Jon Shane

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at John Jay College of Criminal Justice

This book offers researchers, police practitioners and policymakers a platform for organizational reform and an understanding of how the police organization creates stress, which contributes to reduced officer performance. This book, based on an in-depth study exploring the relationship between perceived organizational stressors and police perform...

International and Transnational Crime and Justice - edited by Mangai Natarajan June 2019

There is tremendous controversy across the United States (and beyond) when a police officer uses deadly force against an unarmed citizen, but often the conversation is devoid of contextual details. These details matter greatly as a matter of law and organizational legitimacy. In this short book, authors Jon Shane and Zoë Swenson offer a comprehensi...

Maritime piracy has been a worldwide problem for decades before starting gradual declines around 2011. Situational crime prevention (SCP) techniques have been shown to reduce successful pirate attacks (Shane and Magnuson 2014; Shane et al. 2015), suggesting that they may also be capable of reducing violent ransom hijackings. This study uses data fr...

Unlike state and municipal police forces that can generally not be sued by victims of crime on the grounds that they provided inadequate policing, shopping malls are regularly the targets by crime victims in tort actions for failing to provide adequate security. Courts have struggled with the question of how to set the standard for reasonable polic...

Purpose: Previous studies on police use of fatal force in the United States are limited to specific cities or rely on aggregate data. This is the first analysis of its type to rely on incident-level national data and to establish base rates for police shooting fatalities. Methods: Publicly available data from the Washington Post were used to model...

While confidential informants (CIs) can play a crucial role in police investigations, they also have the potential to cause great harm if they are dishonest. The process by which police agencies qualify a CI to work and the strength of agency policy may be the source of the problem. This Brief examines the integrity problem involving CIs in police...

Documenting police use of force has been an issue in the United States since at least 1931. As of July 2016, there is still no standardized national data collection effort, despite a call from several presidential and civil rights commissions to do so. Without accurate and timely national data, a moral panic of sorts unfolds that replaces rational...

Relying on situational crime prevention perspective, this study compares successful and unsuccessful pirate attacks reported to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) from the year 2000 through 2013 (n = 4,902). The study builds upon the recent work of Shane and Magnuson in Justice Quarterly, pp 1–26 (2014), which found various SCP techniques effe...

Using concepts drawn from situational crime prevention theory, this study compares successful and unsuccessful pirate attacks (n = 4,638) against ships worldwide and the situational factors that help prevent such attacks. The results show that when a ship’s crew takes proactive self-protective measures that increase the perceived effort (increasing...

Eyewitness identification has high probative value for the prosecution’s case. One method for obtaining eyewitness identification is the show-up procedure. If the prosecution intends to rely on the show-up identification, then the show-up must not be impermissibly suggestive or prone to error, which can lead to misidentification. The United States...

The incident occurred in July 2007, at approximately 3:00 p.m. in a mid-sized U.S. city. A police officer was on patrol in a marked police car in the City when he was approached by an Hispanic male who informed him that he had just been robbed inside his store. The officer broadcasted over the police radio that three White or Hispanic males were se...

This research uses a mixed method design to present a deep narrative account of facts that offer context (qualitative), supplemented by statistical data (quantitative) that offer breadth. Mixed methodology was selected for the strength of triangulation to elaborate and clarify the findings and to generate greater understanding about how errors in p...

What can criminal justice learn from a single case study? This study revealed how a person can be misidentified during a police show-up, the failure points during the preliminary investigation that may have facilitated the misidentification and the failure points during the follow-up investigation that may have accelerated the harm (or failed to st...

Adopting an organizational accident framework offers a measure of coherence, even if to a modest degree, to the fragmented, decentralized and disparate world that is American law enforcement. American law enforcement is unique among the Western world’s policing practices, insofar as there is no centralized government authority regulating the police...

This case is described in terms of James Reason’s organizational accident framework. An organizational accident is a confluence of human, situational and other contextual circumstances that combine and breach established organizational defenses that have been erected to guard against certain hazards, when breached.

The first part of the analysis compares the observed actions of the officers during the investigation to the standards defined by criminal procedure, criminal investigations, police management, and supervision against the organizational accident framework and helps answer the first research question: what are the failure points in the investigation...

This study explores an organizational accident that occurred in American policing, but the context and circumstances have direct implications for all rule-of-law societies that practice democratic law enforcement. While the proximate cause of any accident is usually someone’s immediate action or omission, there is often a trail of underlying latent...

Learning from error has been explored in other industries, most notably medicine, aeronautics and transportation, petroleum and nuclear production, and business.

This guide begins by describing the problem of abandoned buildings and lots, factors that contribute to the problem, and who is responsible for the problem. It then presents a series of questions that will help you analyze the problem. Finally, it reviews several responses to the problem and what is known from research, evaluation, and government p...

This article explores the concept of a rational sentencing structure for imposing internal police discipline that helps practitioners make more reasoned and consistent decisions when dispensing discipline. The data consists of 360 hr of participant observation of police trials involving sworn police officers and civilian employees in the Newark, Ne...

Confidential informants (CIs) currently occupy a central role in law enforcement, particularly in the enforcement of drug laws, where officers, agents and prosecutors consider them indispensable to undercover and other operations. In virtually all types of criminal cases, state and federal sentencing schemes authorize reduced punishment for offende...

This study examined police officers' perceptions of daily operational and organizational work experiences and their relationship with performance in two large urban police departments in the Midwest and the Middle Atlantic regions (USA). The findings were mixed: (1) organizational work experiences showed a higher mean score than operational work ex...

This study examines the impact organizational stressors have on police performance. Evidence on police stress is mixed whether or not the nature of police work is inherently stressful. A growing body of research suggests police officers are no more stressed than other groups and police work is not especially stressful. Instead, organizational stres...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to define a systematic management structure that helps police practitioners institutionalize performance management and analysis in more rational‐technical ways. Design/methodology/approach The design is based on Gold's “complete participant” field researcher method. Findings The findings suggest a performance...

NY State task force report on friendly-fire police shootings.

The terror attacks on the United States that occurred on September 11, 2001 are defining events in US history. The oceans separating the North American continent from the tumultuous Middle East no longer seemed such a protective barrier. The long-held belief that such things only happened over there showed the United States just how vulnerable she...

Technical assistance project empaneled by the New Jersey Attorney General for the Camden Police Department.

Persons with mental illnesses increasingly come into contact with police in the community due to changes in local and national policies and police responsibility for maintaining order. Recently, specialized intervention strategies have been advanced to ensure that persons with mental illnesses are not inappropriately arrested and moved into the cri...

A problem-oriented policing project in Newark, NJ aimed at reducing drug dealing in privately owned apartment complexes.