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- All Subjects: Mexican Drug Cartels
- Creators: Katz, Charles
Description
Mexican drug cartels have been a difficult group to get official data on because of the clandestine nature of their operations and the inherent dangers associated with any type of research on these groups. Due to the close relationship that the United States and Mexico share, the United States being a heavy demander of illicit drugs and Mexico being the supplier or the transshipment point, research that sheds light on cartels and their effects is necessary in order to solve this problem. A growing concern is that cartels have been seeking to improve their international infrastructure. This could potentially be done by partnering with gangs located in the United States to help with the distribution of drugs. The author uses data from the 2009 and 2010 Arizona Gang Threat Assessment and three sets of analyses (dummy variable regression, change score, multinomial logistic) to shed light on the possible partnership between cartels and U.S. based gangs. Primarily using the varying level of intervention strategies practiced by police departments throughout the state of Arizona, this study is exploratory in nature, but attempts to find the effectiveness of intervention strategies on "cartel affiliated" gangs, as identified by federal authorities, and how police departments respond towards these same groups. With the current data, there was no significant evidence that suggests that intervention strategies were less effective on "cartel affiliated" gangs or that police departments were responsive towards these “affiliated” gangs.
ContributorsMora, Victor, M.S (Author) / Sweeten, Gary (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Xia (Committee member) / Katz, Charles (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Recently, there has been an upsurge in highly publicized negative police-citizen encounters, contributing to the current crisis in police legitimacy. These encounters, mostly filmed and disseminated by citizens, provide a new type of vicarious experience through which the viewer can assess police-citizen interactions, potentially shaping their perceptions of the police. These recordings have sparked national conversations and protests regarding police behavior and treatment of minority citizens. An area that has received less attention, however, is what effect viewing video recordings of less contentious police-citizen interactions has on public perceptions of police. To that end, this study seeks to address the knowledge gap through experimental methodology. Using actual footage of a variety of police-citizen encounters, this study examines the impact of viewing videos of police encounters on individuals' perceptions of police legitimacy, procedural justice, estimates of police misconduct, and their willingness to cooperate with police. Also examined are the impact these videos have on support for officer body-worn cameras and willingness to film the police. The findings indicate the impact of viewing police-citizen encounters on individual perceptions and attitudes are primarily linked to the content – whether positive, negative or neutral – of the video. Specifically, positive videos depicting procedurally just encounters increased perceptions of procedural justice, decreased estimations of police misconduct and increased support for officer body-worn cameras. Viewing negative videos, however, decreased perceptions of police legitimacy, distributive fairness, and procedural justice while increasing estimations of police misconduct and willingness to film the police in the future. The effects of the video encounters on perceptions of police were not lasting and were not stable when respondents were surveyed again two weeks later. Lasting effects were found for individuals’ self-reported willingness to film the police in the future. Given these findings, the process-based model of policing should consider also incorporating digital vicarious experiences when examining factors impacting perceptions of police.
ContributorsParry, Megan Marie (Author) / Wallace, Danielle M (Thesis advisor) / White, Michael D. (Committee member) / Katz, Charles (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017