scholarly journals Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (37) ◽  
pp. 9181-9186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Mummolo
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Officer Safety ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Local Police ◽  
Local Law ◽  
Swat Team

The increasingly visible presence of heavily armed police units in American communities has stoked widespread concern over the militarization of local law enforcement. Advocates claim militarized policing protects officers and deters violent crime, while critics allege these tactics are targeted at racial minorities and erode trust in law enforcement. Using a rare geocoded census of SWAT team deployments from Maryland, I show that militarized police units are more often deployed in communities with large shares of African American residents, even after controlling for local crime rates. Further, using nationwide panel data on local police militarization, I demonstrate that militarized policing fails to enhance officer safety or reduce local crime. Finally, using survey experiments—one of which includes a large oversample of African American respondents—I show that seeing militarized police in news reports may diminish police reputation in the mass public. In the case of militarized policing, the results suggest that the often-cited trade-off between public safety and civil liberties is a false choice.

Sanctuary Cities: Public Attitudes Toward Enforcement Collaboration Between Local Police and Federal Immigration Authorities

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason P. Casellas ◽  
Sophia Jordán Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Immigration Enforcement ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Local Police ◽  
Local Law ◽  
Attitudes Toward Immigration

Local law enforcement has dramatically increased its cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, while other localities refuse to cooperate. Although scholars have examined how sanctuary cities may differ from other places in terms of crime rates, attitudes toward local law enforcement’s collaboration with federal immigration authorities remain understudied. We utilize original data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES) to study attitudes toward local/federal collaboration. Our results demonstrate that those who most recognize the racial advantage of Whites are significantly less likely to support collaboration between local police and federal authorities. Confirming prior work, our results also support the critical role of partisanship, nativity, and education in explaining attitudes toward sanctuary policies. Our findings have important implications for understanding attitudes toward immigration enforcement and policies.

scholarly journals The enforcement of statewide mask wearing mandates to prevent COVID-19 in the US: an overview

F1000Research ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 1100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Jacobs ◽  
Arvi P. Ohinmaa
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Law Enforcement Officers ◽  
Government Agencies ◽  
Law Enforcement Agencies ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Legal Remedies ◽  
The Us ◽  
Local Law ◽  
State And Local

Face masks have become the bulwark of COVID-19 prevention in the US.  Between 10 April and 1 August, 2020, 33 state governors issued orders requiring businesses to require their customers and employees to wear face masks, and persons outdoors who could not social distance  to do the same. We documented the policies and enforcement actions for these policies in each of the states.  We used governors’ orders and journalists’ news reports as our sources. Our results show that the states used a variety of state and local (county and municipality) agencies to enforce business prevention behaviors and primarily local  law enforcement agencies to enforce outside mask-wearing behaviours. In particular, law enforcement officers demonstrated a strong preference for educating non-mask wearers, and indicated a reluctance to resort to civil penalties that were enacted in the state orders.  Businesses expressed a preference to have government agencies enforce non-mask wearing behaviours.  But there was also a widespread reluctance on the part of local law enforcement  to resort to legal remedies.

scholarly journals Going National: Immigration Enforcement and the Politicization of Local Police

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-426
Author(s):  
Michael Zoorob
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Local Elections ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Voter Preferences ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Local Police ◽  
Outside Money ◽  
Local Law ◽  
Immigration And Customs Enforcement

ABSTRACTThis article develops a theory of when and how political nationalization increases interest in local elections using evidence from county sheriff elections. A quintessentially local office, the sheriff has long enjoyed buffers from ideological or partisan politics. However, many sheriff elections since 2016 were waged on ideological grounds as progressive challengers—often backed by outside money—linked their campaigns to opposition to President Trump. I argue that this “redirected nationalization” becomes possible when a salient national issue impinges on a local government service, enabling challengers to expand the scope of conflict against valence-advantaged incumbents. In the highly nationalized 2018 midterm election, the question of cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the nation’s jails provided a compelling link between local sheriffs and national politics, infusing new interest and energy in these races. Although redirected nationalization can help align local policies with voter preferences, the politicization of local law enforcement also might undermine police professionalism and credibility.

Improving African American confidence in law enforcement: Recruit to optimize procedural justice, not racial quotas

2020 ◽  
pp. 146135572097469
Author(s):  
Charles E MacLean
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Procedural Justice ◽  
Nationwide Survey ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Law Enforcement Agencies ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Local Police ◽  
Police Forces

Although a common maxim among many practitioners argues that police departments should recruit their way out of the African American confidence race gap by hiring more minority officers, that maxim is unfounded and redirects our recruitment efforts away from hiring to ensure procedural justice and police effectiveness—the two most powerful determinants of African American confidence in the police. The author’s nationwide survey revealed that African Americans living in cities with more racially representative law enforcement agencies were no more confident in local law enforcement than those living in cities where African Americans were underrepresented. That same survey proved, instead, that African American confidence is far higher where local police forces deliver procedural justice and effective policing than where local police forces are merely racially representative. This article presents the survey findings and explores the policy implications for law enforcement recruitment.

scholarly journals The Fine Line: Rural Justice, Public Health and Safety, and the Coronavirus Pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422110031
Author(s):  
Jennifer Sherman ◽  
Jennifer Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Local Law ◽  
Sheriff's Department ◽  
Public Health And Safety

In this article, we provide an early glimpse into how the issues of public health and safety played out in the rural United States during the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on Washington State. We utilize a combination of news articles and press releases, sheriff’s department Facebook posts, publicly available jail data, courtroom observations, in-depth interviews with those who have been held in rural jails, and interviews with rural law enforcement staff to explore this theme. As elected officials, rural sheriffs are beholden to populations that include many who are suspicious of science, liberal agendas, and anything that might threaten what they see as individual freedom. At the same time, they expect local law enforcement to employ punitive measures to control perceived criminal activity in their communities. These communities are often tightly knit, cohesive, and isolated, with high levels of social support both for community members and local leaders, including sheriffs and law enforcement. This complex social context often puts rural sheriffs and law enforcement officers in difficult positions. Given the multiple cross-pressures that rural justice systems faced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we explore the circumstances in which they attempted to protect and advocate for the health and safety of both their incarcerated and their nonincarcerated populations. We find that certain characteristics of rural communities both help and hinder local law enforcement in efforts to combat the virus, but these characteristics typically favor informal norms of social control to govern community health. Thus, rural sheriff’s departments repeatedly chose strategies that limited their abilities to protect populations from the disease, in favor of appearing tough on crime and supportive of personal liberty.

Racializing Crimmigration

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amada Armenta
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Enforcement ◽  
Law Enforcement Agencies ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Local Jail ◽  
Colorblind Ideology ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Local Law

Deporting “criminal aliens” has become the highest priority in American immigration enforcement. Today, most deportations are achieved through the “crimmigration” system, a term that describes the convergence of the criminal justice and immigration enforcement systems. Emerging research argues that U.S. immigration enforcement is a “racial project” that subordinates and racializes Latino residents in the United States. This article examines the role of local law enforcement agencies in the racialization process by focusing on the techniques and logics that drive law enforcement practices across two agencies, I argue that local law enforcement agents racialize Latinos by punishing illegality through their daily, and sometimes mundane, practices. Investigatory traffic stops put Latinos at disproportionate risk of arrest and citation, and processing at the local jail subjects unauthorized immigrants to deportation. Although a variety of local actors sustain the deportation system, most do not see themselves as active participants in immigrant removal and they explain their behavior through a colorblind ideology. This colorblind ideology obscures and naturalizes how organizational practices and laws converge to systematically criminalize and punish Latinos in the United States.

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