Immigrant Sanctuary Policies and Crime-Reporting Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis of Reports of Crime Victimization to Law Enforcement, 1980 to 2004

2021 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-185
Author(s):  
Ricardo D. Martínez-Schuldt ◽  
Daniel E. Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
Public Safety ◽  
The United States ◽  
Crime Reporting ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Crime Victimization ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Reporting Behavior

Sanctuary jurisdictions have existed in the United States since the 1980s. They have recently reentered U.S. politics and engendered contentious debates regarding their legality and influence on public safety. Critics argue that sanctuary jurisdictions create conditions that threaten local communities by impeding federal immigration enforcement efforts. Proponents maintain that the policies improve public safety by fostering institutional trust among immigrant communities and by increasing the willingness of immigrant community members to notify the police after they are victimized. In this study, we situate expectations from the immigrant sanctuary literature within a multilevel, contextualized help-seeking framework to assess how crime-reporting behavior varies across immigrant sanctuary contexts. We find that Latinos are more likely to report violent crime victimization to law enforcement after sanctuary policies have been adopted within their metropolitan areas of residence. We argue that social policy contexts can shift the nature of help-seeking experiences and eliminate barriers that undermine crime victims’ willingness to mobilize the law. Overall, this study highlights the unique role social policy contexts can serve in structuring victims’ help-seeking decisions.

Tightening the Gap

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-176
Author(s):  
Maria Ray Langheim ◽  
Ann Maureen McCaughan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
School Violence ◽  
School Personnel ◽  
The United States ◽  
School Shooting ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Essential Step ◽  
Successful Communication ◽  
Common Goals

Between January 1, 2012 and January 30, 2018 alone there were 27 school shooting incidents, accounting for 62 victim deaths, 108 victims injured, countless witness and community members affected, and 10 assailants who committed suicide or were killed by a police officer during the attack, at schools or campuses across the United States (U.S.). Clearly, further intervention and prevention strategies are necessary for school personnel and law enforcement, as well as our greater communities, in reducing instances of school violence. Identification of individuals and groups who are at higher risk for violence toward self or others is one essential step in prevention. When prevention is unsuccessful, a student may begin down a path toward violence, eventually posing a threat to the extent that identifying and intervening becomes necessary. Encouraging law enforcement and school personnel to become well-versed in both, so that they might successfully support each other's efforts and develop common goals, is essential to successful communication regarding students and groups of concern.

Insurgent safety: Theorizing alternatives to state protection

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meghan G McDowell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Public Safety ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dominant Model ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Social Good ◽  
State Protection

In the United States, public safety is embraced as an unquestioned social good. Broadly speaking, the criminal justice system is tasked with administering and maintaining public safety through the use of law enforcement, the courts, and prisons. First, through a focus on racialized police violence, this article develops a critique of the dominant model of public safety practiced in the United States—identified herein as ‘carceral safety’. Second, through an analysis of findings from the (Re)imagining Public Safety Project (RPSP), this article seeks to sketch out an alternative model and practice of safety that does not rely on banishment, policing, or mass criminalization. In contradistinction to the forms of state protection exercised under the seemingly innocuous rhetoric of ‘public safety’, RPSP participants conceptualized what I am calling ‘insurgent safety’: locally determined, anti-capitalist practices and ethics for reducing, and responding to harm.

Latinx Mental Health in the Mexican Consulate: Addressing Barriers Through Social Good

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Helu-Brown ◽  
Concepcion Barrio
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
Health Program ◽  
Barriers To Care ◽  
Mental Health Program ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Social Good ◽  
Salud Mental

Objectives: This article examines an innovative mental health program in the largest Mexican consulate in the United States guided by a social good organizing framework and an intersectionality lens. The mental health program, Modulo de Salud Mental, was designed to address barriers to help seeking. Methods: The Modulo used the central characteristics of the social good model, such as innovative collaborations between systems that otherwise do not typically collaborate and burgeoning technologies to overcome barriers for service utilization among this population. We conducted a qualitative study to examine how the Modulo addressed structural and cultural barriers to care. Results: The salient themes from interviews were classified into four categories: current political situation, reasons for seeking services, prior barriers to care addressed by program, and perceived benefits of the program. Conclusions: Findings suggest that the Modulo's services and convenient location in an unconventional setting can serve as a model for promoting social good by facilitating help seeking and alleviating illness burden for this immigrant community.

Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation in Hate Crime Victimization: Identity Politics or Identity Risk?

2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Dunbar
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
Hate Crime ◽  
Hate Crimes ◽  
Gay And Lesbian ◽  
Crime Victimization ◽  
The Impact

This study examined the impact of hate crimes upon gay and lesbian victims, reviewing 1,538 hate crimes committed in Los Angeles County. Differences between sexual orientation and other hate crime categories were considered for offense severity, reportage to law enforcement, and victim impact. The type of offense varied between crimes classified for sexual orientation (n = 551) and other bias-motivated crimes (n = 987). Assault, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and stalking were predictive of sexual orientation hate crimes. Sexual orientation bias crimes evidenced greater severity of violence to the person and impact upon victim level of functioning. More violent forms of aggression were predictive of gay and lesbian victim’s underreportage to law enforcement. For sexual orientation offenses, victim gender and race/ethnicity differences were predictive of the base rates of crime reportage as well. These findings are considered in terms of a group-risk hypothesis, encountered by multiple outgroup persons, that influences help-seeking behavior and ingroup identity.

Best Practices in Policing

2020 ◽  
pp. 224-257
Author(s):  
Kae Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Partner Violence ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intimate Partner ◽  
Transgender People ◽  
Competency Training ◽  
Police Interactions

Intimate partner violence is one of the most underreported crimes in the United States. The sensitive nature of proper police response and protocol is further complicated by the need to adequately serve transgender populations criminally victimized by intimate partners. Due to the complicated history between the police and transgender communities, many transgender people hesitate to involve the police in their affairs. While police are often the first responders to IPV incidents and can serve as both help-seeking resources and safety enforcers, best practices in police interactions with transgender survivors of IPV are rarely discussed in the literature or applied in the field. Researchers generally identify issues with transphobia in law enforcement, misgendering, improper call screening, non-tailored response, and other LGBTQ competency training issues. This chapter will highlight some of the unique challenges for law enforcement in responding to transgender IPV, with an eye toward ultimately improving responses to transgender survivors.

scholarly journals (A28) A Matter of Degree: Teaching “Disaster” and “Emergencies” to Public Safety Executives

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (S1) ◽  
pp. s8-s9
Author(s):  
J.J. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Public Safety ◽  
First Responders ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
Full Time ◽  
College Level ◽  
Fire Departments ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Government

What is the difference between a “disaster” and an “emergency”? One can safely say that for the victim of an event, it is always a disaster. But what about the first responders who are tasked with returning conditions to normal as quickly as possible? What about the executives who must direct the first responders, as well as coordinate resources? The difference is a “matter of degree” because it depends on the amount of resources that are required to respond to the incident. For example, an overturned gasoline tanker truck may only be an emergency for a major metropolitan area, but a disaster in a more rural region. American public safety is a mirror image of the government system of federalism that developed during the founding of the United States. Public safety entities are attached to the various local, state, and federal government agencies. There are almost 18,000 local law enforcement agencies across the US. Only 47 agencies have more than 1,000 sworn officers, while almost 90 percent have less than 50. There are more than 30,000 fire departments, yet only about one-quarter of all firefighters are full-time professionals. The rest are volunteers. The author, a 30-year law enforcement veteran, has developed a college-level course for public safety executives to help them understand the “matter of degree.” The intent of the course is to challenge executives to conduct a careful self-examination of their own public safety agencies to determine what they are capable of doing in an event. An executive only gets one chance to do it right, so being able to distinguish between a disaster and an emergency response will be critical to success. When the event occurs, a public safety executive will be better prepared to make key decisions.

scholarly journals Racial Disparities in Police Crime Victimization

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 287
Author(s):  
Philip Matthew Stinson ◽  
Chloe Ann Wentzlof ◽  
John Liederbach ◽  
Steven L. Brewer
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Law Enforcement Officers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Crime Victimization ◽  
Multivariate Relationships ◽  
Google Alerts

Policing has become a topic of intense public scrutiny and protest in the aftermath of several recent highly questionable and violent police–citizen encounters including the acts of police violence against George Floyd in Minneapolis (MN), Breonna Taylor in Louisville (KY), and Jacob Blake in Kenosha (WI). These encounters have led to large-scale street protests, the legitimization of the Black Lives Matter movement, and what many commentators perceive as a “national reckoning” on the issue of racial justice. The focus of our research is on police crime—a particular form of police misconduct that involves the criminal arrest of police officers. Our work is designed to identify cases in which law enforcement officers have been arrested for any type of criminal offense(s). One area of police scholarship that has thus far been neglected is the relationship between citizen race and the perpetration of police crime. We are aware of no existing empirical studies on whether, and if so, to what degree, citizen race is associated with crimes committed by police officers. The public has been forced to re-examine and question the role and legitimacy of police against the backdrop of protests and concerns about how police may contribute to racial injustice and discrimination. The broadest research issue involved an examination of the association between police crime and the race of the victim. Our goal was to identify and examine any racial disparities of police crime overall and within specific types of police crime. The analyses compared police crimes committed against Black victims to all other police crimes identified within the dataset. More specifically, we examined the degree to which police crimes perpetrated against Black victims tend to be more violent than those perpetrated against non-Black victims. CHAID regression models were utilized to explore any multivariate relationships between race and police crime. Data were derived from published news articles using the Google News search engine and its Google Alerts email update service. Our database currently includes information on more than 18,700 cases of police crime from years 2005-2021. The study utilized data derived from this larger project. The study examined those cases of police crime in which we have identified a victim and recorded information on the race of the victim. The dataset for this study includes information on 865 criminal arrest cases of sworn nonfederal law enforcement officers within the United States from 2005 through 2014.

“Once again, a meth lab exploded and somebody died”: Narratives of volatility and risk in the rural drug war

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Revier
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Rural Poverty ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
Upstate New York

Methamphetamine (“meth”) has received a massive amount of media attention in the United States over the last decade. In reporting, journalists, politicians, and police commonly link meth to widespread risk, violence, criminality, and rural decay. Although the rise in meth use, addiction, and crime has been largely overstated, such imagery legitimizes an expansion of surveillance and policing to rural landscapes. In this research, I examine the way meth and meth makers are represented in case coverage of a meth lab fire sited in upstate New York. I find that reporters narrate a more general meth lab “social problem formula story” with caricature villains (meth makers), victims (community members), and heroes (law enforcement and legislators). Significantly, this model of storytelling conveys a distorted and exaggerated understanding of meth as a social problem, turning the atypical meth lab case into the “typical,” while legitimizing law and order solutions. In contributing to the contemporary “methamphetamine imaginary,” this formula story forgoes a structural analysis that considers the prevailing global drug war, rural poverty, or broader capital inequality.

Tightening the Gap

2021 ◽  
pp. 257-279
Author(s):  
Maria Ray Langheim ◽  
Ann Maureen McCaughan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
School Violence ◽  
School Personnel ◽  
The United States ◽  
School Shooting ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Essential Step ◽  
Successful Communication ◽  
Common Goals

Between January 1, 2012 and January 30, 2018 alone there were 27 school shooting incidents, accounting for 62 victim deaths, 108 victims injured, countless witness and community members affected, and 10 assailants who committed suicide or were killed by a police officer during the attack, at schools or campuses across the United States (U.S.). Clearly, further intervention and prevention strategies are necessary for school personnel and law enforcement, as well as our greater communities, in reducing instances of school violence. Identification of individuals and groups who are at higher risk for violence toward self or others is one essential step in prevention. When prevention is unsuccessful, a student may begin down a path toward violence, eventually posing a threat to the extent that identifying and intervening becomes necessary. Encouraging law enforcement and school personnel to become well-versed in both, so that they might successfully support each other's efforts and develop common goals, is essential to successful communication regarding students and groups of concern.

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