Assessing the Utility of Body-Worn Cameras for Collegiate Police Agencies

Nearly all scholarship on body-worn cameras (BWCs) has focused on municipal police departments, as they comprise a majority of sworn agencies. Given the unique environment of collegiate law enforcement agencies, however, it is possible that their paths to BWCs—and the benefits and challenges they experience—vary from that of more traditional agencies. Using a survey of 126 collegiate police departments and in-depth interviews with 15 collegiate police executives, this study describes their goals, challenges, and benefits related to BWCs. Importantly, it also describes the decision-making of agencies that chose not to implement BWCs, giving voice to an understudied population and providing guidance to special agencies in making the decision to adopt BWCs. The most notable benefits and challenges interrelate with their placement as part of institutions of higher education, such as the impact of collegiate privacy concerns (e.g., FERPA) and the utility of BWC footage in both law enforcement and educational processes.

Police self-legitimacy and democratic orientations: Assessing shared values

Using a sample of frontline police officers from several mid-sized municipal police departments in the United States, this study explores the relationships between frontline police officers’ self-legitimacy, organizational fit, moral alignment with policed communities, and attitudes toward democratic policing principles. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling, the analysis frames democratic policing using a formative latent construct to test several hypotheses. The results support a direct positive relationship between self-legitimacy and attitudes toward democratic policing, and suggest the relationship is partially mediated by officers' perceptions of moral alignment with their policed communities. The results further demonstrate that self-legitimacy is significantly related to organizational fit, but organizational fit does not appear to mediate the relationship between self-legitimacy and attitudes toward democratic policing.

Texas sheriffs’ perceptions on firearm regulations and mass shootings

Criminal justice research often focuses exclusively on municipal police departments. Sheriffs’ departments are largely ignored in this research despite this population’s reach and role. There are nearly 3,000 sheriffs’ offices around the United States and they often serve as the only law enforcement body in rural areas. This study sought to address the scarcity of this research and focused on Texas sheriffs’ views regarding firearm regulations and the causes of mass shootings. An 18-question instrument created in consult with the Texas Narcotic Officers Association was sent to each sheriff in the 254 counties of Texas to assess their perceptions regarding solutions to mass shootings, disqualification criteria for gun ownership, and civilian access to certain types of firearms and ammunition. Responding sheriffs, as a whole, were reluctant to limit access to guns and ammunition as a general matter, but strongly agreed that certain discrete populations should have limited or no access to firearms. Policy implications are discussed.

Race, Place, and Context: The Persistence of Race Effects in Traffic Stop Outcomes in the Face of Situational, Demographic, and Political Controls

Evidence that racial minorities are targeted for searches during police traffic stops is widespread, but observed differences in outcomes following a traffic stop between white drivers and people of color could potentially be due to factors correlated with driver race. Using a unique dataset recording over 5 million traffic stops from 90 municipal police departments, we control for and evaluate alternative explanations for why a driver may be searched. These include: (1) the context of the stop itself, (2) the characteristics of the police department including the race of the police chief, and (3) demographic and racial composition of the municipality within which the stop occurs. We find that the driver's race remains a robust predictor: black male drivers are consistently subjected to more intensive police scrutiny than white drivers. Additionally, we find that all drivers are less likely to be subject to highly discretionary searches if the police chief is black. Together, these findings indicate that race matters in multiple and varied ways for policing outcomes.

Policing College Campuses: The Production of Racialized Risk

Recent months have brought powerful demands for reform, divestment, and abolition of municipal police departments, but campus police are typically overlooked. We argue that contemporary university policing is shaped by three types of “creep:” the tendency for policing to move into previously unpoliced contexts, take on more expansive roles, and adopt an increasingly aggressive stance—or, carceral creep, mission creep, and conflict creep. We draw on qualitative data from case studies of two schools in the University of California system to ask: How do campus police activities produce risk, both physical and psychological, for racially marginalized individuals? We detail the mechanisms producing risk for racially marginalized individuals in four contemporary campus police activities: routine policing, protecting the conservative provocateur, managing the large student protest, and responding to the active attacker. We show that even when university police and leadership purport best intentions, these activities can create harm for racially marginalized populations on campus.

When Law Enforcement Pays: Costs and Benefits for Elected Versus Appointed Administrators Engaged in Asset Forfeiture

The billions of dollars in assets seized by law enforcement each year represent a crucial source of revenue for these organizations, but also raise important constitutional questions and can create significant tensions within the jurisdictions they administer. Research on asset forfeiture to date has focused heavily on municipal police, largely neglecting forfeiture activities by sheriffs. Thus, it has missed an important opportunity to build theory about the differences between appointed and elected administrators and neglected an important source of institutional variation that may help to explain this particular administrative activity. To develop expectations about the relative levels of asset forfeiture and the response to intergovernmental incentives related to forfeiture, we draw on and extend scholarship comparing the behavior of elected versus appointed administrators in other settings. We test those expectations in analyses of more than 1,200 sheriff’s offices and over 2,200 municipal police departments between 1993 and 2007. Results suggest that sheriffs receive less forfeiture revenue than municipal police and are less responsive to state-level policies that change the financial rewards of asset forfeiture for agencies. These results hold whether we examine forfeitures made through the federal Equitable Sharing Program, where civil and criminal forfeiture cases can be distinguished, or jurisdictional level data on forfeiture, where civil and criminal forfeitures are combined. We conclude with a discussion of implications for both the research on asset forfeiture and on elected versus appointed public administrators more generally.

Fear City on Film

This chapter considers how films produced in New York City played to an emergent anti-urban political culture. With crime and disorder as the feature antagonist in the New York film cycle of the late 1960s and the 1970s, the vigilante became a vital counterpoint to the perceived incompetence of municipal police departments. Escaping the dying city also served as a powerful motif in the period’s films. The motion picture industry brings the homegrown narrative of New York to a national audience.