Police

Are fatal police shootings increasing?

Much is being made about an apparent increase in the use of deadly force by U.S. police officers. In January, The Guardian ran a story titled “It never stops: killings by US police reach record high in 2022”.1 And last week, The Washington Post (WAPO) ran a story titled “Fatal police shootings are still going up, and nobody knows why”. In this story, one of us (Justin) was quoted as saying “It’s hard to know if the increase is meaningful or random.

The Criminology Academy Podcast - Episode 68

We discuss police killings, legitimacy, and the "war on cops."

The "War on Cops," Retaliatory Violence, and the Murder of George Floyd

The police murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests in the summer of 2020 and revived claims that public outcry over such high-profile police killings perpetuated a violent *war on cops*. Using data collected by the Gun Violence Archive …

American Society of Criminology - 2022 Meeting

A list of the panels I'm involved in at the November 2022 meeting.

A Multi-Site Study of Firearms Displays by Police at Use of Force Incidents

We model the factors associated with officers displaying their firearms in 4 agencies.

Does Procedural Justice Reduce the Harmful Effects of Perceived Ineffectiveness on Police Legitimacy?

**Objectives**: Judgments about police procedural fairness consistently have a stronger influence on how the public ascribes legitimacy to the police than evaluations of police effectiveness. What remains largely underexplored, however, is the …

Officer Diversity Reduces Black Americans’ Fear of the Police

In two experiments, we find that officer racial and gender diversity reduces Black Americans’ fear of the police.

Linking the Workforce Crisis, Crime, and Response Time

We show how agencies can use data to determine the effect of patrol staffing levels on response times.

An Evaluation of De-Escalation Training to Understand the Links between Training and Outcomes

Abstract In reaction to high-profile incidents of excessive and deadly force, policymakers, advocates, scholars, and the general public, have all called for police departments to embrace de-escalation training as a method for improving police-citizen interactions. This practice has, in turn, spurred a small, but growing, number of evaluations of police de-escalation training programs. The findings of these studies have been mixed, but incomplete. In particular, we argue that prior studies of de-escalation have been hindered by (1) a lack of consideration of changes in officer behavior in incidents not involving force, (2) a singular focus on whether or not force was used rather than alterations to the “trajectory” of use-of-force encounters, and (3) a failure to measure the intervening mechanisms between de-escalation training and officer behaviors (i.

Screening for Insider Threats in US Law Enforcement: A National Representative Sample of Department Policies and Practices

Abstract For decades, extremist groups in the U.S—particularly on the far-right—have encouraged their members to infiltrate law enforcement agencies and the military. While there are anecdotal examples of insider threats in law enforcement, we do not have a systematic understanding of whether these are isolated incidents or indicative of a more pervasive issue. It is not feasible to examine officer-level risk of engagement as an insider threat at this time.