A review of the effectiveness of the extent of discretion exercised by police officer of Hong Kong Police Force in street level

Red-turbaned Sikh policemen have long been viewed as symbols of the cosmopolitan feature of modern Shanghai. However, the origin of the Sikh police unit in the Shanghai Municipal Police has not been seriously investigated. This article argues that the circulation of police officers, policing knowledge, and information in the British colonial network and the circulation of the idea of taking Hong Kong as the reference point amongst Shanghailanders from the 1850s to the 1880s played important role in the establishment of the Sikh police force in the International Settlement of Shanghai. Furthermore, by highlighting the translocal connections and interactions amongst British colonies and settlements, this study tries to break the metropole-colony binary in imperial history studies.

Download Full-text

“Laying Hands” and Learning to Touch and Grab in the Police Academy

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190842475.013.34 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 446-468

Author(s):

Brian Lande

Keyword(s):

Police Officer ◽

Police Officers ◽

Gain Control ◽

Police Force ◽

Police Culture ◽

Police Academy ◽

Attitudes And Beliefs ◽

Police Recruits ◽

Hands On

Research on the formation of police officers generally focuses on the beliefs, accounts, and categories that recruits must master. Becoming a police officer, however, is not simply a matter of acquiring new attitudes and beliefs. This article attends to an unexplored side of police culture—the sensorial and tactile education that recruits undergo at the police academy. Rubenstein wrote in 1973 that a police officer’s first tool is his or her body. This article examines the formation of the police body by examining how police recruits learn to use their hands as instruments of control. In police vernacular, this means learning to “lay hands” (a term borrowed from Pentecostal traditions) or going “hands on.” This chapter focuses on two means of using the hands: searching and defensive tactics. It describes how instructors teach recruits to use their hands for touching, manipulating, and grabbing the clothing and flesh of others to sense weapons and contraband. It also examines how recruits are taught to grab, manipulate, twist, and strike others in order to gain control of “unruly” bodies. It concludes by discussing the implications of “touching like a cop” for understanding membership in the police force.

Download Full-text

Policing for Peace

10.1017/9781108979580 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Matthew Nanes

Keyword(s):

Police Officer ◽

Police Force ◽

Crime Victimization ◽

Marginalized Groups ◽

The Future ◽

New Evidence

In communities plagued by conflict along ethnic, racial, and religious lines, how does the representation of previously-marginalized groups in the police affect crime and security? Drawing on new evidence from policing in Iraq and Israel, Policing for Peace shows that an inclusive police force provides better services and reduces conflict, but not in the ways we might assume. Including members of marginalized groups in the police improves civilians' expectations of how the police and government will treat them, both now and in the future. These expectations are enhanced when officers are organized into mixed rather than homogeneous patrols. Iraqis indicate feeling most secure when policed by mixed officers, even more secure than they feel when policed by members of their own group. In Israel, increases in police officer diversity are associated with lower crime victimization for both Arab and Jewish citizens. In many cases, inclusive policing benefits all citizens, not just those from marginalized groups.

Download Full-text

Executive Functions of Swedish Counterterror Intervention Unit Applicants and Police Officer Trainees Evaluated With Design Fluency Test

Frontiers in Psychology ◽

10.3389/fpsyg.2021.580463 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 ◽

Author(s):

Torbjörn Vestberg ◽

Peter G. Tedeholm ◽

Martin Ingvar ◽

Agneta C. Larsson ◽

Predrag Petrovic

Keyword(s):

Executive Functions ◽

Police Officer ◽

Cognitive Flexibility ◽

Higher Order ◽

Police Force ◽

Cognitive Capacity ◽

Expected Improvement ◽

Control Group ◽

Design Fluency ◽

Successful Behavior

Executive functions (EF) represent higher order top-down mechanisms regulating information processing. While suboptimal EF have been studied in various patient groups, their impact on successful behavior is still not well described. Previously, it has been suggested that design fluency (DF)—a test including several simultaneous EF components mainly related to fluency, cognitive flexibility, and creativity—predicts successful behavior in a quickly changing environment where fast and dynamic adaptions are required, such as ball sports. We hypothesized that similar behaviors are of importance in the selection process of elite police force applicants. To test this hypothesis, we compared elite police force applicants (n = 45) with a control group of police officer trainees (n = 30). Although both groups were better than the norm, the elite police force applicants had a significantly better performance in DF total correct when adjusting for sex and age [F(1,71) = 18.98, p < 0.001]. To understand how this capacity was altered by stress and tiredness, we re-tested the elite police force applicants several days during an extreme field assessment lasting 10 days. The results suggested that there was a lower than expected improvement in DF total correct and a decline in the DF3-subtest that includes a larger component of cognitive flexibility than the other subtests (DF1 and DF2). Although there was a positive correlation between the baseline session and the re-test in DF3 [r(40) = 0.49, p = 0.001], the applicants having the highest scores in the baseline test also displayed the largest percentage decline in the re-test [r(40) = −0.46, p = 0.003]. In conclusion, our result suggests that higher order EF (HEF) that include cognitive flexibility and creativity are of importance in the application for becoming an elite police officer but relatively compromised in a stressful situation. Moreover, as the decline is different between the individuals, the results suggest that applicants should be tested during baseline conditions and during stressful conditions to describe their cognitive capacity fully.

Download Full-text