Thinking Like a State: Policing Dangerous Thought in Imperial Japan, 1900–1945

This article explores the changing ways the Japanese police understood and policed radical politics between 1900 and 1945. Specifically, it traces the process in which the objective of policing transformed from an emphasis on political organizations, their activities, publications, and assemblies in the 1900s to the policing of individuals ostensibly harboring “dangerous ideas” that were deemed threatening to state and capital—what the police came to categorize as “thought crime” by the late 1920s. Once “thought” was identified as an object for policing, Japanese police agencies began to practice a kind of intellectual history—thinking like a state—to distinguish dangerous thought and to understand its origin and its spread during the socioeconomic turbulence of the interwar period. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s theory of police, this article explores how police manuals and other publications categorized certain ideas, texts, enunciations, and slogans and distributed them based on the presumed degree of danger they posed to the imperial polity. It reveals how the expanded classifications and distributions of dangerous thought transformed policing in the 1920s, thereby extending imperial state power into various aspects of social life in interwar Japan.

Integrated Information Circle: The Challenge of Integrating the Civil and Military Police

ABSTRACT Context: the case narrates the creation of the Integrated Information Circle, a pilot project that took place in an area limited to the Rocinha community, led by managers of the civil and military police, which was carried out through a partnership between the 11th DP - Rocinha and the 28th UPP - Rocinha. This action sought to develop protocols for the exchange of information in a continuous, effective, and, above all, institutionalized manner between local police agencies. However, despite the good results achieved, the initiative has not been consolidated. Methodology: the information was collected from secondary data and interviews from the managers who participated in the process - Dr. Gabriel Ferrando, chief of the 11th DP, and Major Felipe Carvalho Barreto, then intelligence superintendent of the Pacifying Police Coordination (CPP). Objectives: To discuss how the civil and military police organize and act. Results: development of analyzes on aspects related to the organization and culture of police institutions about the theme of integration. Conclusion: the case allows us to understand the limits and potential of integration between the police, based on the discussion about the possible reasons why the Integrated Information Circle has been discontinued.

Cyberchondria, Coronavirus, and Cybercrime

Humans are adapting to and increasingly relying on technology particularly in times of global crisis. As online audiences increase, so does the risk of cybercrime. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is discussed in the context of health anxiety, the infodemic and cyberchondria, along with cybercriminal exploitation of pandemic-induced human anxiety and psychological vulnerability. Health anxiety, uncertainty, social isolation, changes to work-life practices, information seeking, mistrust of public health organisations, and the spread of false information all arguably intersect – leading to a global state of human vulnerability and therefore presenting opportunities for cybercriminals. There is a requirement for global agencies such as the United Nations, the WHO, INTERPOL, and governments to take action. Police agencies worldwide need to extrapolate learnings regarding the current pandemic and attendant increase in cybercrime and based on those findings move to form a global coalition with industry partners to investigate, predict, and prevent a potential future cybercrime pandemic.

Círculo Integrado de Informação: O Desafio de Integração das Polícias Civil e Militar

ABSTRACT Context: the case narrates the creation of the Integrated Information Circle, a pilot project that took place in an area limited to the Rocinha community, led by managers of the civil and military police, which was carried out through a partnership between the 11th DP - Rocinha and the 28th UPP - Rocinha. This action sought to develop protocols for the exchange of information in a continuous, effective, and, above all, institutionalized manner between local police agencies. However, despite the good results achieved, the initiative has not been consolidated. Methodology: the information was collected from secondary data and interviews from the managers who participated in the process - Dr. Gabriel Ferrando, chief of the 11th DP, and Major Felipe Carvalho Barreto, then intelligence superintendent of the Pacifying Police Coordination (CPP). Objectives: To discuss how the civil and military police organize and act. Results: development of analyzes on aspects related to the organization and culture of police institutions about the theme of integration. Conclusion: the case allows us to understand the limits and potential of integration between the police, based on the discussion about the possible reasons why the Integrated Information Circle has been discontinued.

Women in Power? Examining Gender and Promotion in Policing Through an Organizational Perspective

Women bring important strengths to the field of policing, such as communication skills, the ability to lead teams, as well as the ability to coach and nurture subordinates. Despite these contributions, the rate of women entering policing has stagnated in recent years, and the percentage of women in supervisory, command, and leadership positions remains low. To explain this, we use an organizational structure perspective to explore how characteristics of police agencies (e.g., department size, officer demographics, and formalization) may influence the promotion of women to leadership positions. We make suggestions regarding hiring and retention and provide recommendations for further research.

Police Use of Force Escalation and De-escalation: The Use of Systematic Social Observation With Video Footage

As police agencies continue to incorporate body-worn cameras, it becomes increasingly important for researchers and practitioners to explore how to best use these data to better understand patterns of suspect and police behavior. Thus, drawing on a joint project between the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers and Arizona State University, we expand on prior research demonstrating how social systematic observation (SSO) can be used with video footage to methodically detail the evolving nature of police-suspect encounters. We then illustrate how the data could be evaluated within the framework of escalation and de-escalation using an expanded version of the Resistance Force Comparative Scale (RFCS) first developed and employed in 2001. Finally, we assess the merits and challenges of using video footage to account for suspect and police behaviors in relation to escalation and de-escalation.

Transitioning from pandemic to normalcy: what police departments can learn from the rank-and-file

PurposeAfter more than 18 months of life during a pandemic, much of the world is beginning to transition back to some semblance of normalcy. As that happens, institutions – including policing – need to acknowledge changes that had been made during the pandemic and decide what modifications and innovations, if any, to continue moving forward.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use semi-structured interviews and focus groups of police personnel in the United States (US) and Canada. The sample includes police officers and frontline supervisors (n = 20). The authors conduct qualitative analysis using deductive and inductive coding schemes.FindingsThe sample identified four areas of adaptation during the pandemic: 1) safety measures, 2) personnel reallocation, 3) impacts on training and 4) innovation and role adjustments. These areas of adaptation prompted several recommendations for transitioning police agencies out of the pandemic.Originality/valueA growing number of studies are addressing police responses to the pandemic. Virtually all are quantitative in nature, including all studies investigating the perceptions of police personnel. The body of perceptual studies is extraordinarily small and primarily focuses on police executives, ignoring the views of the rank-and-file who are doing the work of street-level police business. This is the first study to delve into the perceptions of this group, and does so using a qualitative approach that permits a richer understanding of the nuances of perception.

Crowdsourcing Documentary Making

The creative commons documentary Preempting Dissent (2014) builds upon the book of the same name written by Greg Elmer and Andy Opel. The film is a culmination of a collaborative process of soliciting, collecting and editing video, still images, and creative commons music files from people around the world. Preempting Dissent interrogates the expansion of the so-called “Miami-Model” of protest policing, a set of strategies developed in the wake of 9/11 to preempt forms of mass protest at major events in the US and worldwide. The film tracks the development of the Miami model after the WTO protests in Seattle 1999, through the post-9/11 years, FTAA & G8/20 summits, and most recently the Occupy Wall St movements. The film exposes the political, social, and economic roots of preemptive forms of protest policing and their manifestations in spatial tactics, the deployment of so-called ‘less-lethal’ weapons, and surveillance regimes. The film notes however that new social movements have themselves begun to adopt preemptive tactics so as not to fall into the trap set for them by police agencies worldwide.

A Qualitative Study: An Examination of Police Officers’ Lived Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe prompting stay-at-home orders for all but the most essential workers in society. Policing was one of the professions that is essential for community safety, regardless of the circumstances. Officers were on the front-line of the COVID-19 public health crisis and their preparedness was crucial for officer and community health. During the onset of the pandemic little was known about how officers perceived the virus and how police agencies prepared officers to work in a highly contagious environment. This study used semistructured interviews of police officers in two states in the United States that had elevated cases of the virus. The authors explored the lived experiences of police officers to explore officers’ perceptions, concerns, implications the pandemic had on patrol activity, and agency preparedness during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results revealed structural and cultural forces that resulted in officers and their agency leadership not taking the pandemic seriously, ill-preparation and ill-equipping, and disincentives in reporting exposure. Moreover, officers’ fears were largely not based on their own well-being, but on the risk of spreading the disease to their family members.