**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 …
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.
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.
My talk provides a broad overview of the research on police use of deadly force – how often it happens, where it happens, and why it happens. I'll also point out the holes in our knowledge due to data constraints. I conclude with a discussion of …
At the 2022 ACJS Conference, my colleagues and I present an ongoing project on the relationship between police discretionary behaviors and crime in Denver.
I’ve been screaming this into the void on Twitter lately so I figured I’d pull all my thoughts together in a blog post.
On January 12th, ABC News published a story claiming that fatal police shootings had declined 13% in 2021 “amid calls for reform on use of force.” The story also claimed that Florida saw the biggest decrease in shootings (from 93 to 44).1
At that time, The Washington Post’s (WAPO) database was showing 888 fatal police shootings.
We discuss how I got into academia, as well as my research on police legitimacy, organizational justice, the Ferguson Effect, and officer decision-making.