Proving Themselves: The Status of LGBQ Police Officers

The policing occupation, a bastion of hegemonic masculinity, is well known for its historical resistance to “difference,” whether among its own members or in society at large. Nowhere does this clash manifest as strongly as when LGBQ ¹ police officers join the force. LGBQ individuals have made great strides in breaking down some beliefs of the traditional and rigid police occupational culture. Still, more progress remains to be made toward dismantling the barriers of heterosexism and sexism that often permeate policing. This article explores the history of these barriers, the progress made, and the structural and individual level obstacles that remain. Policy recommendations and suggestions for future research are also made.     

Applying a US Police Integrity Measurement Tool to the Eritrean Context: Perceptions of Top-Level Eritrean Police Officers Regarding Police Misconduct

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of data from a police integrity measurement survey administered to 107 top-level Eritrean police officers. Respondents were asked for their opinions regarding the seriousness of police misconduct, disciplinary action recommended, and their willingness to report fellow police officers engaged in such misconduct. The surveyed police officers considered some types of misconduct (e.g. off-duty work and accepting gifts) to be significantly less serious than others (e.g. opportunistic thefts from crime scenes and bribery). The findings suggest that the greater the seriousness of the offence, the more likely the officers were to recommend more severe disciplinary action. The survey evidence also indicates that, for six of the ten police misconduct cases, the majority of the respondents revealed they would report the misconduct, which suggests the police code of silence in the context of the Eritrean policing environment is weak.     

Rethinking Role Residual: Retired Police Officers and the Inertia of Habitus

In this paper, we bring conceptual clarity to the literature on “role residual.” Based on the extant literature and our own research involving police retirees, we first delineate three empirical variants of role residual: emotional, cognitive, and behavioral. We then make the case that a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon requires a theoretical framework capable of conceptualizing role residual in a way that is consistent with a broader theory of practice. To that end, we use Bourdieu's work to argue that role residual comprises states of being or behavior that occur at the intersection of (a) schemas and dispositions inscribed in the habitus as a result of one's prior role‐specific orientation to the field, and (b) a configuration of proximate conditions in the present that is sufficiently similar to what one would have experienced while in one's prior role.     

The Law Enforcement Response to Child Sexual Abuse Cases

No abstract available for this article.     

Assessing the Role of Gambling on Problematic Alcohol Consumption by Police Officers

While a number of studies have attributed critical incident stressors to alcohol abuse among police officers, no study has examined the role gambling, if any, plays on problematic alcohol consumption. Therefore, data from the Police Stress and Domestic Violence in Police Families in Baltimore, Maryland, 1997–1999 are analyzed to test the influence of gambling on problematic alcohol consumption engaged by police officers. Results indicated that gambling is significant in predicting problematic alcohol consumption. Burnout, peer drinking, and self-control also predicted the dependent variable. The study’s results, as well as the study’s limitations and directions for future research, are also discussed.     

Rules in Organizational Context: Narcotics Law Enforcement in Two Settings*

Studies of organizational action tend to isolate actors, structures, and goals as if they were not concretely interdigitated in organizational conduct. In many cases, actors are omitted as relevant units of analysis; goals are stated as abstracted entities unrelated to complex collective processes of defining, clarifying and evaluating goal-attainment, and often rules are not studied as continuously negotiated through and by interaction. Unless a close analysis of how broadly defined rules emerge as narrowly defined procedures sanctioned as reasonable and proper conduct is undertaken, the assumptive nature of the concept “bureaucracy” is left unexamined, operates invisibly, and thus impedes sociological analysis. This paper, based on fieldwork and interviews in three police organizations, identifies the processes by which an abstract organizational goal is defined, deferred to and becomes actionable. The organizational contexts of the two narcotics enforcement units (from which most of the data presented here are derived) embed the rules said to guide the pursuit of major violators of narcotics laws and systematically make certain aspects of the work either visible or obscure. Thus, some members are exposed to negative sanctioning while others experience positive sanctioning. This suggests that since the context of rules, not the rules themselves, nor the rules about the rules (so characteristic of formal organizations), determine the consequential (i.e., actionable) meanings of acts, situated interactions, accounts and shared understandings should be examined in the sociological analysis of organizations.     

The Security of Gambling and Gambling with Security: Hacking,Law Enforcement and Public Policy*

This paper studies the relationship between criminal organization and social control in the area of computer crime. We examine a ‘cheat at play’ scheme that hacked into electronic gambling machines. We focus on how these cyber-attacks were committed and on the ability of the state and the industry to control them. We compare and contrast our findings with the research on hacking and the gambling industry and conclude by discussing the implications that our research has for law enforcement, security and consumer protection.     

Black,Blue, and Blow: The Effect of Race and Criminal History on Perceptions of Police Violence

This research aims to determine the situational and individual factors that shape perceptions of whether police violence against citizens is justified. Drawing on research on the racialization of crime, modern racism, and the stigma associated with a criminal history, we hypothesize that individuals will view police violence as more justified when targeted at black citizens and those with criminal histories. We further hypothesize that individuals who have higher levels of racial prejudice will view police violence as more justified. Results from a survey experiment using a sample of 595 white respondents show a consistent effect of criminal history, with individuals viewing violence as more justified against a citizen with a previous criminal background. Further, interaction effects indicate that only white respondents who score highly on racial prejudice view violence against a black citizen as more justified compared to violence against a white citizen. These results underscore the importance of how a criminal record serves as an enduring stigma that shapes how individuals are perceived. Additionally, our results are consistent with theories of contemporary racism and show that negative evaluations of black Americans are limited to whites with high levels of racial prejudice.     

Critical Elements of Criminal Behavior Explanation*

Many theorists have suggested what might be considered elements necessary to committing a criminal act, but no one has attempted to formulate and test a model of criminal behavior which includes the elements appearing most often in the literature: motivation, freedom from social constraints, skill, and opportunity. This paper presents a review of conceptual problems in using two of these elements, followed by a multiplicative model of criminal behavior containing all four elements. The model is then utilizen date pertaining to the pertaining to the purchase of stolen merchandise. All four elements are implicated in this activity.     

创新思路,深化行政执法体制改革——以S市为样本的研究

以拉条管理、上下对应为特点的行政执法体制,存在多头执法、权责脱节、力量分散等突出问题。下一阶段地方行政执法体制改革,在路径方向上,可考虑采取"横向综合,纵向下沉,做实基层"的原则;在步骤安排上,可采用分步、分层、分类推进,与机构改革、事业单位分类改革、权力清单制度等其他简政放权的改革措施协同推进;在改革重点上,要以问题为导向,抓住牵动全局的主要环节,着力解决群众反映强烈的突出问题。     

Disparate Levels of Stress in Police and Correctional Officers: Preliminary Evidence from a Pilot Study on Domestic Violence

New data from a prevention curriculum project on officer-involved domestic violence reveals significant differences in the reported job stress of Florida's correctional officers when compared to police officers who took the same surveys. The significantly higher reported levels of organizational stress in particular—especially those related to staff and resource shortages and attitudes about leadership—raise concerns about the relationship between organizational stress and the reported drastic budget cuts, hiring freezes, and layoffs experienced by the Department of Corrections in 2009. The surprising disparity has significant implications for policy makers, who should be aware of the high cost of stress in officer health and well-being when making budgetary decisions about the state's rapidly increasing inmate population.     

Criminal Behavior and Rapid Community Growth: Examining the Evidence1

Abstract Sociologists have disagreed sharply over whether rapid, resource-related community growth leads to disproportionate increases in criminal activities. Enough studies have now accumulated, however, to permit a more comprehensive assessment. The existing studies fall into three categories. The first two, which employ county-level data and victimization surveys, have encountered inconclusive and mixed results. By contrast, the 23 before-and-after comparisons in specific communities have been highly consistent: All but 2 of the 23 report greater increases in criminal activity than in population (p <.0001 by the sign test). The mean ratio of increased crime to increased population is over 4.4 to 1; regression analyses lead to more conservative ratios ranging as low as 3.2 to 1 and as high as 3.6 to 1. Despite considerable variations in approaches, methods, and study communities, sufficiently consistent findings show that simple regression equations explain 85–98 percent of the variance. The weight of the accumulated evidence indicates that increases in criminal behaviors are significantly more than proportional to increases in populations in rapid-growth communities. Data from other studies would argue against a generic “social pathology” hypothesis; instead, the accumulated findings may best be explained by narrowly focusing on changes in community social structure that accompany rapid growth and result in impairment of informal social controls, particularly the declines in a community's density of acquaintanceship.