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

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.

Kindergarten Cop: A Case Study of How a Coalition Between School Districts and Law Enforcement Led to School Resource Officers in Elementary Schools

Adopting school resource officers (SROs) is a popular response to school shootings. Using the advocacy coalition and multiple streams frameworks, we explore how school districts in one county formed a coalition with the Sheriff’s Department, adopting SROs in elementary schools following the Sandy Hook shooting. We describe how this coalition was bound together by shared beliefs on school safety and the goodness of law enforcement. The implementation activities of SROs related to the beliefs of the coalition, focusing on security and relationship building. The beliefs were not uniformly understood by SROs—many interpreted their role to include student discipline and managing behavior of students with disabilities. The findings show the utility of comparing policy adoption processes with implementation activities.

Naloxone administration by nonmedical providers- a descriptive study of County sheriff department training

The study background In 2015 a county sheriff department in Michigan began a training program for its deputies on administration of naloxone for non-medical providers. Methods A descriptive analysis was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. Data collected from the Sheriff’s department allowed the study to quantify the incidence of naloxone administration, describe characteristics related to the administration, and report on aggregate outcomes. Results Of the reported 184 incidents involving naloxone use the sheriff department had an overall successful administration rate of 94.6% in the cases from 2015 to 2017. It was also noted that the overall number of naloxone administrations showed an upward trend with a greater number of trained deputies. Conclusion The outcome of training non-medical first responders in naloxone administration has been shown to be successful with regard to resuscitation of patients with opioid overdose.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s challenge: Police corruption, management ethics, and the indispensable virtues of integrity and constancy

This paper investigates some of the information conditions necessary for the preservation of police officers’ individual and collective moral agency, particularly the virtues of integrity and constancy, which can diminish in markedly rule-based, informationally impoverished, or corrupt work environments. We focus on one particular work from philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who explores the threat of social structures to moral agency by using the hypothetical case of J whose job it was to make the trains run on time while avoiding questions about the cargo. J’s supervisors and the broader social structure he occupies inhibited his capacity to be a full moral agent. In order to illustrate the relevance and application of MacIntyre’s argument to policing and the good justice, including the wider philosophical and economic problems of compartmentalization of moral agency, we draw from his framework to consider our own case study in policing inspired by a challenging era within the recent history of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (USA). Implications for leadership and management in policing are discussed.

Contrasting emotional labor and burnout in civilian and sworn law enforcement personnel

PurposeThis study introduces emotional labor into an analysis of multiple dimensions of burnout in sworn and civilian employees across three law enforcement agencies.Design/methodology/approachUsing data from a survey of law enforcement employees in a metropolitan police department, a full-service sheriff's department, and a state corrections agency located in the western United States (n = 1,921), we test the explanatory power of an emotional labor-based model of burnout.FindingsResults partially confirm the lone prior study to examine civilian and sworn personnel. Sworn and civilian employees experience variant levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, though the underlying emotional labor correlates are significantly related to burnout for both groups. Further, we extend prior results by capturing multiple facets of burnout as well as contributing an emotional labor explanation for burnout, while controlling for individual demographic characteristics and agency type.Research limitations/implicationsLaw enforcement agencies rely upon non-sworn employees to support their missions. The experience of non-sworn law enforcement personnel is under-researched in both the emotional labor and law enforcement organizational literature. Burnout is a phenomenon that has high costs for both employees and organizations, particularly in the law enforcement context. Investigating the emotional labor experience of employees is critical for practitioners who are tasked with effectively managing both groups.Originality/valueOne previous study has investigated the emotional labor of civilians in law enforcement and used community-level predictions for burnout. This study builds on those findings by capturing two facets of burnout rather than the lone gauge of burnout used in the previous study. Furthermore, we use an emotional labor model to investigate emotional exhaustion and depersonalization reported by sworn and civilian personnel.

The Morrison County School District: Issues Involving Employee Misconduct

A school principal has been placed on administrative leave for allegedly having sexual relations on school property after hours with a member of the county sheriff’s department. The principal denies the allegations but, in an effort to get his job back, the deputy confesses to the affair. The school district says that the case is under investigation. The case has also been referred to the State Department of Education for review.

Gun Ownership

Chapter 30 includes cases related to gun ownership. The first two cases (District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago) focus on the Constitutional basis for gun ownership generally, while the others (Tyler v. Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Department and Wollschlaeger v. Governor of Florida) represent two examples of cases in which the national gun ownership debate is relevant to clinical care and the potential consequences of clinical treatment.