The Effects of Medical and Recreational Marijuana Policies on Hiring in US Municipal Police Departments

2021 ◽  
pp. 204-213
Author(s):  
Diana Scharff Peterson ◽  
Carlos Avalos
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Jones ◽  
Melchor C. de Guzman ◽  
Korni Swaroop Kumar

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siân Mughan ◽  
Danyao Li ◽  
Sean Nicholson-Crotty

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-508
Author(s):  
Kelsey Shoub ◽  
Derek A. Epp ◽  
Frank R. Baumgartner ◽  
Leah Christiani ◽  
Kevin Roach

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.


2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 64-66
Author(s):  
Darren A. Raspa

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.


Author(s):  
Brian Tochterman

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.


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