Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management

Publisher:: Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Publication date:: 2021-02-01

ISBN:: 1363-951X

Issue Number

Latest documents

Who is reported missing from Canadian hospitals and mental health units?
Purpose: International literature on missing persons suggests that a significant volume of missing person cases originate from hospitals and mental health units, resulting in considerable costs and resource demands on both police and health sectors (e.g., Bartholomew et al., 2009; Sowerby and Thomas, 2017). In the Canadian context, however, very little is known about patients reported missing from these locations – a knowledge deficit with profound implications in terms of identifying and addressing risk factors that contribute to this phenomenon. The present study is one such preliminary attempt to try to fill a significant research and policy gap. Design/methodology/approach: The authors draw on data from a sample of 8,261 closed missing person reports from a Canadian municipal police service over a five-year period (2013–2018). Using multiple logistic regression, the authors identify, among other factors, who is most likely to be reported missing from these locations. Findings: Results reveal that several factors, such as mental disabilities, senility, mental illness and addiction, are significantly related to this phenomenon. In light of these findings, the authors suggest that there is a need to develop comprehensive strategies and policies involving several stakeholders, such as health care and social service organizations, as well as the police. Originality/value: Each year, thousands of people go missing in Canada with a large number being reported from hospitals and mental health units, which can be burdensome for the police and health sectors in terms of human and financial resource allocation. Yet, very little is known about patients reported missing from health services – a knowledge deficit with profound implications in terms of identifying and addressing risk factors that contribute to this phenomenon. This manuscript seeks to remedy this gap in Canadian missing persons literature by exploring who goes missing from hospitals and mental health units.
Law enforcement manpower analysis: an enhanced calculation model
Purpose: This study aims to advance the existing analytic model to include staff allocation information at the district level. Maintaining adequate size of staff is essential to law enforcement agencies' ability to ensure social order, fight crime and, increasingly, deliver a widening range of social services. Review of the scientific literature on police size of force and staffing calculation models indicates that this line of inquiry (i.e. manpower analysis) is attentive to population size and workload demands but generally inattentive to how service demands are affected by community-level variables. Current staffing calculation models specify number of staff needed for a jurisdiction but do not inform the allocation of personnel across districts within the jurisdiction. Design/methodology/approach: To address this problem, the current study illustrates an enhanced analytic model to provide law enforcement staffing recommendations for a southern coastal county. An integrated per capita-workload manpower analysis model first factors the minimum number of law enforcement deputies needed per population size served and recent history workload demands and then executes the six-step workload model process. This study enhances staffing analysis by adding an additional seventh arithmetical step indicating the staffing needs by districts across a jurisdiction. Findings: The results from the integrated per capita-workload analysis indicate the need to hire additional deputies to meet current and future demands. Originality/value: Discussion centers on the need to include drivers of police services identified but not measured in this study's application of the hybrid manpower analysis model and its replication potential.
Assessing cross-national differences in police officers' domestic violence attitudes
Purpose: Comparative research provides a mechanism to understand how justice systems throughout the world operate. McPhedran et al. (2017) conducted a comparative examination of police officer attitudes about domestic violence (DV) in the USA and Australia and reported fairly high levels of agreement among male and female officers within each country. The current study builds on these findings by examining officer attitudes toward DV among male and female officers cross-nationally. This was accomplished by examining whether American and Australian male and female officers agree with one another on a number of DV issues. Design/methodology/approach: Two-way ANOVA was used to examine the effect of two factors (gender and country) on law enforcement officer attitudes about DV. Findings: The results suggest that male and female officers from the USA and Australia significantly differ on 14 of 24 attitudes about DV with the greatest number of attitudinal differences found between American and Australian male officers. Research limitations/implications: Scholars who conduct future research examining police officer attitudes about DV should use the instrument from this study as a springboard to develop an updated survey in terms of content and one that would be applicable to cross-national analyses. Methodological study limitations are described in depth in McPhedran et al. (2017). Originality/value: While gender differences in attitudes have received scholarly attention, questions remain regarding the degree to which attitudes align among male and female officers across different countries. The current study seeks to fill these gaps in knowledge by examining attitudes about DV between American and Australian law enforcement officers.
Fatigue and short-term unplanned absences among police officers
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess whether shift work, sleep loss and fatigue are related to short-term unplanned absences in policing. Design/methodology/approach: N = 367 police officers from the Buffalo Police Department were studied. Day-by-day work and sick leave data were obtained from the payroll. Absenteeism was defined as taking a single sick day on a regularly scheduled workday. Biomathematical models of fatigue (BMMF) predicted officers' sleep–wake behaviors and on-duty fatigue and sleepiness. Prior sleep, fatigue and sleepiness were tested as predictors of absenteeism during the next shift. Findings: A total of 513,666 shifts and 4,868 cases of absenteeism were studied. The odds of absenteeism increased as on-duty fatigue and sleepiness increased and prior sleep decreased. This was particularly evident for swing shift officers and night shift officers who were predicted by BMMF to obtain less sleep and have greater fatigue and sleepiness than day shift officers. The odds of absenteeism were higher for female officers than male officers; this finding was not due to a differential response to sleep loss, fatigue or sleepiness. Practical implications: Absenteeism may represent a self-management strategy for fatigue or compensatory behavior to reduced sleep opportunity. Long and irregular work hours that reduce sleep opportunity may be administratively controllable culprits of absenteeism. Originality/value: Police fatigue has consequences for police officers, departments and communities. BMMF provide a potential tool for predicting and mitigating police fatigue. BMMF were used to investigate the effects of sleep and fatigue on absenteeism.
Community perceptions: procedural justice, legitimacy and body-worn cameras
Purpose: This paper explores community members' perceptions of the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD)'s body-worn camera (BWC) program, examining knowledge and support of the program and its impact on views of procedural justice and legitimacy. Design/methodology/approach: A two-wave, online survey was administered to Milwaukee-area residents in the fall of 2017 and summer of 2018, yielding 1,527 respondents. Multivariate regression analyses focus on overall relationships between sociodemographic characteristics, community member knowledge of the program, procedural justice and legitimacy and support for BWCs. Findings: Community members are supportive of BWCs and view officers as procedurally just and legitimate; however, perceptions were significantly lower among Black respondents. Respondents with knowledge of the BWC program were more likely to view officers as procedurally just, but program knowledge did not increase support for it. Research limitations/implications: Police agencies may benefit from improving community awareness of their BWC program as knowledge of the program is positively linked to the views of departmental procedural justice and legitimacy. However, education efforts alone are not sufficient in improving police–community relations. Future research should examine how policing stakeholders can engage the community to build views of legitimacy associated with BWC policies. Originality/value: Findings provide insight into community member perceptions of a large BWC program in a major US city. Results demonstrate the relationship between knowledge of a department's BWC program and views of procedural justice and legitimacy and support for BWCs.
The impact of general police officer outlooks on their attitudes toward body-worn cameras
Purpose: The past five years have seen a growth in studies of police body-worn cameras (BWCs). A large share of the research focused on individual officer attitudes toward these new law enforcement tools. The scholarship, however, focused almost exclusively on their positive and negative perceptions of body cameras or correlations between those attitudes and general officer characteristics. This study examined whether the influence of negative or “concerning” policing attitudes toward body cameras is mediated by other variables, such as officer outlooks toward law enforcement, officers' perceptions of citizen cooperation or their opinions of the public. Design/methodology/approach: An online survey was distributed to a convenience sample of police offices from two Northeastern police agencies. Findings: Findings indicate that the relationship between experience and concerning perceptions of body cameras is mediated by distrust in citizens and perceived civilian cooperation. Further, an office's outlooks regarding aggressive law enforcement tactics do not have a direct effect on concerning perceptions of body cameras, nor do they serve as a mediator between years of experience and concerning perceptions of body cameras. Originality/value: Findings uncover the nuance and complexity of studying and understanding police officer outlooks and perceptions of BWCs. Future experimental designs should include general outlook measures.
Work-family conflict and job dissatisfaction among police officers: mediation of threat to family role and moderation of role segmentation enhancement
Purpose: This study investigates the mechanism between work-family conflict (WFC) and job dissatisfaction by considering threat to family role as a mediator and role segment enhancement as a moderator. Design/methodology/approach: The data were collected from 245 male and 245 female police officers using a questionnaire-based survey method through convenience sampling. Findings: Results revealed that threat to family role partially mediates the association between WFC and job dissatisfaction. Role segment enhancement was also noted to weaken the association between WFC and job dissatisfaction. Moreover, the study revealed that male employees are more likely to draw a boundary between their work and family domain, which was not found in their female counterparts. Research limitations/implications: The survey for this study was conducted in a male-dominant developing country, so results may be different in developed countries. The study has theoretical and managerial implications. Originality/value: This study adds value to the existing literature on work-family conflicts in the perspective of source attribution and boundary management. Further, to the best of researchers' knowledge, none of the previous studies have examined role segment enhancement and threat to family role among the police workforce.
Female attrition from the police profession
Purpose: Do female police recruits drop out of police education and/or leave the profession more often than men, and has this changed over time? Can gender differences be explained by the background characteristics and family obligations of the recruits? Design/methodology/approach: This paper employs administrative registry data covering all individuals admitted to the police academy (1995–2010, N = 6570) and all academy recruits employed in the Norwegian police (1992–2014, N = 7301). The paper analyses the data using discrete-time logistic regression and coarsened exact matching. Findings: The levels of dropout and attrition are generally low. However, female recruits have a somewhat greater tendency both to drop out of education and to leave the force. The gender differences are quite stable, although the percentage of female recruits has risen sharply. Family obligations do not seem to explain female attrition from the police force. Research limitations/implications: Because women tend to leave the police more often than men, further research is suggested in investigating female police recruits’ experiences. However, the relatively low level of dropout and limited gender differences also provide a reason to question whether stories of the police as a male-dominated profession not adapted to women are valid across time and in different settings. Originality/value: This study provides exhaustive and detailed longitudinal data not previously available in studies of police careers. This study also tracks attrition in a period that has involved both increased numerical representation of women and changes in police culture, while accounting for other observable differences between male and female police officers. Contrary to common explanations, there is limited importance of family obligations and altered gender composition.
Exploring police-reported cybercrime in Canada. variation and correlates
Purpose: Police-reported incidents of cybercrime appear to vary dramatically across Canadian municipal police services. This paper explores cybercrime reporting by police services in eight of Canada's largest municipalities, assessing (1) variation over time; (2) variation across jurisdictions; and (3) correlates of reporting volumes. Design/methodology/approach: Data was collected from a combination of national Uniform Crime Report statistics and annual reports by police services. Two repeated one-way ANOVA tests and a Pearson's r correlation matrix were used to assess variation and correlation. Findings: Findings suggest that police-reported cybercrime varies significantly across jurisdictions but not over time. Moreover, negative relationships were observed between police-reported cybercrime incidents per 100,000 residents and calls for service per 100,000, as well as number of sworn officers per 100,000. Research limitations/implications: The study assessed a small sample of cities (N = 8) providing 32 data points, which inhibited robust multivariate analyses. Data also strictly represents calls to police services, therefore excluding alternative resolutions such as public–private interventions. Practical implications: Canadian provincial and federal governments should consider engaging in high-level talks to harmonize cybercrime reporting strategies within frontline policing. This will mitigate disparity and provide more accurate representations of cybercrime for future policy development. Additionally, services should revisit internal policies and procedures, as it appears that cybercrime is deprioritized in high call volume situations. Originality/value: This paper introduces previously unreported data about police-reported cybercrime incidents in Canada. Furthermore, it adds quantitative evidence to support previous qualitative studies on police responses to cybercrime.
Officers' perceptions regarding the unexpected effects of body-worn cameras
Purpose: Throughout the last decade, a number of empirical studies have assessed the effectiveness of body-worn cameras (BWCs) among law enforcement agencies across the United States. The purpose of this paper is to examine officers' perceptions regarding the impact this technology has had on police-community relations, as well as the working relationship between police and other actors in the criminal justice system (e.g. prosecutors, jurors). Design/methodology/approach: The author conducted focus groups with officers (n = 89) from two local law enforcement agencies in California that had adopted BWCs in recent years. Participating officers discussed advantages and disadvantages they associated with BWCs, as well as how BWCs have impacted their relationship with the public and justice system personnel. Findings: Officers recognized advantages to using BWCs, including the potential for positive changes in police behavior and the ability to protect officers against false citizen complaints. Officers also identified a number of disadvantages (or consequences) they associate with BWCs, such as the depreciation of credibility behind an officer's word and the impact of video footage on prosecutorial decision-making. Originality/value: Prior studies have gathered officers' perceptions regarding BWCs, but very few have assessed whether and how the use of this technology by law enforcement influences other actors within the criminal justice system. The findings from this study may prompt further empirical consideration regarding BWCs, especially with regard to whether police use of this technology significantly impacts citizens' trust in the police and how their use may impact prosecutorial and juror decision-making.