Scott Mourtgos

Many U.S. cities witnessed both de-policing and increased crime in 2020, yet it remains unclear whether the former contributed to the latter. Indeed, much of what is known about the effects of proactive policing on crime comes from studies that evaluate highly focused interventions atypical of day-to-day policing, use cities as the unit of analysis...

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...

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...

Many U.S. cities witnessed both de‐policing and increased crime in 2020, yet whether the former contributed to the latter remains unclear. Indeed, much of what is known about the effects of proactive policing on crime comes from studies that evaluated highly focused interventions atypical of day‐to‐day policing, used cities as the unit of analysis,...

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...

The police murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests in the summer of 2020 and revived claims that public outcry over such high‐profile police killings perpetuated a violent “war on cops.” Using data collected by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) on firearm assaults of U.S. police officers, we use Bayesian structural time series (BSTS) modeli...

Many U.S. cities witnessed both de-policing and increased crime in 2020, yet it remains unclear whether the former contributed to the latter. Indeed, much of what is known about the effects of proactive policing on crime comes from studies that evaluate highly focused interventions atypical of day-to-day policing, use cities as the unit of analysis...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 purpose of this paper is to reframe child forensic interviewing in terms of emotional labor. Child forensic interviewing practice illustrates a public service function that demands emotional labor yet fails to empower its workers with skills to preserve their personal wellbeing. Under an ethic of care, public servants are not the means to organ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Many studies have looked at the public’s trust in the police, but very few have examined police trust in the public. Based on Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman’s model of trust, we conducted two studies. The first study created scales measuring the antecedents of trust and assessed police trust in the public based on a survey of 990 police officers from...

Many studies have looked at the public’s trust in the police, but very few have examined police trust in the public. Based on Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman’s (1995) model of trust, we conducted two studies. The first study created scales measuring the antecedents of trust and assessed police trust in the public based on a survey of 990 police officer...

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...

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...

Objectives: The present studies developed measures of police trust in the public and ascertained whether police trust in the public affects important police behaviors. Methods: We used structural equation modeling and multivariate analysis to examine police trust in the public and its effects on police behavior in two studies. In the first study,...

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...

Purpose Past research indicates that increasing police arrests deters crime. However, little research exists on how restricting police arrests affects crime. The purpose of this paper is to test whether restrictions on police authority to arrest affects deterrence and crime rates. Design/methodology/approach The data consisted of crime statistics...

Many studies have looked at the public's trust in the police, but very few have examined police trust in the public. Moreover, those studies that have examined police trust in the public only analyze components of trust, rather than comprehensively evaluating the construct. Based on Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman's (1995) model of trust, two studies w...