October 2024
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4 Reads
Police Practice and Research
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October 2024
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4 Reads
Police Practice and Research
September 2024
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10 Reads
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 organizational justice (i.e., perceptions of fair treatment of individuals within an organization) and support for officers are crucial to addressing the retention crisis. Follow-up studies support the idea of a policing workforce crisis and its negative effect on agencies’ abilities to serve communities.
August 2024
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5 Reads
April 2024
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6 Reads
American Journal of Public Health
February 2024
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73 Reads
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1 Citation
February 2024
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136 Reads
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5 Citations
Policing
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 Dispatch (CAD) systems at the daily level over seven years, we estimate the effects that staffing, overtime, call volume, and the level of proactive work (e.g., traffic stops, pedestrian stops, business checks) have on police response times. Our findings indicate that the impact of staffing on response times is significantly greater than that of other independent variables in the models. Furthermore, improvements in response times for higher-priority (i.e., more serious) CFS have a lower elasticity response to increases in staffing levels. As police agencies face increasingly complex challenges, the empirical evidence presented herein serves as a cornerstone for making informed decisions in the intricate balancing act of resources, officer well-being, and public safety priorities.
February 2024
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41 Reads
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2 Citations
February 2024
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642 Reads
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14 Citations
Criminology
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, or could not rule out endogeneity. This study addresses each of these issues, thereby advancing the evidence base concerning the effects of policing on crime. Leveraging two exogenous shocks presented by the onset of the coronavirus 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic and social unrest after the murder of George Floyd, we evaluated the effects of sudden and sustained reductions in high‐discretion policing on crime at the neighborhood level in Denver, Colorado. Multilevel models accounting for trends in prior police activity, neighborhood structure, seasonality, and population mobility revealed mixed results. On the one hand, large‐scale reductions in stops and drug‐related arrests were associated with significant increases in violent and property crimes, respectively. On the other hand, fewer disorder arrests did not affect crime. These results were not universal across neighborhoods. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of debates concerning the appropriate role of policing in the 21st century.
February 2024
February 2024
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4 Reads
Crime & Delinquency
We analyzed police shootings in Canada (except Québec) between 2017 and 2019. Drawing upon media reports and information provided by police oversight agencies, we attempted to identify all incidents where on-duty police officers discharged their firearm with the intent to strike a person. Findings indicated that such incidents occurred an average of 58 times per year. Approximately 39% of police shootings were fatal, 48% were non-fatal, and 12% were non-injurious. Most occurred in public spaces and were initiated by civilian requests for police service, typically for crime-related reasons. We discuss our findings with respect to both research and practice. We also call for official, incident-level data regarding police shootings to address concerns that otherwise exist about these incidents among civilians, practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.
... Research has shown that the number of officers available at the time of dispatch significantly affects response times, especially for lower-priority calls. A study focusing on police staffing levels found that response times for priority calls can increase when staffing shortages occur, highlighting that maintaining adequate staffing is crucial for minimizing delays (Mourtgos et al., 2024). ...
February 2024
... The current landscape of police staffing is shaped by a multitude of factors that require a comprehensive and adaptive approach. Recent societal events have profoundly impacted police personnel dynamics (Adams et al., 2023;Mourtgos et al., 2021Mourtgos et al., , 2024Mourtgos and Adams, 2023), underscoring the need for strategies that not only address immediate staffing shortages but also anticipate long-term challenges (Wilson and Heinonen, 2012). ...
February 2024
Policing
... Some evidence supports these claims, particularly when discretionary traffic stops are executed in high-crime hot spots (Braga et al., 2019). Although the effect of traffic stops across larger geographic areas may not find as much support as micro-locations (although see Petersen and colleagues (2023), there is a body of literature showing an impact of discretionary traffic stops on crime (Boehme & Mourtgos, 2024;Nix et al., 2024). Moreover, police argue that these stops are necessary for executing daily duties and maintaining low crime rates (Epp et al., 2014;Lee, 2022). ...
February 2024
... The employment of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in mapping crime incidents and conducting hotspot analysis by several researchers (e.g., Han et al., 2023;Mokhtar et al., 2023) has yielded valuable insights into crime patterns, shaping future research methodologies. Additionally, studies by Nix et al. (2024) and Santos (2021) underscore the significance of proactive policing on neighborhood-level crime rates, emphasizing the necessity for understanding its impacts across various crime types, including property crimes, to craft evidence-based policies (Jubit et al., 2020;Tavares & Costa, 2021). ...
February 2024
Criminology
... This includes an increased reliance on police services to undertake other duties that put them in contact with individuals with mental illness and cognitive impairments, including wellness checks, addressing citizen concerns about observed behaviours, and the provision of care and case management for those whom they frequently encounter . While the number of encounters that result in police taking formal legal action (e.g., arrest and apprehension) or using lethal or less-than-lethal force accounts for a small proportion of police encounters (Simpson & Nix, 2024;, highly publicised incidents in which police misconstrue the behaviours of individuals with mental illness and cognitive impairments as a source of threat or danger have contributed to heightened public scrutiny about what police services are doing to prepare their officers to interact with these individuals. This public scrutiny includes increased interest and concern from the autism community, scholars, and police services about how to ensure the safety of autistic individuals during encounters and what interventions (e.g., training or registries) are needed to prepare officers for these encounters. ...
January 2024
Crime & Delinquency
... 14 within respondents classified as black or as white (Pickett et al., 2024). Some racialized contexts show both large between-race disagreements and agreements, where ratings of the role of race in the shooting of Michael Brown exhibited 46.8% overlap between black and white distributions (Jefferson et al., 2020). ...
December 2023
Criminology
... Previous incidents, such as the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York, sparked major protests, and tensions had been building in the months leading up to the 2020 protests. Thus, one could argue that the protests were not only foreseeable but had already begun before the larger wave (Adams et al., 2023;Tucker, 2021). However, the events that unfolded were volatile. ...
September 2023
Journal of Criminal Justice
... These findings further underscore the need for evidence-based institutional reforms to eliminate officerinvolved killings in the Black community and other manifestations of biased policing. [78][79][80] For example, available evidence, though still sparse or mixed for many interventions (eg, body-worn cameras or de-escalation training [80][81][82], suggests that increasing accountability for officers, 83 implementing training to reduce officer decision-making biases in stressful encounters, 84 increasing police force diversity, 19,85 and encouraging citizen activism 86 may be effective in reducing officer use of force. Ongoing municipal experiments with alternate approaches to policing (eg, embedded behavioral health expertise 87 or social work 69 ) may yield further data on effective approaches. ...
August 2022
... Third, agencies may capitalize on word-of-mouth recruiting from veterans who are already employed, thus ensuring a smoother transition. As both corrections and policing agencies continue to raise concerns about a crisis in recruitment and turnover (Adams et al., 2023;Vickovic et al., 2022), there is increasing effort among agencies to leverage "lateral transfers"-recruiting already-employed officers from other agencies-and network effects among officers with military experience may prove valuable to agencies seeking to increase their sworn numbers. Fourth, as mentioned, prior service may count toward time served in an institution and employee pensions. ...
March 2023
... After constructing a BSTS model, one can estimate a probabilistic forecast starting at an intervention point, comparing that counterfactual to the actual observed values post-intervention. This method has been employed in studies examining the effects of George Floyd's murder on police turnover , shifts in victim service demand during the pandemic (Richards et al., 2021), and changes in gun assaults against police post-George Floyd's murder (Sierra-Arévalo et al., 2023). ...
April 2023
Criminology