Matching Items (7)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Arrest (Police methods)
- All Subjects: Crime prevention
- All Subjects: Social Research
- Creators: White, Michael D.
Description
There has been a tremendous amount of innovation in policing over the last 40 years, from community and problem-oriented policing to hot spots and intelligence-led policing. Many of these innovations have been subjected to empirical testing, with mixed results on effectiveness. The latest innovation in policing is the Bureau of Justice Assistance's Smart Policing Initiative (2009). Created in 2009, the SPI provides funding to law enforcement agencies to develop and test evidence-based practices to address crime and disorder. Researchers have not yet tested the impact of the SPI on the funded agencies, particularly with regard to core principles of the Initiative. The most notable of these is the collaboration between law enforcement agencies and their research partners. The current study surveyed SPI agencies and their research partners on key aspects of their Initiative. The current study uses mean score comparisons and qualitative responses to evaluate this partnership to determine the extent of its value and effect. It also seeks to determine the areas of police agency crime analysis and research units that are most in need of enhancement. Findings indicate that the research partners are actively involved in a range of aspects involved in problem solving under the Smart Policing Initiative, and that they have positively influenced police agencies' research and crime analysis functions, and to a lesser extent, have positively impacted police agencies' tactical operations. Additionally, personnel, technology, and training were found to be the main areas of the crime analysis and research units that still need to be enhanced. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for police policy and practice.
ContributorsMartin-Roethele, Chelsie (Author) / White, Michael D. (Thesis advisor) / Ready, Justin (Committee member) / D'Anna, Matthew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Though police-involved homicides have generated controversy and caused community disruptions and riots for many years, few efforts to systematically capture and study these events exist. The lack of research on arrest-related deaths (ARDs) is particularly troubling not only because of the consequences of these events, but also because the nature of how these deaths occur may also be changing. In particular, recent attention has shifted away from incidents where police use firearms to incidents where other less-lethal tools are used but death still occurs (e.g., TASERs). In 2000, the Federal Government sought to address this problem through the creation of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (DCRP), a national-level voluntary reporting system managed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There have been few efforts, however, that have assessed the accuracy and completeness of the DCRP data collection. The current study seeks to accomplish this through a comparison of ARDs in the DCRP to open-source, web-based media reports of ARDs in a stratified, random sample of 12 states during 2005. The study finds that all types of ARDs, not just police-involved homicides, are not accurately and reliably reported. Furthermore, the information provided is not reliably reported or interesting to research initiatives. Improvements in how the data is collected and what type of data is collected are needed. This adds to the scholarly research that advocates for a systematic and reliable national dataset of all deaths that occur in the process of arrest.
ContributorsBorrego, Andrea (Author) / White, Michael D. (Thesis advisor) / Kane, Robert (Committee member) / Fornango, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The controversy over law enforcement use of TASER devices and the potential for the devices to cause death has proliferated in recent years. In 2005 the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) and International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) published national-level policy guidelines for the use of TASER devices, with one of the goals being to reduce the occurrence of deaths proximal to their use. What remains unknown in regard to these guidelines is whether or not departments that adhere to these guidelines are experiencing fewer TASER-proximate arrest related deaths (ARDs) than departments who are not. This study seeks to determine preliminary answers to this question by conducting a comparison of the policies of departments with three or more TASER-proximate ARDs to a matched sample of police departments that deploy the TASER, but have no (or one to two) TASER-proximate ARDs. The departments were matched on the number of full time sworn officers, geography (region, division, or state), and department type. Once matched, all department policies were coded based on how closely they adhered to the following areas of PERF and IACP guidelines: use of force against vulnerable/at risk populations, policies governing the TASER device deployment, training, reporting, and post-exposure requirements. Study departments, when compared to matched departments, had a greater number of policy areas with higher failure to comply rates. The same was true when looking at the category totals, as well as the overall totals, with the difference in failure to comply rates being larger for PERF than IACP. These findings show an association between departments with three or more TASER-proximate ARDs and higher failure to comply rates with national model policies. Additionally, it appears that many departments are failing to heed research findings or advice from outside their department. Based on this, future research may want to address the ways in which greater compliance with national policies can be obtained nationwide.
ContributorsRiggs, Courtney (Author) / White, Michael D. (Thesis advisor) / Ready, Justin (Committee member) / Sweeten, Gary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
A perceived link between illegal immigration and crime continues to exist. Citizens continue to believe that immigration creates crime and fear that as the immigrant population grows, their safety is jeopardized. Not much research in the field of criminology, however, has focused on examining this perceived relationship between immigration and crime. Those studies which have examined the relationship have mainly relied on official data to conduct their analysis. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the relationship between immigration and crime by examining self report data as well as some official data on immigration status and criminal involvement. More specifically, this thesis examines the relationship between immigration status and four different types of criminal involvement; property crimes, violent crimes, drug sales, and drug use. Data from a sample of 1,990 arrestees in the Maricopa County, Arizona, was used to conduct this analysis. This data was collected through the Arizona Arrestee Reporting Information Network over the course of a year. The results of the logistic regression models indicate that immigrants tend to commit less crime than U.S. citizens. Furthermore, illegal immigrants are significantly less likely than U.S. citizens to commit any of the four types of crimes, with the exception of powder cocaine use.
ContributorsNuño, Lidia E (Author) / Katz, Charles M. (Thesis advisor) / White, Michael D. (Committee member) / Decker, Scott H. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Recent events in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, have focused the public's attention on citizen deaths during arrest encounters with officers in police departments across the United States. Riots and protests have broken out across the nation and resulted in a recent President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing to address some of these major issues. Arrest-related deaths (ARDs), however, are not a new phenomenon and have long generated controversy among the public. Despite the reoccurring nature of ARDs, no publicly available, central national registry of ARDs exists to allow for an in-depth analysis of such cases, as well as the development of training and policies to decrease police and citizen harms. In an effort to fill this gap, the current study conducts a retrospective, open-source, web-based search of media reports to explore the prevalence and nature of all types of ARDs that occurred through the United States in 2005 and 2006. The purpose of the study is to investigate ARDs, but to also assess the reliability of media reports as a source of data. The study finds that media reports are not adequate for identifying the prevalence of ARDs, but are useful when investigating circumstances surrounding deadly police-citizen encounters to an extent.
ContributorsBorrego, Andrea, Ph.D (Author) / White, Michael D. (Thesis advisor) / Wallace, Danielle (Committee member) / Telep, Cody (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Problem-oriented policing (POP) dynamically addresses unique community issues in a way that allows police departments to be cost-effective and efficient. POP draws upon routine activities and rational choice theories, at times incorporating elements of crime prevention through environmental design. A recent systematic review found POP to be hugely popular, but not rigorously assessed or implemented. In 2009, the Glendale, Arizona Police Department and researchers from Arizona State University received funding through the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s (BJA) Smart Policing Initiative (SPI) to target crime at convenience stores through a problem-oriented policing approach. The Glendale SPI team devised an approach that mirrored the ideals put forth by Goldstein (1990), and provided a thorough undertaking of the SARA model. A comprehensive response plan was developed with several proposed responses, including: intervention with Circle K leadership, suppression, and prevention at the six highest-activity stores. Despite a thorough POP implementation, the initial descriptive evaluation of the Glendale SPI reported positive effects on crime, but left questions about the intervention’s long-term impact on convenience store crime in Glendale, Arizona. The policy and theoretical influence of the initiative warrants a more rigorous evaluation. Supplanting the original assessment, a difference in difference model, negative binomial regression, and relative effect size are calculated to ascertain the SPI’s long-term effects on target and comparison stores. Phi and weighted displacement quotient are calculated to determine the existence of displacement of crime or diffusion of benefits. Overall, results indicate support for the project’s effectiveness on crime reduction. Further, none of the six intervention stores experienced crime displacement. Five of the six stores, however, experienced a diffusion of benefits in the surrounding 500-yard area; that is, a crime reduction was observed at the intervention stores and in the surrounding areas of five of these stores. Disorder and property crimes at the targeted stores were most affected by the intervention. One of the intervention stores did experience an increase in violent crime, however. Future studies should strengthen the methodological design when evaluating POP projects and seek to flesh out more precisely the crime control effects of unique problem-oriented strategies.
ContributorsDario, Lisa M (Author) / White, Michael D. (Thesis advisor) / Spohn, Cassia C. (Committee member) / Sweeten, Gary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Prior ethnographic research has found some relatively consistent factors that influence an officer’s use of force (e.g., organizational and suspect and officer characteristics). However, very little research has explored the effect department size in and of itself may have on force displayed during a police/citizen encounter. This study used data from the 2010 – 2013 Arizona Arrestee Reporting Information Network (AARIN) to examine the relationship between departmental size and officer use of force. Participants in this data collection cycle were limited to adult male and female arrestees (N = 2,273). AARIN personnel conducted confidential interviews and used a Police-Contact Addendum to document the type of forced employed by police during their current arrest. This study sought to answer the following research question: does the likelihood of an officer employing use of force increase (or decrease) in relation to department size the officer is nested in? The results indicate that citizens who are arrested by officers from a larger agency are more likely to report experiencing use of force during their arrest when compared to those arrested by officers from small and medium sized agencies.
ContributorsGalvin-White, Christine Marie (Author) / Wallace, Danielle (Thesis advisor) / White, Michael D. (Committee member) / Fradella, Hank F. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017