Ian T. Adams

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Verified

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor at University of South Carolina

Objectives Test the immediate and sustained impact of suspending a police K9 program on officer injury, suspect injury, and suspect resistance rates. Methods A large municipal policing agency housing one of the oldest K9 programs in the USA suddenly terminated the program at the close of summer 2020. We exploit this change as a natural experiment...

Objective To evaluate the relationship between police cadets’ facial traits and their subsequent promotional success. Methods Using archival police academy photographs, we use a two-phase experiment to evaluate the impact of facial traits on future promotional success. First, respondents (n = 507) view randomly selected photographs of cadets (obse...

Research summary Several of the largest U.S. police departments reported a sharp increase in officer resignations following massive public protests directed at policing in the summer of 2020. Yet, to date, no study has rigorously assessed the impact of the George Floyd protests on police resignations. We fill this void using 60 months of employment...

Administrative discretion can range from benign to troubling, and law enforcement officers possess the power to use physical violence in the discharge of their duties. Body‐worn cameras (BWCs) are a workplace surveillance technology intended to monitor officer behavior in the field, but officers exercise discretion over whether or not to activate t...

How do public expectations of police use-of-force align with the strict professional and legal guidelines under which police officers train and operate? This is a largely unexamined but salient question in the use-of-force literature and is important given the ongoing public discourse regarding police use-of-force, community standards, and perceive...

The study described in the source article represents the first experimental evaluation of AIassisted police report writing, even as agencies are already adopting these unproven tools. AI-assisted report writing did not significantly reduce police report writing times, contrary to marketing claims. There may be other potential benefits from using AI...

Objectives: Explore officers' perceptions of the fairness of monitoring with systematic variations in activation (manual/automatic) and auditing (on-demand/supervisor random/artificial intelligence) policy regimes for body-worn cameras (BWCs). Methods: This study uses a 2 × 3 survey experiment in a sample of officers wearing BWCs (n = 258) to asses...

Profanity is common in everyday life, yet law enforcement often treats all swear words alike. Building on Adams (2024), we surveyed a large public sample (n=2,412) who evaluated profanity’s appropriateness, professionalism, impact on trust, and disciplinary deservedness across nine scenarios (n=9,874) varying in intent (positive, neutral, derogator...

Objectives This study examines the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the time police officers spend writing reports, a task that consumes a significant portion of their workday. Methods In a pre-registered randomized controlled trial, we test this claim within the patrol division of a medium-sized police department (n = 85) at th...

ntroduction: Police agencies are often hesitant to adopt evidence-based practices. The barriers may include political factors, ingrained habits and cultures, and labor union concerns. This study examined organizational and community-level barriers and facilitators that influence innovation in policing using an implementation science framework. Meth...

In “Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World” (2023), Megan Stevenson makes a claim that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have not had a significant effect in criminal justice settings. She then draws the conclusion that the gold standard for research designs, RCTs, are inherently incapable of doing so, demonstrating that the social...

Police resignations increased by 279% following the George Floyd protests, posing significant challenges for police staffing and operational capacity. Retirements and involuntary separations (e.g., terminations due to misconduct) did not show significant changes, but the elevated resignations are likely to continue. Effective strategies to improve...

The accountability of police to the public is imperative for a functioning democracy. The opinions of police executives—pivotal actors for implementing oversight policies—are an understudied, critical component of successful reform efforts. We use a pre‐registered survey experiment administered to all U.S. municipal police chiefs and county sheriff...

Research summary This study investigates how information about public opinion and peer practices influences police executives' views on civilian review boards. We applied structural topic modeling in an experimental paradigm, a novel approach diverging from traditional experimental survey methods, to the open‐ended responses of 1331 police executiv...

This study focuses on police profanity, with a particular interest developing reasonable policy to regulate the use of the word "fuck." Officers employ "fuck" as a linguistic tool to accomplish a range of goals, such as establishing authority, fostering solidarity, and diffusing tension. However, "fuck" can also be used derogatorily, and negatively...

We examine the factors influencing police response times, with a particular focus on staffing levels, calls for service (CFS), and proactive police work. We estimate Bayesian Holt-Winters state-space models for each CFS priority level. Using a novel dataset that combines data from the Salt Lake City Police Department's staffing and Computer-Aided D...

Job burnout and turnover among those who work for correctional agencies have increased dramatically in recent years and are of primary concern to administrators and staff alike. Recent efforts to curb the exodus have focused on recruiting individuals who are theoretically well-suited for prison work, including former or current members of the U.S....

Law enforcement agencies are increasingly adopting AI‐powered tools. While prior work emphasizes the technological features driving public opinion, we investigate how public trust and support for AI in government vary with the institutional context. We administer a pre‐registered survey experiment to 4200 respondents about AI use cases in policing...

Police officers wield the authority to use force in pursuit of lawful objectives, which significantly impacts the public perception of policing legitimacy. Previous research findings continue to document more questions than answers, but the gaps in knowledge are slowly closing. While various actors review the appropriateness of police use of force,...

Research summary This study investigates the impact of scientific research findings on public views of policing topics. Specifically, we conducted an original survey experiment to determine whether research information treatments influence respondents’ views on the effectiveness of the police in reducing crime, defunding and refunding police budget...

Purpose This study aims to demonstrate the need for further examination of legal judgments and the exercise of discretion in policing. Design/methodology/approach A factorial vignette survey with traffic stop scenarios based on US Court of Appeals decisions was administered to 396 police officers across six states. Officers were asked to indicate...

We examine whether police resignations and retirements significantly changed in the two years following public backlash related to the police murder of George Floyd. We employ Bayesian Structural Time Series to compare observed trends in each agency to synthetic counterfactuals using monthly staffing data from fourteen large municipal policing and...

Forthcoming: Journal of Experimental Criminology

Demand for democratic accountability in policing is accelerating, yet little is understood about how law enforcement executives engage in policy learning around civilian oversight. This paper shares the results of a novel survey experiment administered to all U.S. police chiefs and sheriffs. We assess whether police executives’ attitudes towards ci...

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are a permanent, though not well understood, feature of modern US policing. As a technological solution to the perception that officers use force too often, BWCs have not fared well. This dissertation sidesteps questions of effectiveness, however, and instead investigates how the cameras are perceived by officers, and how v...

Objectives: Test the immediate and sustained impact of suspending a police K9 program on officer injury, suspect injury, and suspect resistance rates.Methods: A large municipal policing agency housing one of the oldest K9 programs in the U.S. suddenly terminated the program at the close of summer 2020. We exploit this change as a natural experiment...

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are a permanent, though not well understood, feature of modern US policing. As a technological solution to the perception that officers use force too often, BWCs have not fared well. This dissertation sidesteps questions of effectiveness, however, and instead investigates how the cameras are perceived by officers, and how v...

Many of the challenges organic producers and pro­cessors experience are caused by how organic standards compliance is monitored and enforced—in particular, the administrative procedures that are mandated to verify that operation practices meet organic certification requirements. In this policy analysis, we examine noncompliance documenta­tion and v...

Research Summary : We examine changes in help‐seeking for domestic violence (DV) in seven U.S. cities during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Using Bayesian structural time‐series modeling with daily data to construct a synthetic counterfactual, we test whether calls to police and/or emergency hotlines varied in 2020 as people stayed home due to COVID‐19. Ac...

Several of the largest U.S. police departments reported a sharp increase in officer resignations following massive public protests directed at policing in the summer of 2020. Yet, to date, no study has rigorously assessed the impact of the George Floyd protests on police resignations. We fill this void using 60 months of employment data from a larg...

Most use-of-force policies utilized by U.S. police agencies make fundamental ordinal assumptions about officers’ force responses to subject resistance. These policies consist of varying levels of force and resistance along an ordinally ranked continuum of severity. We empirically tested the ordinal assumptions that are ubiquitous to police use-of-f...

Recent experimental results suggest that when police officers smile, the public will react with enhanced perceptions of those officers. However, emotional labor theory suggests that organizationally mandated emotional displays such as smiling exact costs to the individual worker. We use data from a 2020 national survey to test effects of emotional...

The initial interaction between rape victims and police officers affects how cases progress through the criminal justice system. In one US state capitol, the police agency determined its initial response to rape victims was sub-par. Victim engagement was low, and officer-written reports often endorsed negative stereotypes about rape victims. A four...

The initial interaction between rape victims and police affects how cases progress through the criminal justice system. In one US state capitol, the police agency determined its initial response to rape victims was sub-par. Victim engagement was low, and officer-written reports often endorsed negative stereotypes about rape victims. A four-hour tra...

COVID-19 has created tremendous operational difficulties for law enforcement agencies, with substantial portions of their staff quarantined for either exposure or infection. With the rollout of a vaccine beginning in early 2021, there is hoped for relief on the horizon. However, to date, no study has reported the vaccine’s effect on infection rates...

The present study employs a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the effects of a mandatory sexual assault kit (SAK) testing policy on rape arrests in a large western US jurisdiction. We use a Bayesian structural time-series model and monthly data on arrests for rape from 2010 through 2019. In the post-implementation period, we observed a downward...

The initial interaction between rape victims and police can affect how these cases progress through the criminal justice system. In one US state capitol, the police agency determined its initial response to rape victims was less effective than desired. Victim retention was low, and officer written reports were found to endorse negative stereotypes...

In 2014, a jurisdiction's police department came under public criticism regarding past non-testing of sexual assault kits (SAKs) for sexual assault investigations. From 2004 through 2013, approximately 77% of all SAKs received by this jurisdiction were never submitted to a crime laboratory for processing. As a result, a city ordinance was passed, r...

Recent experimental results suggest that when police officers smile, the public will react with unliterally-enhanced perceptions of those officers. The claim is that smiling is costless. In this paper, we test that claim. We use data from surveys in 2016, 2018, and 2020 to test effects of emotional labor-display rules, surface acting, and deep acti...

This chapter reports the results of a dual test on the subscales of burnout –emotional exhaustion and depersonalization – for civilian and sworn employees in a large US correctional agency. The lone previous study to compare burnout in civilian and sworn law enforcement employees (McCarty & Skogan, 2013) found the levels and predictors of burnout w...

Administrative discretion can range from benign to troubling, and law enforcement officers possess the power to use physical violence in the discharge of their duties. Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are a workplace surveillance technology intended to monitor officer behavior in the field, but officers exercise discretion over whether or not to activate t...

The present study employs a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the effects of a mandatory sexual assault kit (SAK) testing policy on rape arrests in a large western US jurisdiction. We use a Bayesian structural time-series model and monthly data on arrests for rape from 2010 through 2019. In the post-implementation period, we observed a downward...

Introduction: Previous studies of emergency dispatch personnel have established high levels of emotional labor, burnout, and turnover intention among this population of first responders. This study is the first to investigate the effect of emergency dispatch script protocols on workplace outcomes of burnout and turnover intention. Hypotheses: The s...

Purpose: This study introduces emotional labor into an analysis of multiple dimensions of burnout in sworn and civilian employees across three law enforcement agencies. Design: Using data from a survey of law enforcement employees in a metropolitan police department, a full-service sheriff’s department, and a state corrections agency located in th...

Purpose: This study introduces emotional labor into an analysis of multiple dimensions of burnout in sworn and civilian employees across three law enforcement agencies. Design/methodology/approach: Using data from a survey of law enforcement employees in a metropolitan police department, a full-service sheriff's department, and a state correction...

This study focuses on two main research questions: What attitudes and/or demographics predict individuals’ attitudes toward a punitive US criminal court system? Moreover, can a change in an attitude or demographic category across time help explain the less-punitive shift in public opinion that began in 1996? These questions are examined by using Ra...

Using data from one urban police department in the United States, this study gauges the effects of individual officer characteristics on use-of-force. Consistent with prior research, we find Emotional Exhaustion to be a negative correlate to use-of-force: Emotionally-exhausted officers avoid engaging with others. However, unlike previous research,...

Most use-of-force policies in U.S. police departments make fundamental ordinal assumptions about officers’ force responses to subject resistance. These policies consist of varying levels of force and resistance along an ordinally-ranked continuum of severity. The exact formulation of these continua varies widely, however, and little research has be...

Global public administration represents an under-studied current within public administration scholarship, and the experiences of those who work within organizations which span international boundaries remain under studied as well. As challenges become increasingly global in nature—migration, environmental degradation, and cybersecurity threats—so...

The story of postwar government in the UK is a story of serial reform. From a twentieth-century welfare state, to New Public Management reforms, to New Labour and its reliance on nonprofits, to the Brexit era, the nation has sought one system after another as a means to provide efficient, effective services in a way that resonates with a difficult-...

The wide range of policies demanding multinational attention and the problems that brought them about include the globalization of financial markets, global climate change, internal and cross-border conflicts displacing tens of millions of people (UNHCR 2018), and international trade, among others. Understanding the effects of culture on human beha...

Highlights Machine learning-based textual analysis is a viable tool for police survey research Analyzing large numbers of police free-text responses provides more nuanced understanding of police perceptions of the public Officers' attention to professionalism guards against de-policing, while attention to perceived unfair criticism increases it...

Ferguson’s book provides an excellent review of the sheer breadth of big data’s entry into policing, as well as some depth through the case studies he presents. When combined with the theory and research experience of public administration scholars—long practiced at unpicking claims of neutrality in public service—The Rise of Big Data Policing is a...

Abstract • Purpose: To extract latent topic models from open-ended survey responses, and test the relationship between the resulting models and police officers' motivation to engage in proactive policing. • Methods: The study relies on a corpus of open-ended responses from 396 police officers collected in a survey. Using structural topic modeling,...

Please see updated preprint (8/13/2019): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335158005_The_Rhetoric_of_De-Policing_Evaluating_Open-Ended_Survey_Responses_from_Police_Officers_with_Machine_Learning-Based_Structural_Topic_Modeling Purpose: To extract latent topic models from open-ended survey responses, and test the relationship between the res...

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are the latest and perhaps most tangible answer to complex social questions regarding the use of force, state legitimacy, and the proper role of police in a liberal democracy. How do officers experience heightened monitoring? This article pursues two objectives via two studies. In the first study, we establish a valid and r...

Law enforcement agencies in the United States take on a wide variety of organizational structures, but all rely upon the non-sworn employees who support the agencies’ missions. The experience of non-sworn law enforcement personnel is unremarked upon in both the emotional labor and criminal justice literature, despite accounting for up to 46% of emp...

How do public expectations of police use-of-force align with the strict professional and legal guidelines under which police officers train and operate? This is a largely unexamined but salient question in the use-of-force literature, and is important given the ongoing public discourse regarding police use-of-force, community standards, and perceiv...

Among the more recognizable programs related to natural and sustainable food is the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program. Although the robustness of the organic food market is difficult to contest, many debate the extent to which U.S. organic policy outcomes adequately serve consumers and the organic agriculture produc...

In the current study, we examine prosecutorial decisions that affect the certainty, celerity, and severity of punishment at the county level in the state of Florida. Leveraging a unique data set, we investigate the effect of the rate at which prosecuting agencies within each county filed formal charges against offenders (certainty), the swiftness o...

The purpose of this paper is to explore emotional labour in the context of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) using word data from interviews of five NGO directors on their recruitment criteria when hiring staff. We analyse interview transcripts using semiotic clustering. First-order concepts are organised into second-order themes which are summ...

The purpose of this paper is to explore emotional labour in the context of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) using word data from interviews of five NGO directors on their recruitment criteria when hiring staff. We analyse interview transcripts using semiotic clustering. First-order concepts are organised into second-order themes which are summ...

Emotional labor is the effort to express job-appropriate emotions and/or suppress inappropriate emotions. The effort manifests in interpersonal interactions, whether face to face or voice to voice, and can increase stress and burnout. Most research in emotional labor is based on North American samples. Could public servants in different cultures ex...

The prosecutor inhabits a unique, influential place in the American criminal justice system. Yet, there is inadequate research evaluating the prosecutor’s role in deterring crime, a vital goal of the criminal justice system. In the current study, we address this gap by examining prosecutorial decisions that affect the certainty, celerity, and sever...

Body-worn cameras are the latest proposed technological solution to complex social questions regarding use of force, state legitimacy, and the proper role of police in a liberal democracy. This paper pursues two objectives. First, the establishment of a valid and reliable survey scale to measure police officer perceptions of the risks posed to them...

As the face of government, street-level bureaucrats interact with the citizenry and engage in emotional labor. Here we argue that public servants risk becoming alienated due to the unsupported emotional labor demands of their jobs. Alienated public servants can, in turn, alienate citizens from their government via emotional contagion, and because t...

Police departments in the United States are rapidly adopting body-worn cameras (BWCs). To date, no study has investigated the effects of BWCs on police officers themselves, despite evidence suggesting negative effects of electronic performance monitoring on employee well-being. Police officers already experience higher levels of burnout than other...

Presentation PDF for Law and Society Conference, presented June 7, 2018

The growing use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) in law enforcement poses ethical and privacy threats to be considered by policy makers. Law enforcement adoption of surveillance technology often outpaces the laws and regulations that would ensure their appropriate use, and the negative consequences are rarely anticipated, particularly as they relate to...