Robert E. Worden

John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety

Objective: The purpose of this study was to estimate the behavioral impacts of training police officers in implicit bias awareness and management. Hypotheses: Training police in implicit bias reduces racial and ethnic disparities in stops, arrests, summonses, frisks, searches, and/or use of force. Method: A cluster randomized controlled trial using...

The imposition of appropriate sanctions for substantiated police misconduct is important, but social science offers little evidence about whether the severity of sanctions is related to the gravity of the misconduct, or disparities indicative of biased decision-making, or simply arbitrary decision-making. We examine the application of sanctions for...

Purpose The objectives of this research were to examine how officer perspectives on body-worn cameras (BWCs) are patterned by broader occupational attitudes, and to analyze stability and change in officers' attitudes toward BWCs before and after the deployment of the technology. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyze panel survey data on...

Long-term, collaborative practitioner–researcher partnerships offer many benefits to police agencies and research institutions, generating systematic evidence that enables agencies to become learning organizations and expands the base of knowledge. We reflect on our experiences with five such partnerships to discuss the scope, operation, and struct...

New York State's nonfatal shooting initiative provided support to police departments and district attorney's offices in two cities, Newburgh and Utica, NY: two investigators and a crime analyst dedicated to nonfatal shooting investigations, training and technical assistance, and timely forensic laboratory analysis of evidence. Evaluation findings s...

Objectives We examine satisfaction with the police at micro places using data from citizen surveys conducted in 2001, 2009 and 2014 in one city. We illustrate the utility of this approach by comparing micro- and meso-level aggregations of policing attitudes, as well as by predicting views about the police from crime data at micro places. Methods I...

There is a growing body of evidence that suggests police can be more effective in addressing crime and disorder when they focus on hot people and/or hot places -- those people and places disproportionately driving crime and disorder. I examine the connections between hot people and hot places by considering micro places (street segments and interse...

Chapter Three considers the police decision to arrest, including a thorough discussion of the factors that influence this decision. Identifying the factors that influence arrest (and the relative strength of their influences) is a logical first step that provides the foundation upon which evidence-based strategies must be developed. While there are...

Arrest has several substantial direct and collateral consequences for individuals and communities. Given these costs, it is important to consider the utility of alternatives to arrest. This chapter focuses on two primary forms of arrest alternatives: police-led diversion and citations in lieu of arrest. For police-led diversion, three sup-topics ar...

This chapter considers the important and unanswered questions from existing research examining the police power to arrest and highlights directions and questions for future research studies related to this area. We argue that the most critical research needed should focus on police-decision making, as we need a better understanding regarding how an...

The police decision to arrest is impacted by several areas, including policy, community, and law. This chapter discusses the need to better understand the long-term and unintended consequences of the decision to arrest as well as alternatives to arrest. Well-designed evaluations, particularly through the use of systematic social observation and pol...

This chapter considers the different definitions of arrest and the reasons for the difficulty in creating a universally standard term. However, a singular definition is offered, which is used to guide discussions throughout this review. This chapter considers the historical use of arrest, including the evidence for the general and specific deterren...

The group-based violence intervention model is predicated on the assumption that individuals who hear credible messages of consequences for further violence will deliver the message to other group members. Using social network analysis, we develop an algorithm of who should receive the message to maximize the spread of the message among the remaini...

Review Essay

We evaluate the Violent Offender Identification Directive (VOID) tool, a risk prediction instrument implemented within a police department to identify offenders likely to be involved with future gun violence. VOID uses a variety of static measures of prior criminal history that are available in police records management systems. The VOID tool is as...

This insightful volume examines key research questions concerning police decision to arrest as well as police-led diversion. The authors critically evaluate the tentative answers that empirical evidence provides to those questions, and suggest areas for future inquiry. Nearly seven decades of empirical study have provided extensive knowledge regard...

In early 2016, Albany police launched its law-enforcement-assisted diversion (LEAD) program, providing for discretionary prebooking diversion for low-level offenders whose offending was driven by drug addiction, mental illness, homelessness, or poverty. We examine the exercise of officers' discretion in making LEAD diversions by analyzing eligible...

People who file complaints against the police tend to experience objectively unfavorable outcomes, for most complaints are not sustained. But features of citizen oversight might be expected to enhance the procedural justice of the complaint review process and, hence, provide positive subjective experience despite the outcomes. Using data collected...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the “state of the art” in research on police legitimacy. The authors consider two bodies of theory and empirical research on police legitimacy: one rooted in social psychology and concerned with individual attitudes, and the other based on organizational institutionalism. The authors contrast the theor...

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the United States, the exercise of police authority-and the public's trust that police authority is used properly-is a recurring concern. Contemporary prescriptions for police re...

Objectives Replicate two previous studies of temporal crime trends at the street block level. We replicate the general approach of group-based trajectory modelling of crimes at micro-places originally taken by Weisburd et al. (Criminology 42(2):283–322, 2004) and replicated by Curman et al. (J Quant Criminol 31(1):127–147, 2014). We examine pattern...

The procedural justice that citizens subjectively experience with the police affects police legitimacy. The procedural justice of policing is typically not measured in police agencies, nor is it an outcome for which managers are held accountable. We examine whether and how the measurement of procedural justice would affect its management. Survey-ba...

Objectives: Replicate two previous studies of temporal crime trends at the street block level. We replicate the general approach of group-based trajectory modelling of crimes at micro-places originally taken by Weisburd, Bushway, Lum and Yang (2004) and replicated by Curman, Andresen, and Brantingham (2014). We examine patterns in a city of a diffe...

When people have contacts with the police, the fairness with which police are perceived to act affects citizens’ trust and confidence in the police and their sense that the police deserve to be obeyed – that is, the procedural justice that citizens subjectively experience affects the legitimacy of the police. Translating this body of research into...

Academics and practitioners recognize that research partnerships can benefit both research and practice. Many such partnerships, of varying scope and duration, have been formed over the past 20 years. However, while we have learned some lessons about such partnerships, we have much yet to learn about how research partnerships can be sustained and p...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critique contemporary tools for assessing and managing the risk of police misconduct and suggest directions for their improvement. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on extant literature, synthesizing several lines of inquiry to summarize what the authors know about patterns of police misconduct...

This handbook shows how local police organizations in the United States have been the focus of reform efforts, especially due to a new crisis in the policing environment—terrorism. The problem of terrorism has raised a host of questions about how police should respond to this new threat, and this handbook aims to address these questions. It also di...

We examine the impacts of public surveillance cameras on crime and disorder in Schenectady, New York, a medium-sized city in the northeastern United States. We assessed camera impacts by analyzing monthly counts of crime and disorder-related calls for service that occurred within each camera's 150-foot viewshed as an interrupted time series, with t...

Police executives have increasingly assumed—or they have been compelled to accept—responsibility for managing the risk of misconduct by their officers through the implementation of early intervention (EI) systems, even though social science has provided very little evidence on their effectiveness, or on their unintended effects. We examine the effe...

Police disciplinary systems are predicated on the notion of deterrence, particularly that officers more severely sanctioned for misconduct will be less likely to repeat those behaviors compared with less severely or unsanctioned officers. Using retrospective, longitudinal data from a large police department in the northeastern United States, we exp...

The “veil-of-darkness” method is an innovative and low-cost approach that circumvents many of the benchmarking issues that arise in testing for racial profiling. Changes in natural lighting are used to establish a presumptively more race-neutral benchmark on the assumption that after dark, police suffer an impaired ability to detect motorists’ race...

Exposure to crime occurs when an individual’s activities place them in vulnerable situations. A collaborative problem-solving approach to address student victimization in one area of the city of Ashton resulted in the development of a safe passageway initiative, Operation Safe Corridor (OSC). OSC applies the logic of crime and place research by foc...

In this study we examine the decisions of local governments regarding the form and funding of indigent defense programs. We draw theoretical propositions from the literature on state and local policy making, and we test these propositions using data from Georgia. We find that the provision of indigent defense counsel by local governments is influen...

Recent analyses of the relationship between crime and an aggressive patrol strategy have led to no single conclusion concerning the deterrent power of aggressive policing. This research adds to that debate by exploring the effects of a variety of aggressive patrol tactics on several different crimes. The empirical analysis, based on cross-sectional...

This paper examines the influence of officers' and supervisors' attitudes and priorities toward community policing and problem solving over the time officers spend conducting problem-solving activities. Analyzing data collected for the Project on Policing Neighborhoods, a multi-method study of police patrol in two police departments, results show t...

Community policing creates the expectation that oficers will become more selective in making arrests and that those decisions will be influenced more by extralegal considerations and less by legal ones. Data on 451 nontraffic police-suspect encounters were drawn from ridealong observations in Richmond, Virginia, where the police department was impl...

According to the conventional wisdom, the police culture consists of a set of values, attitudes, and norms that are widely shared among officers, who find in the culture a way to cope with the strains of their working environment. Some research implies that the conventional wisdom is overdrawn, and recent research has begun to question it more dire...

Recent research has reexamined the hypothesis that suspects' demeanor affects police behavior. Reanalyses have supported this demeanor hypothesis, but none have considered the possible interaction effect of demeanor with other extralegal variables. Utilizing systematic observational data collected in 24 police departments in three metropolitan area...

Extant research on policing juveniles raises several questions: (1) the influence of extra-legal factors on police behavior toward juveniles; (2) the temporal generalizability of extant findings; (3) the use of police authority other than arrest; and (4) how, if at all, the treatment of juvenile suspects differs from that of adult suspects. We addr...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

Recent research has called into question the seemingly well-established conclusion that the likelihood of arrest by the police rises when suspects display a disrespectful or hostile demeanor toward the police. In this article we reanalyze data collected for the Police Services Study, on which a substantial body of supporting evidence for this concl...

It is often implied that citizens’ attitudes toward the police are a determinant of their willingness to engage in the coproduction of police outputs. This relationship, however, has been subjected to only limited empirical scrutiny. Using data from a three wave panel survey conducted in a large metropolitan area, this study examines the determinan...

No study has been made to identify systematically the elements of police officers' belief systems. Most studies focus on one or more attitudes and ignore related findings. Recent research has shown that police are heterogeneous in their attitudes, i.e., officers have divergent views about the ends and means of their functions. This article digests...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

Since the 1960s, a substantial body of research has focused on citizens' attitudes toward the police. These studies tap a rather wide variety of outlooks: some ask about specific assessments of the police (e.g., satisfaction with the police in particular incidents), while others ask about more global assessments (e.g., satisfaction with the police...

Arguments for and against measures intended to raise the educational levels of police officers turn partly on the hypothesized relationships between college education and officers' attitudes and behavior. The purpose of this analysis is to provide additional empirical evidence concerning these hypotheses. The results suggest that college education...

This paper reappraises the value of situational and attitudinal variables as parts of a theory of police behavior. That situational factors affect officers' decisions to make arrests is well supported by empirical evidence; that officers' behavior is shaped by their attitudes and values is a common assumption even though it is supported only by wea...

This study is a reexamination of the effect of situational characteristics on police arrests in domestic disturbances. Using observational data, we replicate recent research based upon official police reports. We also consider the implications of variables not available in the earlier study, especially the role orientation of the intervening office...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1986. Includes bibliographical references (p. 315-328). Photocopy.