By Julia A. Yesberg, Arabella Kyprianides, Ben Bradford, Jenna Milani, Paul Quinton & Oliver Clark-Darby

The use of force is arguably the defining feature of police. Yet this power is often controversial: a key node in the contest and debate that almost always swirls around police, with the question of race never far from such contestation. In this paper, we consider the influence of race in responses to use of force incidents among British-based samples. Using two text-based vignette experiments and one video study, our aims are threefold: (1) to explore the influence of suspect race in how people respond to police use of force; (2) to test the interaction between participant ethnicity and suspect race; and (3) to understand what attitudes and beliefs influence how people respond to police use of force. We found no effect of suspect race on how people judged police use of force. White participants were slightly more accepting of police use of force than black participants, but there was no interaction with suspect race. The strongest predictor of acceptance of police use of force was trust in police, and, controlling for other relevant predictors, racial prejudice was also a significant positive predictor of acceptance of use of force. To our knowledge this is the first study of its kind to be fielded in the UK.

Policing and Society, An International Journal of Research and Policy, Volume 32, 2022 - Issue 7, 19p.

By Leigh Goodman and Marjorie Cook

Between March and May 2021, The National Domestic Violence Hotline (The Hotline) conducted a survey on the experiences survivors impacted by intimate partner violence* or sexual assault have had with members of law enforcement. The survey, conducted on The Hotline’s chat line and website, collected both qualitative and quantitative data. The two groups were categorized by those who had chosen not to call the police and those who had called the police. Of the roughly 1,500 who responded, approximately 82% had contacted the police, while 12% had not. Of those who did call the police, more than twice the number (39%) actually felt less safe after calling, compared to 20% who felt safer. Both groups demonstrated fear of calling the police. Seventy-seven percent of those who called the police were afraid to call them again; 92% of those who had not called were afraid to do so. Yet 62% of those who called say that they would call police again. Most of the reasons given centered around the fact that they felt law enforcement was their only option. When asked if other resources had been available, would they have chosen them over calling the police, 71% answered “yes” and provided examples of resources needed. This report contains powerful information from survivors who voluntarily gave insight into their experiences through answers to our questions and in their own words. They did so with the hope that the criminal justice system will hear them, believe them and effect change. Until then, it’s a powerful reminder of the importance of looking beyond the criminal legal system for interventions that meet the needs for justice, safety and the survival of people subjected to abuse.

Lame Deer, MT:: National Indigenous Women's Resource Center. 2024. 16p

By His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue (UK)

The effective investigation of crime is fundamental to the legitimacy of policing and to public confidence. It also influences how safe people feel and it prevents future offending. When a crime is reported, the public have a right to expect that the police will record and investigate the crime effectively. There has been a long-term decline in successful prosecutions, meaning that too few criminal investigations are leading to justice for victims. There is a general perception among the public that the police aren’t doing a good job of tackling the crimes that affect local communities. Therefore, as part of our 2022–25 programme of inspections, we inspected how effectively the police investigate crime. During our inspection, we saw numerous examples of initiatives forces have introduced to improve the standard of crime investigations and achieve better outcomes for victims. We have included 24 case studies in this report to highlight some of these initiatives. Understanding demand Crime experienced by individuals and households has generally decreased over the last 10 years. However, since 2015, police-recorded crime rates per 1,000 population have increased by 44 percent. Improved police recording practices, and an increase in public reporting of crime, are likely to have contributed to this increase in police-recorded crime. Since 2010, after accounting for changes in the population, the number of police officers in England and Wales has decreased by 6 percent. Over this period, the number of police staff decreased by 13 percent and the number of police community support officers decreased by 59 percent. We have previously reported that a shortage of resources negatively affects the police’s ability to detect crime. During our fieldwork, we heard about a lack of resources in every force we inspected. Interviewees told us that officers and staff often couldn’t investigate crime as well as they wanted to because their workloads were too high, they were under pressure and they didn’t have enough time. Frequently, we also saw the effect of this strain on their supervisors, line managers and chief officers, who repeated the same message. We concluded that in order to investigate volume crime more effectively, forces need more officers and staff. Forces don’t have an in-depth understanding of their crime-related demand. Most forces have a good understanding of their crime patterns, but analysis of future crime rates is inconsistent. The amount of digital evidence that investigators need to gather and examine has increased considerably over the past decade. This increase in digital evidence adds complexity to crime investigations. Forces need to consider this when analysing their crime-related demand. 

Birmingham, UK:His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue, 2025. 135p.

By Pradhi Aggarwal, Alec Brandon, Ariel Goldszmidt, Justin Holz, John A. List, Ian Muir, Gregory Sun, and Thomas Yu

Prior research on racial profiling has found that in encounters with law enforcement, minorities are punished more severely than white civilians. Less is known about the causes of these encounters and their implications for our understanding of racial profiling. Using high-frequency location data of rideshare drivers inFlorida (N = 222,838 individuals), we estimate the effect of driver race on citations and fines for speeding using 19.3 million location pings. Compared with a white driver traveling the same speed, we find that racial or ethnic minority drivers are 24 to 33% more likely to be cited for speeding and pay 23 to 34% more money in fines. We find no evidence that accident and reoffense rates explain these estimates, which suggests that animus against minorities underlies our results

Science, Volume 387, Issue 6741Mar 2025, 5p,

By Monica C. Bell

The Black Lives Matter movement has operated alongside a growing recognition among social scientists that policing research has been limited in its scope and outmoded in its assumptions about the nature of public safety. This essay argues that social science research on policing should reorient its conception of the field of policing, along with how the study of crime rates and police departments fit into this field. New public safety research should broaden its outcomes of interest, its objects of inquiry, and its engagement with structural racism. In this way, next-generation research on policing and public safety can respond to the deficiencies of the past and remain relevant as debates over transforming American policing continue.

  Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 35, Number 4—Fall 2021—Pages 29–48  

By Katherine Del Valle Hoogesteyn, Meret Sarah Hofer, Travis Anthony Taniguchi, Jennifer Rae Rineer.

Maintaining adequate staffing levels to ensure public safety is a critical challenge for law enforcement agencies, especially with rising officer turnover driven by sociopolitical factors and changing workforce demographics. This narrative review examines strategies to enhance officer retention by synthesizing findings from both policing and related fields. These strategies are organized into five categories: (1) compensation and financial incentives, (2) career development and professional growth, (3) workplace environment and support, (4) wellness and resilience, and (5) feedback and organizational learning. The review underscores the importance of context-specific, tailored approaches and calls for rigorous studies to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of these strategies. Recommendations include adapting organizational structures to foster innovative retention strategies, optimizing resource management, and implementing continuous evaluation processes to promote sustained officer retention.

Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press.2025. 22p

By Katherine Hoogesteyn; Travis A. Taniguchi

This paper presents the results of a review of literature discussing potentially effective practices and strategies for interviewing human trafficking victims in a law enforcement setting; the paper discusses the methodology for identifying applicable research reports as well as the findings, indicating limitations to the available research and implications for policy and practice.

Abstract

Victims of human trafficking play a key role in the investigation and prosecution of traffickers; however, their involvement in the interview process and the information they disclose largely depend on the quality of their interactions with interviewers. Victims of trafficking represent a challenging and complex subset of victims. Unfortunately, little is known about the effectiveness of interviewing strategies specifically with trafficking victims. Law enforcement agencies have limited evidence-based or actionable guidance to strengthen interviewing practices with this subset of victims. In addition to systematically identifying and describing the available literature on interviewing potential human trafficking victims in a law enforcement context, this report discusses interviewing practices and recommendations stemming from the literature, research gaps, and future research directions.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice. 2024. 52p.

By Travis A. Taniguchi , Jennifer R. Rineer , Katherine Hoogesteyn , Sean Wire and Lauren Mangum

Law enforcement agencies are struggling to meet recruitment goals and are rarely representative of the communities they serve. In particular, women make up just 12% of sworn officers despite the fact that women officers act in ways that are more consistent with community-oriented policing and use less force. Despite this, there are few evidence-based strategies that agencies can use to improve outreach and messaging efforts focussed on improving candidate diversity. The current study experimentally explored the effectiveness of job advertisements formatted similarly to popular social media platforms (Facebook Ads and short-form videos) and variations on law enforcement officer job descriptions. Results indicated that women-focussed recruitment material significantly improve perceptions of motivation to apply, relevance, and positive perceptions of the material for women participants and that diversity-focussed job descriptions improved perceptions of task and skill variety and diversity climate. These results, however, were only found for video advertising. Agencies should consider tailoring marketing material to meet the needs of different potential applicants and be sensitive to differences in marketing channels.

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 17, 2023, 21p.

By Ekow N. Yankah

A number of high-profile and racially charged killings, such as Trayvon Martin’s, Kenneth Herring’s, Ahmaud Arbery’s, and Jordan Neely’s, have been at the hands of civilians declaring themselves the law. These deaths stemmed from a phenomenon best described as “deputization.” Deputization describes a latent legal power that has empowered White people throughout American history to claim authority to enforce the law, as they see it, upon racial minorities generally and Black people in particular. This power turned the ancient common law duty to police all felons in England into a specific American common law duty to police Blacks. From the founding clauses of the Constitution to the Fugitive Slave Acts, to the birth of racist citizen’s arrest laws, there has always been an implicit understanding that part of Whiteness in America is a privilege to use private force to police Black people.

Deputization adds to the literature by focusing not only on racist state-sponsored violence but the privilege of racist private violence. Indeed, “deputization” is a more potent danger for Black Americans than racist policing. First, as a matter of magnitude, White Americans’ inherited assumption that they are authorized to violently enforce the law upon Black people dwarfs the reach of the police. Second, deputization is clothed in claims of legal authority; its power is amplified because those who act upon it feel they are in the right. Lastly, deputization shapes the way in which Black Americans so often move through the world: cautious, alert, or angry; their lives truncated, metaphorically and literally, by the awareness that White people around them claim a power to police them at any time.

Importantly, deputization presents a unique legal challenge because those who impose racial violence in its name do not fear the law; they are confident that they are both authorized by and reinforcing the law. This Article further places deputization in the context of two important areas of criminal theory. It shows how deputization presents another front in understanding critical race theories of criminal law. Simultaneously, it shows why civic, equality-based political theories are particularly insightful in identifying the harms deputization does to our civic bonds. Lastly, this Article shows the lessons of deputization can draw from criminal law abolitionism about the need to change deeper structures than policing while simultaneously cautioning of the dangers of private violence rushing to fill the void.

77 Stan. L. Rev. 703 (2025), 75p.

By Thalia González

The ever-growing list of names of Black victims who have died at the hands of police has emboldened a new public narrative that frames police violence—and other more commonplace, though less lethal, disparate policing practices—as a public health crisis rooted in this country’s history of racism and anti-Blackness. This public narrative in turn has spawned a diverse set of responsive actions in both the public and private sectors directed at addressing the effects of individual and structural racism on health. Yet missing from this linkage between police violence and racialized health disparities is any focus on the educational system, despite the increasing prevalence of police and standard policing practices in K-12 schools and the clear racial disparities of school policing. The central claim of this Essay is that school policing is an obvious public health issue. It sits at the nexus of two critical social determinants of health—education and racism—and requires targeted attention as such. The racialized nature of school-policing practices and the disparate outcomes for Black students are well documented. And, by applying a public health lens to this school police literature, specific individual- and aggregate-level health and mental outcomes become apparent. School policing negatively affects Black students’ mental health and physical safety, diminishes protective health factors, and places students at heightened risk for justice-system entry. Finally, understanding school policing as a public health issue has significant potential benefits and practical implications, especially for the antiracist health-equity movement.

Stanford Law Review Online, Vol. 73, 2021. 14p.

By Eisha Jain

This Essay argues that racial reckoning in policing should include a racial reckoning in the use of criminal records. Arrests alone—regardless of whether they result in convictions—create criminal records. Yet because the literature on criminal records most often focuses on prisoner reentry and on the consequences of criminal conviction, it is easy to overlook the connections between policing decisions and collateral consequences. This Essay employs the sociological framework of marking to show how criminal records entrench racial inequality stemming from policing. The marking framework recognizes that the government creates a negative credential every time it creates a record of arrest as well as conviction. Such records, in turn, trigger cascading consequences for employment, housing, immigration, and a host of other areas. The credentialing process matters because it enables and conceals race-based discrimination, and because a focus on the formal sentence often renders this discrimination invisible. This Essay considers how adopting a credentialing framework offers a way to surface, and ultimately to address, how race-based policing leaves lasting marks on over-policed communities.

Stanford Law Review Online, Volume 73, 2021. 18p.

By Jessica M. Eaglin

Much public debate circles around grassroots activists’ demand to “defund the police,” raised in public consciousness in the summer of 2020. Yet confusion about the demand is pervasive. This Essay adopts a literal interpretation of “defund” to clarify and distinguish four alternative, substantive policy positions that legal reforms related to police funding can validate. It argues that the policy debates between these positions exist on top of the ideological critique launched by grassroots activists, who use the term “defund the police” as a discursive tactic to make visible deeper transformations in government practices that normalize the structural marginalization of black people enforced through criminal law. w. By recognizing this socially contextualized meaning to the call to defund the police, this Essay offers two important insights for the public in this current moment. First, it urges the public to confront the structural marginalization of black people when evaluating legal reforms that may impact police budgets. Second, the Essay encourages the public to embrace the state of confusion produced by the demand to “defund the police” when considering social reforms going forward.

Stanford Law Review Online Volume 73 (2020-2021), 21p.

By Bocar A. Ba , Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo3, Roman Rivera

Diversification is a widely proposed policing reform, but its impact is difficult to assess. We used records of millions of daily patrol assignments, determined through fixed rules and preassigned rotations that mitigate self-selection, to compare the average behavior of officers of different demographic profiles working in comparable conditions. Relative to white officers, Black and Hispanic officers make far fewer stops and arrests, and they use force less often, especially against Black civilians. These effects are largest in majority-Black areas of Chicago and stem from reduced focus on enforcing low-level offenses, with greatest impact on Black civilians. Female officers also use less force than males, a result that holds within all racial groups. These results suggest that diversity reforms can improve police treatment of minority communities. 

Science, 371, (6): 2021, 8p.

By Lucy Strang, Jack Cattell, Eddie Kane, Emma Disley, Brenda Gonzalez-Ginocchio, Alex Hetherington, Sophia Hasapopoulos, Emma Zürcher  

Background to the Report RAND Europe, in partnership with Get the Data and Skills for Justice, was commissioned by the Ministry of Justice in 2021 to conduct a study funded by the Shared Outcomes Fund on how police in England and Wales use options to resolve cases out of court to support adults (aged 18 or over) with health-related vulnerabilities.1 Following legislative reforms, a ‘two-tier plus’ framework for Out of Court Disposals (OOCDs; or Out of Court Resolutions2) is due to come into force nationally. This new framework consolidates the current statutory disposals into two primary options: Diversionary Caution and Community Caution. In advance of the implementation of the framework, this study aimed to provide an overview of how different police forces use OOCDs; to improve the use of OOCDs with conditions attached that address mental health and other health-related vulnerabilities; and to produce the foundations of practice change and improve the data collection methods to monitor their use and enable potential further research to explore their effectiveness. The study took place in three phases: • In Phase 1, the research team captured the current use of OOCD conditions to support adults with health vulnerabilities and relevant services available locally for each of the 37 police force areas in England and Wales participating in this study, including identifying any local gaps in service provision. • In Phase 2, the research team explored in greater depth how health vulnerabilities are identified, relevant conditions set, and progress is monitored, as well as perceptions of the effectiveness of the conditions set in a sample of seven police forces. • In Phase 3, the research team worked with seven3 police forces on a more detailed follow-up to co-produce the foundations of practice change, developing improved operational practice around the use of OOCDs, and creating supportive guidance, tools and training to enable effective application of OOCDs with health related conditions. In addition, the research team worked with these forces to improve data collection on the use of OOCDs with conditions attached to enable potential longer-term analytical work to isolate the short, medium- and long-term impacts of individual interventions on reoffending. This Report presents findings from all three Phases of this study. It is intended to be useful and relevant for frontline and operational police officers, service providers and policy stakeholders. 1.2 Key findings from this study Force-level approaches to OOCDs • Just over half (19) of the participating forces were using a two-tier OOCD model in March 2022, with a further 13 forces reported to be introducing two-tier in 2022 or working towards introducing it in 2023. • The OOCD processes and protocols used varied a great deal between forces and work with the case study forces identified significant missed OOCD opportunities, even in forces which had high levels of OOCD usage. • Across 37 forces, 189 services were identified that could be attached as conditions to OOCDs, with substance misuse and mental health services the most commonly available to be attached to OOCDs. • Nevertheless, most force areas reported that the local provision of mental health-related services generally was not sufficient for the needs of vulnerable offenders with OOCDs. • A range of funding models for available services were identified, the most common of which were police-funded, externally funded (for example, by local authorities) and offender-funded. • Of the forces that reported engaging with service providers as part of their OOCD process, relationships with service providers were generally maintained through some form of regular contact. • The training of police officers and staff on OOCDs, particularly in relation to conducting vulnerability assessments, was generally conducted on an ad hoc basis and was not available as a structured programme for most police forces, with staff turnover and inexperienced officers identified as key challenges. • Disproportionality in who received OOCDs was identified as a concern by some OOCD stakeholders. • Force use of OOCD scrutiny panels, which independently review anonymised cases, varied greatly across forces. Frontline approaches to OOCDs • Three levels of decision-makers at key OOCD decision gateways – the officer in charge (OIC), their supervisor and the force OOCD management and support functions – were identified. • Most police forces did not have a force-wide policy requiring a health vulnerability screening and assessment during the OOCD decision-making process and the use of a tool to assess health vulnerabilities was a well established process in only a minority of forces, usually those with a dedicated OOCD team. • The majority of forces were still reliant on frontline officers and their supervisors to make decisions regarding OOCD condition setting and deciding on any supportive interventions. • The most effective OOCD management processes and outcomes were found in those with a dedicated team. • The responsibility for monitoring compliance varied significantly between forces, with some assigning it, for example, to a dedicated OOCD team, and others to the OIC or an OOCD caseworker. 5 experiment and process evaluation would offer the most rigorous findings in the current context. 1.3 Reflections and implications Overall, findings from the study indicate that there is significant variation across forces in England and Wales in their OOCD processes and in how well-developed and well-established these processes are. At the force level, it appeared that OOCDs were underused in many forces; across the 31 forces that shared information on outcomes given to offenders in 2021, on average only 8% of all offenders were given an OOCD, but this varied substantially between forces. Furthermore, significant gaps were identified across most force areas in the availability of interventions to meet the needs of vulnerable offenders. Furthermore, limited provision of training on OOCD use, staff turnover, high proportions of inexperienced officers, and the disproportionality in who receives OOCDs were identified as significant force-level challenges to making the best use of OOCDs to support adults with health vulnerabilities. At the frontline operational level, limited use of vulnerability assessments in the OOCD process and limited input from Liaison and Diversion (L&D) services were also widely reported. In relation to offender engagement and compliance with conditions, there is a lack of meaningful data available which creates challenges in understanding the effectiveness of their use. Overall, the existence of a dedicated OOCD team or independent entity was associated with strong and consistently applied OOCD processes. While most interventions identified in this study have not been rigorously evaluated, broader evidence from the UK and abroad suggests that OOCDs can address health vulnerabilities and reduce reoffending. In Section 5, we discuss how relevant data can be collated to facilitate the management, monitoring, and evaluation of OOCDs. Based on these reflections, our Phase 3 work produced a series of practice guides and tools to support forces to develop and maintain good practice in using OOCDs to support adults with health vulnerabilities. These guides and tools, listed below, are referred and linked to where appropriate throughout this report.    • Health Vulnerability Assessment Guide: to support forces in identifying the health vulnerability assessment process and enabling better decision-making throughout. This guide also includes good practice examples for working with Liaison and Diversion. • Quality Assurance Guide: discussing how forces can procure in a way that facilitates a good evidence base. • Auditing Missed Opportunities Guide: provides forces with a simple methodology for auditing OOCD decisions to identify learning. • Data collection tool prototype: to support forces in gathering and using OOCD data. In addition, the study team developed OOCD training resources for forces to support relevant officers and decision makers on setting conditions to OOCDs to address health vulnerabilities, and to support higher level decision makers on implementing OOCD processes. Implications Sections 3, 4 and 5 conclude with a series of implications for OOCD practitioners and stakeholders in light of the implementation of the statutory two-tier plus framework in 2023. At the force level (Section 3), these implications are: • Each force should review their current processes and protocols to ensure significant opportunities to use OOCDs for those with health vulnerabilities are not being missed. This could include offence type audits and more detailed scrutiny of cases given OOCD and equivalent cases where they were not. A guide developed as part of this study is available (see the Rand website). • Forces should analyse data on local needs to identify any gaps in service provision, and work with service providers to address these gaps. • Forces should build service provision for OOCDs and their relationships with service providers by piloting and scaling up services in response to identified local need (and informed by robust evidence of effectiveness – see Section 5 below (see the Rand website). • Where possible, forces should seek to identify and utilise service providers with stable sources of funding to help ensure resilience in service provision. This may mean that some services are funded by the police to provide this stability. Furthermore, reducing offender-pays services can remove some barriers to compliance. • Forces should establish consistent and standardised modes of communication with service providers, including on compliance with and breaches of conditions. This may be easier with a dedicated OOCD team. • Forces should facilitate good information sharing by integrating service providers into police IT systems (in compliance with relevant data protection regulations.) • Each force should review their current training arrangements to ensure all those involved in OOCD decision-making are suitably trained in this area. Forces can consider adopting/adapting the training model outlined in this guidance (see the Rand website). • Each force should review its current use of OOCD attached services aimed at those with health vulnerabilities to ensure that their current practice is not resulting in disproportionality in the use of OOCDs or discriminating against some individuals, groups or communities. • Each force should review their current adult OOCD scrutiny arrangements to ensure that their overall oversight and accountability mechanisms for OOCDs are more consistent and comprehensive, as well as able to address wider issues of disproportionality. At the frontline operational level (Section 4), these implications are: • Each force (where not already in place) should review its position on having a dedicated OOCD team and develop options to put one in place. • Each force should review their current approach to screening for and assessing health vulnerabilities as part of the OOCD decision making process including links to L&D or equivalent services in all relevant settings including for Voluntary Attendance. The research team has developed a guide on working with L&D for OOCDs (see the Rand website).  ....continued.....

London: UK Ministry of Justice, 2024. 150p.

By Richard Odin Segovia 

This systematic review explores the recruitment and retention challenges in law enforcement, focusing on their impact on operational effectiveness and community safety. The goal is to synthesize existing literature to identify research gaps and suggest directions for future studies. By examining qualitative and quantitative research, this review aims to provide practical strategies to improve recruitment and retention in law enforcement. Methods: Searches were conducted using Google Scholar, JSTOR, and ProQuest to capture a broad range of law enforcement recruitment and retention studies. The selection process involved a systematic search that yielded 135 records. After removing duplicates, 42 studies were screened based on title and abstract, leading to 34 full-text articles assessed for eligibility. Twenty-five studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the qualitative and quantitative synthesis, and five additional sources were used for background and contextual information. This review adhered to PRISMA guidelines. Results: The review highlights key factors influencing recruitment and retention, including public perceptions, competing labor markets, and organizational culture. Enhanced recruitment efforts, such as digital campaigns and targeted outreach, significantly increase applications and improve the quality of applicants. Supportive workplace environments and wellness programs substantially reduce turnover rates and improve job satisfaction. Effective recruitment and retention strategies also enhance community trust and workforce diversity. Conclusions: The review underscores the need for well-structured research to substantiate effective recruitment and retention strategies. It recommends areas for in-depth exploration in future studies, especially longitudinal research on the long-term impacts of innovative recruitment and retention strategies. Application to Law Enforcement: Integrating digital recruitment, community engagement, and wellness programs can enhance workforce stability  and effectiveness for law enforcement leaders. These strategies improve officer recruitment and retention, reduce turnover, and build stronger relationships with the community, leading to more effective policing outcomes.    

Lynchburg, VA: Liberty University, 2024. 43p.

 By Logan Seacrest and Jillian Snider  

  This policy study explores the recruitment and retention crisis in U.S. law enforcement, analyzing historical, social, and economic factors that have shaped the problem. It describes the staffing shortage, evaluates its consequences, and explores innovative strategies to address the issue. The findings and recommendations offered in this paper provide a practical, comprehensive framework for agencies to build and sustain a strong, resilient workforce

R Street Policy Study No. 31, 2025. 27p.

By Eve M. Brank, Jennifer L. Groscup, and Kayla R. Sircy

The Fourth Amendment and court cases interpreting it provide guidelines for how law enforcement should legally approach searching for and taking evidence in criminal investigations. Though it originally applied to physical intrusion by law enforcement, current—and likely future—intrusions are more virtual in nature. Law enforcement officers no longer need to walk onto someone’s property to search for criminal activity because various technologies now provide similar or more in-depth information. Technological innovations have stretched the bounds of the Fourth Amendment. Although public opinion cannot answer the policy implications, it can speak to what the public reasonably expects of the police. In general, limited research demonstrates that the public has concerns about the way law enforcement officers can use technology in their investigations, but those concerns are not strong enough to decrease individuals’ technology use  

Annual Review of Law and Social Science Vol. 20:387-405, October 2024)

By Brian A. Jackson, Pauline Moore, Jennifer T. Leschitz, Benjamin Boudreaux, Jo Caulkins, Shoshana R. Shelton

Violence by K–12 students is disturbingly common. Ensuring that schools have effective ways to identify and prevent such incidents is becoming increasingly important. Various concerning behaviors or disturbing communications, including direct threats, can precede acts of violence. Although removing every student exhibiting such behaviors might seem prudent, doing so can be counterproductive, limiting the effectiveness of safety efforts. With effective systems for behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM), schools can assess and respond to concerning behavior to protect the community and respond to the student whose behavior caused concern.

To do so, schools need the tools to respond. Tools may include restrictive measures or law enforcement involvement in the most serious cases, but other options can be more effective. Those additional options include different types of mental health intervention, counseling, and other supports. Teams with extensive tools available to them can better customize interventions, increasing the chance of positive outcomes for all involved.

In this report, the authors draw on published literature and extensive interviews with education and public safety practitioners to build an inventory of the many intervention options that are valuable for schools in the management phase of BTAM. In addition, drawing on varied approaches from the fields of counseling, school discipline and behavioral management, and other professions that must match appropriate services to the needs of youth in their care, the report discusses decision support tools to help management teams implement this critical part of efforts in preventing targeted violence and keeping school communities safe.

Key Findings

Various Intervention Options Are Available for K–12 BTAM Efforts

Support-focused interventions can address the underlying causes of problematic student behavior and also lead a student toward a more favorable, positive path into the future.

By using supportive counseling and other interventions, BTAM is widening the options available for school leaders and staff to address problematic behavior that has the potential to develop into violence.

To be effective, school BTAM teams need a broad set of tools, including options appropriately matched (1) to the specifics of a student's problematic behaviors, (2) to the unique school community and environment, and (3) to the needs and circumstances of the student or students involved.

Insights from Education, Public Safety, and Other Fields Can Be Combined to Support Matching Effective Interventions to Student Needs

Decision support tools and resource-matching guidance can help ensure that school-based teams are collecting the information required to taking a holistic approach to address a student's varied needs and help promote appropriate consistency to ensure that disparities in how BTAM teams respond do not substantiate concerns that BTAM processes are unfair or inequitable.

Using structured systems to capture data when a BTAM team (1) interviews students involved in an incident, (2) collects school or law enforcement data, or (3) contacts others for information about a student of concern provides a more straightforward starting point for selecting among multiple intervention options.

Recommendations

To better inform intervention planning, intervention tools should be designed so that they prioritize collecting data on factors that can be changed because pieces of information in BTAM that may be a useful part of assessing the danger posed by an individual may be useless for intervention planning.

The inventory of intervention options developed in this study could provide a starting point for schools to make conscious decisions as they (1) review the options available to their teams and (2) identify any options they do not have access to but that could become valuable near-term priorities to strengthen their school safety efforts.

Progress monitoring data of BTAM efforts can help better support students while also helping schools become more responsive to external oversight of their BTAM programs and allay concerns about the fairness and equity of outcomes across different student populations.

Including positive mileposts into threat management planning not only could help lay out a path to full completion of all intervention activities but could also help define goals more specifically for an at-risk student, motivating even more beneficial outcomes.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2025. 170p.

By David J. Knight and Vesla M. Weaver

This review integrates recent scholarship outside of criminology with primary source material from a broadened source base to trace underappreciated histories of political struggle to secure safety and address harm in Black communities. Much of the existing literature in criminology and related social science fields tends to overlook bottom-up sources and the creative safety practices and sites of safety provision that exist and, in so doing, contributes to a lopsided empirical narrative of policing in the United States. This review, however, highlights the centrality of Black-led political mobilization, formal and informal, to articulating alternate visions of safety beyond policing and building alternate structures to transform the legal system and challenge racial criminalization. Examples include community patrols, the efforts of Black police to confront violence in their own departments and stand up structures of responsiveness, and national campaigns to challenge punitive legislation and offer alternatives. Unearthing these often marginalized and misrecognized histories and sources of Black-led struggle for community safety enables an analysis of not only the forms that community-led practices and interventions can take but also the ongoing state-produced conditions—referred to in this review as safety deprivation—that give rise to them. More broadly, this review uses these histories as a lens through which to consider how empirical narratives of policing and safety are transformed when community-derived, bottom-up knowledge sources are accounted for both substantively and methodologically and offers the field a guide of available databases.

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2025. 8:25–52

By The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services

The Community Policing Act of 2020 (HB 1250; “the Act") mandated that the Virginia State Police (VSP) and other state and local law enforcement agencies, including police departments (PDs) and sheriff’s offices (SOs), begin collecting and reporting data on traffic stops as of July 1, 2020. State law enforcement agencies, PDs, and SOs are required to collect data on the race, ethnicity, and other characteristics of the drivers stopped, and on other circumstances of the stop such as the reason for the stop, whether any individuals or vehicles were searched, and the outcome of the stop (arrest, citation, warning, etc.). All reporting agencies are to submit this data to VSP, who maintain the data in the Community Policing Database.

The Act also mandated that the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) periodically obtain data from the Community Policing Database and produce an annual report “for the purposes of analyzing the data to determine the existence and prevalence of the practice of bias-based profiling and the prevalence of complaints alleging the use of excessive force." Such reports shall be produced and published by July 1 of each year.

This is the third of these reports from DCJS. It contains a review of how the data was collected and analyzed as well as preliminary findings of data from 650,387 traffic stops reported in Virginia during the nine-month period between July 1, 2022, and March 31, 2023. This report also presents the findings from analyses of statewide data; aggregated data from the seven VSP Divisions; and data from each individual law enforcement agency that reported sufficient data to the Community Policing Database.

The information presented in this report is preliminary and should be interpreted with caution. Although this analysis identified disparities in traffic stop rates related to race/ethnicity, it does not allow us to determine or measure specific reasons for these disparities. Most importantly for this study, this analysis does not allow us to determine the extent to which these disparities may or may not be due to bias-based profiling or to other factors that can vary depending on race or ethnicity. These other factors include differences in locations where police focus their patrol activities, differences in underlying regional populations, differences in driving patterns among individuals, and the lack of a scientifically established baseline for determining the number of drivers in each racial/ethnic group who are on the road and subject to being stopped while driving.

The analysis of racial disparity is a complex field with a vast array of potential contributing factors. Many data elements could play influential roles in racial/ethnic patterns of traffic enforcement but are unavailable to DCJS. Factors like the race of the officer performing the stop, agency policies and community priorities driving enforcement patterns, police report narratives outlining legal justifications for stop, search, and arrest can all inform stop patterns but are not within the current purview of available Community Policing Act data. Additionally, the data presented in this report cannot reflect any stop trends from agencies which did not provide data or records that were excluded for completeness issues. As such, while the report presents stop, search, and arrest disparities based on the available data, they should not be construed as complete and final proof of disparity OR any explanation of contributing factors which drive genuine disparities which may exist.

This report does not tabulate the many positive actions that can occur for a traffic stop such as seizures of guns, confiscation of drugs, and ensuring valid and current drivers’ licenses. The Community Policing Act imposes narrow requirements for data collection and analysis, and any benefits of traffic or pedestrian stops are not within the scope of the law.

While DCJS and VSP have introduced process improvements based on lessons learned in past reporting, the Community Policing Act is still in the early stages of implementation. More and better data, as noted in the recommendations, is needed to make the observations in this report more than directional, and the costs of such data gathering need further evaluation. As the report notes, many PDs and SOs − especially smaller agencies with limited resources − continue to face challenges establishing the data collection and reporting required under the Act. The majority of local law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in Virginia (255, or 74%) employ 50 or fewer sworn officers, including 118 (or 34%) employing 10 or fewer sworn officers. Many of these agencies have faced challenges fulfilling all requirements imposed by the Act and aligning their collection practices with the changes introduced since first implementation of the Act. For this reason, some agencies were unable to report complete data responsive to the Community Policing Act for the entire year, and in some cases the quality of the data was limited. Additionally, a substantial number of smaller agencies reported so few traffic stops that it was not possible to interpret data related to driver race/ethnicity. The state may wish to consider providing additional resources to LEAs, particularly smaller agencies, to support their ability to comply with the data-related provisions of the Act.

Another important limitation to the data and findings presented in this report relates to the race/ethnicity data in the Community Policing Database itself. Because the state lacks a standardized mechanism for reporting the race or ethnicity of a given driver, law enforcement officers must either make their own determination about a driver’s race/ethnicity (which may or may not be accurate) or ask for that information in the course of the traffic stop, which could raise constitutional concerns or escalate the perception of conflict in certain situations. Virginia does not collect and store information about a driver’s race/ethnicity, whether in driver-related databases maintained by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles or on individual driver’s licenses. Whether and to what extent the data related to driver race/ethnicity in the Community Policing Database accurately captures this information cannot be determined without further review.

The factors described above limited the ability of DCJS staff to conduct any complex statistical analysis of the data or to draw any firm conclusions about the existence and prevalence of the practice of bias-based profiling in a given agency or jurisdiction. It is anticipated that the reporting, analysis, and interpretation of Community Policing Act data will improve in the future as the program matures.

Richmond: Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services, 2021. 73p.