Diffusion of innovation in the public sector: Twitter adoption by municipal police departments in the U.S.

Community policing is intended to empower citizens who are plagued by crime and disorder. Scholars have considered community policing as a proactive measure that addresses issues of disorder to prevent the occurrence of more serious crimes (Goldstein, 1986; Wilson & Kelling, 1982). In a digital age, people are increasingly interacting socially via web platforms. This digital interaction includes governments, which can interact with the citizens in their society to co-produce effective responses to criminal activity. Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, iPhone applications, and Nixle provide new media for citizens and police interactions. Using a sample of 163 municipal police departments, this chapter examines the level and type of participation among municipal police departments using these resources. It is argued that Web 2.0 social media applications allow for a more fluent and dialogic relationship between citizens and police to work together to reduce crime and increase community livability. Policy and practice recommendations related to participating in and enhancing social media presence for police are also provided.

Download Full-text

When Law Enforcement Pays: Costs and Benefits for Elected Versus Appointed Administrators Engaged in Asset Forfeiture

The American Review of Public Administration ◽

10.1177/0275074019891993 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 50 (3) ◽

pp. 297-314 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Siân Mughan ◽

Danyao Li ◽

Sean Nicholson-Crotty

Keyword(s):

Law Enforcement ◽

State Level ◽

Public Administrators ◽

Police Departments ◽

Level Data ◽

Municipal Police ◽

Institutional Variation ◽

Asset Forfeiture ◽

Appointed Administrators ◽

Municipal Police Departments

The billions of dollars in assets seized by law enforcement each year represent a crucial source of revenue for these organizations, but also raise important constitutional questions and can create significant tensions within the jurisdictions they administer. Research on asset forfeiture to date has focused heavily on municipal police, largely neglecting forfeiture activities by sheriffs. Thus, it has missed an important opportunity to build theory about the differences between appointed and elected administrators and neglected an important source of institutional variation that may help to explain this particular administrative activity. To develop expectations about the relative levels of asset forfeiture and the response to intergovernmental incentives related to forfeiture, we draw on and extend scholarship comparing the behavior of elected versus appointed administrators in other settings. We test those expectations in analyses of more than 1,200 sheriff’s offices and over 2,200 municipal police departments between 1993 and 2007. Results suggest that sheriffs receive less forfeiture revenue than municipal police and are less responsive to state-level policies that change the financial rewards of asset forfeiture for agencies. These results hold whether we examine forfeitures made through the federal Equitable Sharing Program, where civil and criminal forfeiture cases can be distinguished, or jurisdictional level data on forfeiture, where civil and criminal forfeitures are combined. We conclude with a discussion of implications for both the research on asset forfeiture and on elected versus appointed public administrators more generally.

Download Full-text

Race, Place, and Context: The Persistence of Race Effects in Traffic Stop Outcomes in the Face of Situational, Demographic, and Political Controls

The Journal of Race Ethnicity and Politics ◽

10.1017/rep.2020.8 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 481-508

Author(s):

Kelsey Shoub ◽

Derek A. Epp ◽

Frank R. Baumgartner ◽

Leah Christiani ◽

Kevin Roach

Keyword(s):

Police Department ◽

People Of Color ◽

Police Chief ◽

Police Departments ◽

Traffic Stops ◽

Race Effects ◽

The Face ◽

Municipal Police ◽

Municipal Police Departments ◽

Unique Dataset

AbstractEvidence that racial minorities are targeted for searches during police traffic stops is widespread, but observed differences in outcomes following a traffic stop between white drivers and people of color could potentially be due to factors correlated with driver race. Using a unique dataset recording over 5 million traffic stops from 90 municipal police departments, we control for and evaluate alternative explanations for why a driver may be searched. These include: (1) the context of the stop itself, (2) the characteristics of the police department including the race of the police chief, and (3) demographic and racial composition of the municipality within which the stop occurs. We find that the driver's race remains a robust predictor: black male drivers are consistently subjected to more intensive police scrutiny than white drivers. Additionally, we find that all drivers are less likely to be subject to highly discretionary searches if the police chief is black. Together, these findings indicate that race matters in multiple and varied ways for policing outcomes.

Download Full-text

Police Service Crime Mapping as Civic Technology

International Journal of E-Planning Research ◽

10.4018/ijepr.2016070102 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 13-26 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Teresa Scassa

Keyword(s):

Public Sector ◽

North America ◽

Private Sector ◽

Crime Mapping ◽

The Public ◽

Police Services ◽

Municipal Police ◽

The City ◽

Civic Technology

It is increasingly common for municipal police services in North America to make online crime maps available to the public. This form of civic technology is now so widely used that there is a competitive private sector market for crime mapping platforms. This paper considers the crime maps made available by three Canadian police forces using platforms developed by U.S.-based private sector corporations. The paper considers how these crime maps present particular narratives of crime in the city, evaluates the quality of the mapped data, and explores how laws shape and constrain the use and reuse of crime data. It considers as well the problems that may arise in using off-the-shelf solutions – particularly ones developed in another country. It asks whether this model of crime mapping advances or limits goals of transparency and accountability, and what lessons it offers about the use of private sector civic technologies to serve public sector purposes.

Download Full-text

Biggest Gang in Town

California History ◽

10.1525/ch.2014.91.4.64 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 91 (4) ◽

pp. 64-66

Author(s):

Darren A. Raspa

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Law Enforcement ◽

San Francisco ◽

Police Departments ◽

Current Form ◽

Urban Policing ◽

Experimental Process ◽

Municipal Police ◽

Standing Army ◽

Municipal Police Departments

The police are arguably the most visible and contested apparatus of legal authority and urban power in American history. The navy blue uniform, badge, and utility belt of armaments of varying lethal potential have simultaneously been the symbols of justice, order, and security, while also representing the trappings of a virtual standing army of punitive state coercion, eliciting equal amounts of fear and admiration among the most vulnerable members of society. The traditional law enforcement historiography dictates that urban policing in its present form saw its origins in London in the first half of the nineteenth century. I contend, however, that a diverse array of social classes and communities in the American city from the mid-nineteenth century onward formed and continuously reformed the municipal police departments into their current form. This process can best be observed in the experimental process of law enforcement in San Francisco, where a diversity of political ordering and community visions competed for dominance in policing methods and ideology. The sudden convergence of a multitude of classes and ethnicities on the small peninsula of San Francisco from the late 1840s onward shaped the institution of urban policing in ways that would have national ramifications.

Download Full-text

The Paradox of the Interactive Web in the U.S. Public Sector

Public Service, Governance and Web 2.0 Technologies - Advances in Web Technologies and Engineering ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-0071-3.ch017 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 266-289 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ines A. Mergel ◽

Charles M. Schweik

Keyword(s):

Public Sector ◽

Social Networking ◽

Social Networking Sites ◽

Web Applications ◽

The Public ◽

Public Hearings ◽

Rss Feeds ◽

The One ◽

Bureaucratic Constraints ◽

The U.S

Web 2.0 technologies—what we prefer to call the “Interactive Web”—have become frequently used tools in the public sector. These tools include social networking applications such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikis, or RSS feeds. Public sector agencies are using blogs to communicate information on public hearings, wikis to coordinate work or share expertise and intelligence information, and social networking sites to communicate with citizens. These kinds of applications create a public sector paradox. On the one hand, they have the potential to create opportunities related to key public sector issues of transparency, accountability, communication and collaboration, and to promote deeper levels of civic engagement. On the other hand, information flow within government, across government agencies, and between government and the public is often highly restricted through regulations and specific reporting structures, and therefore usually delayed through the filter of bureaucratic constraints. The authors provide an overview of drivers encouraging the adoption of Interactive Web applications, but also transformative organizational, technological, and informational challenges ahead that might lead to resistance to that change.

Download Full-text

Fear City on Film

Dying City ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469633060.003.0008 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Brian Tochterman

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

New York City ◽

Political Culture ◽

Motion Picture ◽

York City ◽

Motion Picture Industry ◽

Police Departments ◽

Municipal Police ◽

Municipal Police Departments

This chapter considers how films produced in New York City played to an emergent anti-urban political culture. With crime and disorder as the feature antagonist in the New York film cycle of the late 1960s and the 1970s, the vigilante became a vital counterpoint to the perceived incompetence of municipal police departments. Escaping the dying city also served as a powerful motif in the period’s films. The motion picture industry brings the homegrown narrative of New York to a national audience.

Download Full-text