enforcement responds to gang violence through suppression strategies. Suppression strategies are deterrence-based strategies. Although the effectiveness of these aforementioned programs varies, law enforcement is better utilized in a prevention capacity rather than an enforcement one. Moreover, law enforcement should not tackle gang violence alone, but in partnership with other community organizations and stakeholders such as Boston’s Operation Ceasefire or Chicago’s Project Safe Neighborhoods. These partnerships with community organizations and visible commitment to combating gang violence through prevention and suppression efforts can build trust and increase police legitimacy in at-risk communities.
Article
Fei Yang
Predictive policing, also known as crime forecasting, is a set of high technologies aiding the police in solving past crimes and pre-emptively fighting and preventing future ones. With the right deployment of such technologies, law enforcement agencies can combat and control crime more efficiently with time and resources better employed and allocated. The current practices of predictive policing include the integration of various technologies, ranging from predictive crime maps and surveillance cameras to sophisticated computer software and artificial intelligence. Predictive analytics help the police make predictions about where and when future crime is most likely to happen and who will be the perpetrator and who the potential victim. The underpinning logic behind such predictions is the predictability of criminal behavior and crime patterns based on criminological research and theories such as rational choice and deterrence theories, routine activities theory, and broken windows theory.
Currently many jurisdictions in the United States have deployed or have been experimenting with various predictive policing technologies. The most widely adopted applications include CompStat, PredPol, HunchLab, Strategic Subject List (SSL), Beware, Domain Awareness System (DAS), and Palantir. The realization of these predictive policing analytics systems relies heavily on the technological assistance provided by data collection and integration software, facial/vehicle identification and tracking tools, and surveillance technologies that keep tabs on individual activities both in the physical environment and in the digital world. Some examples of these assisting technologies include Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR), Next-Generation Identification (NGI) System, the Global Positioning System (GPS), Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL), next-generation police body-worn cameras (BWC) with facial recognition and tracking functions, aerial cameras and unmanned aircraft systems, DeepFace, Persistent Surveillance Systems, Stingrays/D(i)RT-Box/International Mobile Subscriber Identity Catcher, SnapTrends that monitors and analyzes feeds on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Picasa, Flickr, and YouTube.
This new fashion of using predictive analytics in policing has elicited extensive doubt and criticism since its invention. Whereas scholarly evaluation research shows mixed findings about how effectively predictive policing actually works to help reduce crime, other concerns center around legal and civil rights issues (including privacy protection and the legitimacy of mass surveillance), inequality (stratified surveillance), cost-effectiveness of the technologies, militarization of the police and its implications (such as worsened relationship and weakened trust between the police and the public), and epistemological challenges to understanding crime. To make the best use of the technologies and avoid their pitfalls at the same time, policymakers need to consider the hotly debated controversies raised in the evolution of predictive policing.
Article
Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning
Significant developments in our understandings of, and thinking about, “policing” have occurred in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These have been reflected in redefinitions of the words “police” and “policing” that scholars use when writing about it. By the middle of the 19th century the word "police" in English was understood to refer to the state-sponsored institution responsible for order maintenance, crime control, and law enforcement, and its officers; and the word policing referred to what its officers did to achieve these objectives. Police were typically referred to as “the police,” indicating that they uniquely performed this role. But in the decades after the Second World War, scholars and consultants brought the world’s attention to a dramatic growth in nonstate institutions that were fulfilling similar roles; they were referred to as “private security.”
Research revealed that private security were undertaking the same tasks and responsibilities as the police were but doing so in different ways, with different objectives, and different means. They more often saw their role as loss prevention—rather than crime control—and did not see presenting offenders before the criminal justice system as a good way to achieve that. Rather, they developed ways of achieving order and preventing losses that drew on the power of their clients—for instance to exclude troublemakers from their property—rather than the kinds of legal powers relied on by the police, which they typically did not have anyway. Policing scholars began to talk of “private police” and “private policing.” What is more, research revealed that within a couple of decades of the end of the Second World War, private security personnel had come to outnumber public police personnel, in some countries by as much as 3 to 1. It also became apparent that even within government there was an increasing number of organizations and personnel, other than “the police,” such as customs officials, tax inspectors, and so forth, who could also be considered to be doing policing. Many police researchers redefined themselves as policing researchers, interested in studying all these different public and private organizations and personnel who seemed to be doing policing, and what their relationships with each other were.
By the 1990s, in light of these research findings, policing scholars began to talk about plural policing provision, rather than just about the relationships between “private security” and “the police.” A whole lot of new questions arose: Who is doing policing? What are the different ways of doing it? In whose interests is it being done? What are the implications of this for policing policy? How can policing provision be effectively governed given its prolific diversity? How are developments like globalization and technological advances impacting the challenges faced by policing providers? And which providers are best placed to meet which of these challenges? And finally, is policing just about addressing human threats to safety and security ? What about threats to safety and security arising from natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, and droughts, or other manifestations of climate change such as global warming? Or from pandemics and the like? Or from the development of artificial intelligence? In short, what do “policing” and policing provision mean in the 21st century? And how will we understand and think about them in the future? Certainly not as we understood them in the middle of the 20th century.
Article
Jin R. Lee
Cybercrime is generally understood as behaviors that involve the use of virtual environments and/or networked computer systems to generate harm. This broad definition of cybercrime captures a variety of different online behaviors, including interpersonal violence offenses such as cyberbullying and online harassment, as well as those involving the unauthorized use and access of computer systems such as malware dissemination, ransomware, and distributed denial of service attacks.
Cybercrimes are policed by both law enforcement (e.g., local, state or provincial, federal) and extralegal agencies. Local law enforcement agencies are composed of police officers, who are generally tasked with maintaining public order within a specific municipality or county, including investigating crimes, apprehending offenders, and implementing crime prevention mechanisms (e.g., educating the public on available resources; proactive neighborhood patrol) within their local jurisdiction. State and provincial law enforcement agencies are larger police forces that are generally responsible for conduct that occurs within their wider state and provincial borders, including conducting highway traffic control and providing forensic services to smaller local agencies residing within their state or province. State and provincial agencies often become involved only when local forces are limited in their resources to adequately respond to an incident or when local jurisdictional conflicts exist. Federal agencies operate at the highest level of law enforcement, because they deal with crimes that involve homeland security. In fact, federal agencies can obtain cooperation among several national jurisdictions depending on existing political ties and extradition agreements. Several extralegal agencies (e.g., Internet Crime Complaint Center; Computer Emergency Response Teams) are also active in responding to cybercrime incidents. These agencies, which may develop from either public or private sectors, generally perform acts that support law enforcement, including facilitating communication and information sharing between victims and law enforcement agencies.
Despite efforts to sanction online offenses, research suggests that cybercrimes present several challenges for law enforcement agencies across all levels of government. First, cybercrime offenders often anonymize their attacks and offline identities, making arrests and criminal prosecutions extremely challenging. Second, even if offenders and their actions are identified, agencies are limited by their geographic location and jurisdiction. Third, the technical nature of cybercrime means that victims may not be aware of their victimization until months after the attack, which may affect the identification of digital evidence necessary to prosecute an offender. Fourth, law enforcement officers may not possess the knowledge and expertise needed to secure and investigate a digital crime scene adequately.
One approach that could improve how cybercrimes are enforced and regulated is the paradigm of evidence-based policing (EBP). EBP is a collective effort involving law enforcement agencies, academic researchers, and industry personnel/practitioners, whose central focus is to develop a robust evidence base that can identify current and emerging problems in policing, examine possible solutions to these problems using rigorous scientific methods, and monitor these solutions over extended periods of time to ensure successful outcomes are maintained. Knowing which operational practices work best in different situations will not only lead to a more intentional use of officers’ time and agency resources but also strengthen public perceptions of law enforcement in responding to cybercrime calls for service.
Article
Heather Prince, Kiseong Kuen, and Danielle S. Rudes
In recent years, research on policing, police legitimacy, and police decision-making has increased dramatically in part due to several high-profile police use of force and deadly shooting incidents in the United States. This line of studies largely focuses on individual-level factors such as police procedural justice during interactions with citizens from the perspective of the public. However, a growing body of studies suggests that police authority and legitimacy is not only formed by citizens’ evaluations and perceptions derived from police behaviors during the interactions. It is also shaped by factors from both individual-level and structural-level external sources of police organizations, such as citizens’ animus toward the police and crime rates of the jurisdiction. More importantly, research suggests that police culture and organizational-level factors, such as organizational justice and feeling recognition from others in an organization, play large roles in shaping officers’ self-legitimacy. The sense of low self-legitimacy derived from the above sources can lead officers to make racially biased decisions to reinforce their legitimate status with the public. Officers’ decision-making as well as their perceptions of self-legitimacy, by interacting each other, can play crucial roles in police negative behaviors toward citizens, such as use of deadly force, especially toward racial minorities. Some organizations have implemented changes such as implicit bias and procedural justice trainings, or body-worn camera requirements, but changes must be made at the overall organizational level to reduce racially biased police decision-making.
