By Stewart Scott

US cybersecurity policy has a critical blind spot: the absence of reliable outcome metrics that can inform policymakers about whether the digital ecosystem is becoming more secure and which interventions are driving progress most effectively. Despite years of strategies, regulations, and best-practices campaigns, the field of cybersecurity metrics has room to grow, and policymakers still lack answers to fundamental questions. How much harm are cybersecurity incidents causing? Are things getting better or worse? Which policies deliver the greatest return on investment for reducing realized harm and the risk of future harm? This report identifies two core problems holding back progress: first, the unknown state of the system, meaning policymakers cannot empirically describe how secure or insecure the digital landscape currently is; and second, unmeasured policy efficacy, which prevents policymakers from comparing which interventions are most effective at improving security and reducing harm. The result is a policymaking environment heavily reliant on intuition, anecdote, incomplete data, and proxy measures—all unsustainable for a domain with such systemic and escalating risks and so much security investment. To address these challenges, the report proposes a reframing of cybersecurity metrics along two dimensions: 1. Treating cybersecurity as a complex system—acknowledging that incident outcomes result from dynamic, probabilistic interactions between policies, technologies, adversaries, and users. 2. Focusing on harm as the key outcome metric—shifting emphasis from internal system attributes (e.g., the number of vulnerabilities discovered) to the real-world impacts of cyber incidents, such as financial losses, operational disruptions, and physical damage. The report then explores the current limitations of available metrics, illustrating how wide-ranging estimates of incident costs and inconsistent data collection methods hamstring policymakers. It outlines the difficulty of measuring and interpreting harm data at scale due to factors such as silent failures, complex indirect costs, and underreporting, but it argues that such challenges are not insurmountable and that a desire for perfect metrics cannot impede progress toward better ones. Finally, the paper offers two actionable recommendations for near-term progress: 1. Strengthen existing reporting requirements (e.g., CIRCIA, SEC disclosures) to include consistent, updated measures of incident impact. 2. Centralize responsibility under a single federal entity to aggregate, analyze, interpret, and publish cybersecurity harm data across sectors. While perfection in cybersecurity metrics may be impossible, measuring harms is the most direct way to track progress and guide investment and the most critical metric to bolster policymakers’ toolkit. Without such measurement, the United States risks continuing to navigate a complex, evolving system with an incomplete map

Washington, DC: Atlantic Council, 2025. 25p.

By Kathleen Doherty and Annie Chen

In 2013, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) ruled that stop and frisk practices employed by the NYPD were unconstitutional, specifically violating the Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure as well as the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protections under the law due to the discriminatory nature of the stops. A Monitor was installed to oversee compliance, and in 2021, CUNY ISLG was brought in to conduct a study using information captured on body-worn cameras (BWCs).

The CUNY ISLG study examined police encounters recorded by BWCs over a two-month period in 2022 to assess how frequently stops were constitutional. The study also assessed whether police were appropriately documenting stops. The overarching goal of the study was to provide information on the NYPD’s compliance with court-ordered reforms in three primary focus areas. See the executive summary and full report for the complete findings, but select findings, by focus area, are:

Constitutionality of stops and frisks. The study assessed how frequently officers who conduct stops violate the Fourth Amendment, examined the conditions in which unconstitutional stops occur, and identified the reasons a stop was unconstitutional.

Seventy-two percent of the stops were constitutional and 19 percent unconstitutional. The remaining 9 percent had either no consensus or insufficient information.

Unconstitutional stops were particularly prevalent among stops conducted by officers assigned to a Neighborhood Safety Team (NST), which are special units tasked with securing illegal guns. Thirty-five percent of stops were unconstitutional when an NST officer was present compared to 16 percent of stops without one.

Differences by race and ethnicity. To assess compliance with the Fourteenth Amendment, the study examined differences in constitutionality by race and ethnicity, including by conducting statistical analysis to assess differences in the constitutionality of a stop.

Among all stops, 21 percent and 19 percent of the stops of Black and Hispanic individuals were rated as unconstitutional, respectively, compared to 11 percent of the stops of all other races.

Black and Hispanic individuals constituted 97 percent of self-initiated stops. Self-initiated stops of Black and Hispanic individuals were unconstitutional at 48 and 46 percent, respectively, compared to 15 percent of the self-initiated stops of individuals of all other races.

Full and accurate documentation of stops. The study assessed the prevalence of unreported stops and the conditions in which officers most often fail to document stops appropriately in the field.

Among encounters that are low-level (i.e. officers did not indicate that a stop, arrest, or summons occurred), 2 percent of individuals were in fact stopped but not documented by police with a stop report. While this number is small in percentage terms, it indicates a large number of unreported stops because low-level encounters (not labeled as including a stop, arrest, or summons) are extremely numerous (approximately 650,000 recordings or 200,000 encounters).

New York: CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance , 2025. 92p.

By MICHAEL SKIDMORE

Fraud has become the single biggest form of crime affecting people in the UK and yet our policing institutions have not caught up with the scale of that change. We have a 1960s local policing structure trying to fight a 21st century cyberenabled cross border crime. As a result, the police are achieving limited success and victims are receiving too little by way of service. In 2024 4.1 million people were victims of fraud which alone constituted 43 per cent of all crime affecting those aged over 16 in England and Wales (ONS, 2025). The UK government’s National Fraud Strategy1 estimates that fraud costs UK society £6.8 billion a year (UK Government, 2023). Fraud is not a ‘victimless crime’. According to a recent Police Foundation survey 58 per cent of fraud victims in two police force areas felt worried, 56 per cent experienced stress, 46 per cent felt vulnerable and unsafe and 18 per cent experienced depression. Taking the above statistics into account, the police response to fraud does not match the level of threat to the public. In England and Wales less than a third of frauds are reported to the police. Of those that are reported just 3.5 per cent are deemed suitable for a police investigation (Doig et al., 2024). Most victims reporting fraud to the police receive no service at all. In a 2025 survey2 of police officers and staff carried out for this paper, we found that: • 67 per cent of police workers surveyed said that businesses (e.g., banks, retailers, online platforms) hold the most responsibility for reducing fraud. • 88 per cent of police workers surveyed disagreed with the statement – “Police officers have sufficient resources (time, personnel, budget) to tackle fraud”. • 44 per cent of police workers surveyed don’t think the police are doing a good job when it comes to tackling fraud. • Half (51 per cent) don’t believe police officers have the skills to investigate fraud. • 5 per cent agreed fraud was a victimless crime provided no money was lost. • 67 per cent agreed fraud should be handled by a single national policing body. • 37 per cent aren’t clear which agency should be investigating fraud cases. • 41 per cent of police workers surveyed think fraud is low priority for UK police forces compared to other crimes. The police response to fraud is hampered by: 1. A lack of resources. As of March 2021 there were just 866 economic crime officers in English and Welsh police forces, including regional asset recovery teams. This constitutes a mere 0.64 per cent of the total police workforce to respond to 42 per cent of crime. 2. A predominantly local response to a cross-border crime. While fraud has become a cross border ‘distance crime’, often originating overseas, the operational response to it remains largely local. In practical terms there are limits to what local forces can do to investigate complex fraud. Fraud cases are also rarely prioritised over other local crimes such as sexual and violent crimes. 3. A lack of an ability to identify harm and seriousness. Fraud cases are disseminated on the basis of the viability of a potential investigation rather than because of an assessment of the harm caused to the victim. There is currently no common framework which would allow the police to triage and prioritise fraud cases based on harm 4. A lack of skills. The police workforce currently lacks the skills to properly investigate fraud. In 22 out of 32 police forces surveyed, generalist local investigation teams dealt with all or most fraud investigations, despite 86 per cent of officers believing fraud should be dealt with by specialists. 5. The response remains too focused on arrests and prosecutions. In a world where most fraud originates overseas there needs to be more to the law enforcement approach than trying to achieve traditional criminal justice outcomes. In particular more should be done to proactively disrupt the organised crime networks perpetrating fraud. 6. There is a lot of data on fraud but insufficient insight is being generated from it. From the volumes of crimes reported to a variety of different agencies and the wealth of data that exists in the private sector in relation to fraud there is a vast amount of intelligence that could be used to help inform the police response, support investigations and target proactive operations. Yet while there have been improvements in data sharing this could go much further. The report makes the several recommendations to tackle these problems:

London: Police Foundation, 2025. 28p.

By The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) h

Police departments in the United States are charged with a broad set of responsibilities, and officers typically have little specialized training in the breadth of complex issues they encounter. Police are asked to respond to robberies and homicides, but they also enforce traffic rules and respond to noise complaints, domestic disputes, mental health crises, unhoused individuals, and more. Simply put, police are asked to do too much with too little. The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) has conducted multiple studies analyzing the type and severity of calls for service (CFS; i.e., 911 calls) in a variety of police departments across the country, finding across the board that CFS are overwhelmingly for noncriminal or low-level incidents. For example, according to NICJR’s analysis of Oakland Police Department (OPD) calls for service data, between 2018– 2020, nearly 60% of calls responded to by OPD were for noncriminal matters. This amounted to more than 368,000 responses. And in Seattle, NICJR found that 79% of calls received were noncriminal or low-level events, and only 6% of calls were associated with felonies of any kind, violent or nonviolent.1 For this report, NICJR analyzed CFS data as well as police department (PD) budgets for 10 California cities and eight cities in other US states. Across all 18 cities:

Oakland, CA: The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) , 2025. 56p

By Dennis P. Rosenbaum

Calls for police reform play an integral part in the evolution of modern policing. But what truly needs reform is how police agencies evaluate their performance. Rather than determining effectiveness exclusively through crime-fighting statistics, police agencies must also incorporate assessments of how community members are treated. Evidence-based policing must acknowledge a large body of research on procedural justice and recognize the critical role it plays in determining police legitimacy. To implement effective reforms within this framework, the definition of “good policing” must be reimagined, as well as the metrics used to evaluate it. This Ideas in American Policing essay examines previous reform concepts and their shortfalls. It explores how human behavior is heavily influenced by incentives and disincentives and whether a strong enough reward system is in place to truly move officers from the “warrior” to the “guardian” mentality. Lastly, it examines what police leaders, government officials, and policing scholars will need to do to implement, successfully evaluate, and achieve lasting reform within the communities being served.

Ideas in American Policing 2024/

Arlington, VA: National Policing Institute, 2024. 18p.

By Thomas E. Christoff, Shelby Hickman, Zoë Thorkildsen, Monique Jenkins, Jennifer Lafferty, Melissa Gutierrez and Heleana Melendez

Police departments have evolved since the advent of modern policing in the early 19th century, with their roles and purposes constantly changing to meet the needs of the communities they serve. In that time, technology (defined here as tools or systems that enhance law enforcement’s ability to perform its duties) has also evolved, particularly since the 1990s, and police departments are increasingly incorporating modern technology into their daily functions. One of the earliest instances of technology use by police departments was the adoption of the police radio, which allowed officers to have constant communication with one another while patrolling different beats. Since the adoption of the police radio, technology has advanced in ways that benefit not only officers but also the public. Technology provides police departments with the ability to improve accountability and transparency, improve the quality of investigations, effectively allocate resources, and improve levels of trust with their communities. However, given the rapid pace of technological advancement in policing, a review of the various tools presently used in police departments is needed to better understand what is effective in achieving common goals. Using a systematic review framework, the CNA team searched relevant literature examining police, technology and innovation, public safety, crime reduction, and community relationships and identified 1,500 articles for initial review. These articles included academic research, government publications, unpublished studies, and other grey literature. The team completed a more in-depth review of the identified articles, using nine criteria to determine eligibility for this systematic review. The in-depth review yielded 98 articles eligible for the final review. These 98 studies examined police departments’ use of various technologies such as body-worn cameras (BWC), information technology (IT) (e.g., CompStat), closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, spatial analysis software, uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS, often called drones), license plate readers (LPR), social media and other public websites, mobile phones or computers, and gunshot detection. Final review included literature coding, which identified the following information from the articles: • Department or agency discussed • Agency type • Research question • Data source • Sample or respondents • Technology (category and specific) • Study type • Evaluation type • Research approach • Research methods • Study included cost-benefit analysis (CBA) • Outcomes (category and specific) The purpose of the present study is to provide a guide for employing any new technology, discuss insights on technologies currently being used in law enforcement agencies in the United States, and summarize findings and outcomes from the articles reviewed. It also provides a broader discussion on lessons learned for agencies implementing a new technology, including how to determine a need for technology, positive practices when implementing the technology, and anticipated benefits for modern technologies. In addition, it discusses how law enforcement can use technology as a tool to improve crime prevention, investigations and case clearances, accountability and transparency, and community relations. Technology has the potential to aid crime analysts in identifying crime trends, detectives in making arrests, and agencies in maintaining officer standards and building a stronger level of trust between communities and the officers who serve them. Both researchers and police departments therefore have the responsibility to take initiative in reviewing tools and practices to ensure department resources are effectively used.

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. 2024.68p.

By Camello, M., Gomez Cardoso, A., Krebs, C., Planty, M

The Criminal Justice Technology Adoption and Implementation Guide is a resource for criminal justice decision-makers who want to assess agency challenges and understand potential solutions. The guide provides criminal justice decision-makers with a resource to consider the technical, operational, and governance factors that accompany adoption and implementation of technology solutions. The guide is designed for a broad range of criminal justice decision-makers, including those in law enforcement, corrections, community supervision, and courts.

Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI International., 2025. 13p.

By Shute, R., & Mecray, M.

Service weapon activity, including instances where an officer’s firearm is drawn, pointed, or discharged, plays an important role in understanding events transpiring during a police–public encounter. Detection, documentation, and communication of these events in a way that is accurate, timely, and dependable is vital for enhancing transparency and accountability of law enforcement service weapon use. About this Report - The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) requested the Criminal Justice Technology Testing and Evaluation Center (CJTTEC) to investigate the landscape of commercially available and emerging technologies that could meet this need. CJTTEC conducted a review of technologies capable of detecting when a service weapon has been unholstered, pointed, or discharged; documenting when a law enforcement officer discharges their service weapon (or initiating documentation such as body-worn camera (BWC) recordings in such incidents); and communicating the information to dispatchers. CJTTEC’s methodology to understand this technology landscape included secondary research (e.g., reviewing patents, trade literature, press releases, news articles, and publications) and primary research with technology experts, product representatives, and researchers. This brief provides a high-level summary of technology systems capable of documenting, detecting, and communicating service weapon activity, focusing specifically on technology integrated into or onto the weapon, in a holster, in a BWC, in a wearable device, or in environmental sensing tools. Conclusion Although no single commercially available tool is capable of detecting, documenting, and communicating service weapon activity, law enforcement agencies may be able to rely on a suite of products to help them address these needs.

Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI International 2024. . 15p.

By Camello, M., Gomez Cardoso, A., Planty, M., Ruiz, C., & Cramer, J

Real-time crime centers (RTCCs) are centralized hubs that integrate data from various sources to provide law enforcement agencies and their officers with actionable intelligence and enhanced situational awareness in real-time. This report defines RTCCs, describes the activities that RTCCs support, outlines the technology workflow of an effective RTCC, and examines the technical, operational, and governance considerations for implementation.

Research Triangle Institute, NC: Criminal Justice Technology Testing and Evaluation Center; RTI International , 2024. 24p.

By The National Policing Institute

The purpose of accreditation in law enforcement agencies is to establish a foundation of policies, procedures, and practices that promote optimal outcomes in policing. Consistent internal review of an agency’s policies and procedures, combined with third-party validation, supports the delivery of high-quality public safety services, and promotes a culture of accountability in policing. Stated simply, accreditation provides a roadmap for constitutional policing and ensures police agencies continuously consider legal standards, best practices, scientific evidence, and innovation. Many resources are available to law enforcement executives seeking to implement evidence informed and best practices in their agencies as part of the accreditation process. Model policies, training standards, and empirical research can all provide valuable information to inform police practice. National-level guidance on constitutional policing practices, however, can be particularly valuable. Indeed, the settlement agreements, including consent decrees, that the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) engages in with law enforcement agencies following “pattern or practice” investigations are presumed to outline important aspects of 21st Century Policing. The changes implemented by law enforcement agencies to address these agreements should, therefore, demonstrate aspects of constitutional policing in practice. Despite the value of the documentation surrounding these settlement agreements, there has been limited empirical examination of the organizational conditions and practices that precede formal intervention by the DOJ. The systematic identification of the factors contributing to DOJ involvement can provide critical insights for law enforcement executives who seek to be proactive in reviewing and enhancing their agency’s policies, training, and practices. In this vein, the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies contracted the services of the National Policing Institute (hereafter the Institute) in 2022 to review recent pattern or practice investigations conducted by the DOJ to identify: • The events and organizational factors that precede an investigation; • The issues most commonly examined by pattern or practice investigators; • The investigative process and methodological approaches used to identify patterns or practices of unconstitutional policing; • The evidence cited to support observations of unconstitutional policing; and • The remedial measures outlined by the DOJ to address unconstitutional policing practices. Between 2010 and 2022, the DOJ initiated 27 pattern or practice investigations into law enforcement agencies. In this report, the Institute research team presents findings from a qualitative examination of the 19 pattern or practice investigations that had investigative reports and/or findings letters available for review. Specifically, content analysis was conducted on 21 documents, including 11 investigative reports and 10 findings letters, that were available for review across these investigations. The analysis of these documents identifies the reported process, findings, and recommendations produced from 19 DOJ pattern or practice investigations of law enforcement agencies The remainder of this report is organized as follows: Section 02 provides background on the authority of the DOJ to conduct pattern or practice investigations and the context surrounding those investigations. Section 03 presents the results of the research team’s content analysis. Section 04 provides a discussion of the findings and conclusion of the report. The methodology used to identify the sample of pattern or practice investigations and analyze the content of the investigative reports and findings letters for those investigations is outlined in Appendix A

Arlington VA: The National Policing Institute, 2023. 40p.

By The National Policing Institute

This guide, created by the National Policing Institute, is intended for law enforcement personnel or representatives who actively develop annual reviews to summarize their agency’s use of force. We encourage law enforcement executives to provide this document to their staff so that they may review and use the guide as a framework. This document was developed specifically for law enforcement agencies in New Jersey but may benefit others in the field.

Arlington, VA: The National Policing Institute, 2024. 18p.

By Juan Del Toro, Dylan B. Jackson, Ming-Te Wang

The present daily-diary study examined 13,545 daily survey assessments from 387 adolescents (Mage = 13–14; 40% male; 32% Black, 50% White, and 18% Other ethnic-racial minority) across 35 days to assess whether police stops predicted adolescents’ school disengagement through their psychological distress as a mediator. Results showed that 9% of youth experienced at least one police stop, and 66 stops occurred in total over the 35-day study course. Youth stopped by the police reported greater next-day school disengagement, and youth’s psychological distress mediated the link between police stops and school disengagement. Disengagement did not predict youth’s next-day police stops. In addition, ethnic-racial minority youth reported more negative police encounters than did White youth, and the effect of a police stop on next-day psychological distress was more negative for Other ethnic-racial minority youth. Implications for reducing police intervention in adolescents’ lives are discussed.

Dev Psychol. 2022, 23p.

By Public Works LLC

The City of Des Moines commissioned the consulting firm Public Works LLC to perform five basic functions: 1. Identify the current state as to how and what data is being collected by and within the Des Moines Police Department (DMPD) and how that data is applied to inform the practice and policies of law enforcement. 2. Identify promising (best) practices in the field of law enforcement data and show the ways that police departments are applying these practices to enhance how they collect, analyze, share, and act upon what they learn from data. 3. Conduct a needs assessment to identify gaps the DMPD faces between the current state and what could ideally be achieved by implementing promising practices in the field. 4. Identify opportunities to address those gaps and enhance what and how data is collected, analyzed, shared with the community, and acted upon. 5. Engage and learn from the community as to their perspectives and insights as to how and what law enforcement data is being collected, analyzed and shared. Public Works created a conceptual framework to research, examine, assess and organize the law enforcement data initiative we were tasked to develop. It centers upon the basic principle that data systems should achieve four core attributes – they should be accountable, analytic, transparent, and actionable. These four core data attributes serve as the architecture for the entire project, the framework for our research determining and describing the DMPD’s current state of data policy and practice, and our research in scoping out promising practices in the field of law enforcement data. This structure also guided how we determined needs, how we framed questions and gathered insights from the community and, finally, how we came to recommend action steps for the City of Des Moines to pursue in order to realize the ideal state in the field of law enforcement data policy and practice. Data Collection in Des Moines The goal of data collection is to record integral information on policing encounters and activities that enable the identification of trends, patterns, and outcomes leading to informed insights and action through policy and practice. The Des Moines Police Department currently collects data on: stops resulting in citations, arrest data, calls for service, use of force, offenders and victims of crimes. Data on Stops: The Des Moines Police Department does not currently collect data on stops that do not result in a citation, warning, or arrest. Data on Citations: Police officers issuing citations after a stop enter the citation data using the TraCS software that has been installed in their vehicles. A large part of the data is generated automatically from the cited individual’s driver’s license, but the driver’s license does not always include race and ethnicity data. Officers may manually enter that data based on observation, but the TraCS software does not require that the race and ethnicity data fields be collected. The Tyler New World System recently launched should alleviate the need for staff to manually enter data. Data on Arrests: When arrests are made in the field, an officer enters the incident into the Intergraph Field Reporting (IFR) Incident module, which is available in the police officer’s vehicle. Police Information Technicians use this information to generate an arrest record in the RMS. Data on Calls for Service: Calls for service to law enforcement agencies generally include calls to “911” for emergency assistance and calls to non-emergency numbers. Calls for service data are input into Hexagon CAD and imported to RMS I/LEADS. Calls for service data (CFS) input screens are set up for law enforcement, as well as for Fire/EMS calls. CFS data are collected by DMPD Public Safety Dispatchers by entering information into Hexagon CAD; they are then imported to Hexagon I/LEADS. Data on Use of Force: On January 1, 2019, the FBI began collecting use of force data from law enforcement agencies across the country that voluntarily participate. The data collection offers bigpicture insights, rather than information on specific incidents. The collection neither assesses nor reports whether officers followed their department’s policy or acted lawfully. The data includes any use of force that results in death, serious bodily injury, or discharge of a firearm by law enforcement. The Des Moines Police Department collects use of force data through web based IAPro/BlueTeam software programs, which enables input of complaints, use of force incidents, pursuits, and city-owned vehicle accidents. Reporting of Data: The Des Moines Police Department uses a Hexagon RMS custom-tailored data package for sending monthly crime and arrests data to the Iowa Department of Public Safety’s Uniform Crime Code Classification (UCR) program. At present, Des Moines is moving from UCR codes to National IncidentBased Reporting System (NIBRS) codes. Crime data are organized by incident, offense, victim, known offender, and arrestee. They are collected by the Des Moines Police Department RMS/I/LEADS Incident and Arrest modules by entering information into FBI UCR/NIBRS. Geographic Data: The Des Moines Police Department currently collects GIS coordinates, and zip code data for Calls for service incidents. The citation module in RMS is exclusively used by the Police Information Technicians to re-enter selected citation information from the PDF copy generated by the TraCS system, making it vulnerable to human error. When the Police Information Technicians enter the “Offense location,” the RMS system uses that information to automatically populate GeoX and GeoY coordinates. The Des Moines Police Department uses GIS data with its CrimeView system that links crime data with GIS information to map out where the crime took place. The Des Moines Police Department does not analyze the GIS data of Stops resulting in a citation, nor does it connect it to the rest of the Stop data collected. Not having such analysis makes it very challenging to produce any summary of analytic results by census track or zip code.

DesMoines, IA: City of DesMoines, 2022? 207p.

By Laura Pajon, Ben Brewster, Imogen Fell & Zoi Krokida

Social media platforms, while widely used by children and young people, are increasingly exploited for harmful activities that compromise their safety and well-being. Despite heightened attention to youth engagement on these platforms, there is limited research on how social media facilitates different types of exploitation linked to modern slavery. This report presents key findings from exploratory research aimed at better understanding the ways social media is used to exploit young people. It also evaluates the preparedness of relevant stakeholders to respond effectively to these challenges. The findings emphasise the urgent need for targeted measures to safeguard young users and strengthen response frameworks among stakeholders. KEY FINDINGS 3 Social media is leveraged at every stage of the exploitation process, serving various functions from initial contact to sustained control of victims. Offenders use social media both actively and passively—some directly target potential victims, while others use it to glamorise lavish lifestyles that may attract them. In cases of criminal exploitation involving minors, such as 'county lines' drug supply networks, social media is often used for coercive control, including continuous messaging with threatening images or videos. Perceptions of social media's role in exploitation varied across groups, with law enforcement agencies reporting higher rates of use than non-governmental organisations. Different platforms are used strategically across the exploitation process; for example, YouTube is often used for glamorisation, while Snapchat is used for realtime monitoring and control. Social media's low-cost, low-risk environment enables offenders to reach potential victims globally with minimal effort or detection. Anonymity and the difficulty of tracking further reduce the chances of identification and prosecution. Access to affordable devices and the internet expands social media use among young people, increasing their exposure to violence and exploitation. According to practitioners, many minors have a limited perception of online risks, heightening their vulnerability to exploitation.

Offenders use social media across all crime stages, from the identification and recruitment of victims to their exploitation and control. Different apps and social media tools are used at different stages and for different purposes.

The lack of engagement by social media companies with stakeholders presents a key challenge to effectively identifying and safeguarding at-risk children and young people.

Legal and regulatory frameworks governing online platforms’ responsibilities and responses to trafficking-related activities remain insufficient and fragmented.

University of Leeds, The Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre , and Liverppol John Moores University, 2024. . 17p.

By OSAGIE K. OBASOGIE

Police use of force continues to be a significant problem in American law and society. Recent discussions have focused on doctrinal issues such as what type of force is considered “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment and the propriety of qualified immunity as a defense that can shield law enforcement from civil litigation. However, there has been little commentary on how these and other legal questions might be informed by medicine — specifically, victim diagnoses that might effectively absolve officers from criminal prosecution or civil liability. One prominent example concerns excited delirium, which is thought to be a psychiatric issue characterized by the acute onset of extreme agitation that can become so severe that someone might die spontaneously, on their own, without anyone to blame except the person’s own mental condition. This diagnosis has been used by coroners, medical examiners, forensic pathologists, and law enforcement to suggest that some deaths in police custody occur not because the decedent was subject to unlawful force, but because the mysterious onset of a psychiatric illness led them to die suddenly. But there are significant problems with this claim. Notably, since its inception in the 1980s, researchers have found little evidence that this medical condition exists. This lack of proof leads to a critical question: How did law become so welcoming to excited delirium when medical and scientific communities continue to have serious reservations? This Article provides the first empirical assessment of how excited delirium has been treated as an evidentiary matter within federal courts. In doing so, it explores how federal courts deploy Federal Rule of Evidence 702 to understand the claims made by expert witnesses in cases regarding the admissibility of excited delirium as a medical diagnosis that might explain deaths in police custody. The findings show that excited delirium often enters evidentiary proceedings as a contested medical concept. Yet, through the machinations of the law of evidence, these claims exit courtroom proceedings as legally relevant facts. How this transmutation happens, and the evidentiary moves that make it possible, highlight the extent to which legal doctrine can settle an otherwise unsettled — if not wholly discredited — area of medicine to make deaths in police custody seem natural, blameless, and unproblematic. Understanding how the law of evidence contributes to concealing what might otherwise be seen as unreasonable uses of force is critical for ongoing discussions concerning police reform.

Harvard Law Review, VOLUME 138, ISSUE 6, APRIL 2025, 26p.

By Christopher Slobogin

In Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Aerial Investigation Research (AIR), Baltimore's aerial surveillance program, violated the Fourth Amendment because it was not authorized by a warrant. AIR was constitutionally problematic, but not for the reason given by the Fourth Circuit. AIR, like many other technologically-enhanced policing programs that rely on closed-circuit television (CCTV), automated license plate readers and the like, involves the collection and retention of information about huge numbers ofpeople. Because individualized suspicion does not exist with respect to any of these people's information, an individual-specific warrant requirement can never be met by such a program. When police engage in suspicionless searches and seizures of the type exemplified by AIR, a different regulatory approach is needed, one that provides the protection against arbitrariness that the warrant process affords but does not require findings that specific people have violated the law. This Article argues that this regulatory alternative can be derived from administrative law principles. The logic of administrative law dictates that legislatures and agency rulemaking must be involved any time a policing agency wants to establish a program that will intentionally affect sizeable numbers of concededly innocent people. If administrative law principles applied, programs like AIR would not be permitted unless a legislature has delegated appropriate authority to the relevant police agency, implemented regulations have survived notice-and-comment and hard look judicial review, and the agency carried out the program in an even-handed fashion that minimizes discretion. At the same time, contrary to the holding in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, if these requirements are met, the Fourth Amendment at least the part of it requiring warrants and probable cause-would be irrelevant.

75 Administrative Law Review. 565 (2023), 24p.

By Lily Robin, Bryce Peterson and Daniel Lawrence

In 2016, the Urban Institute received funding from the National Institute of Justice to help the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) optimize its surveillance system. Improvements included doubling the number of MPD public surveillance cameras across Milwaukee, integrating video analytic technologies, and other software and hardware upgrades. The department also strategically installed two types of cameras—pan-tiltzoom (PTZ) and panoramic—at intersections across the city. This brief explains how PTZ and panoramic cameras work and how they differentially impact crime and support criminal investigations.

Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2020. 12p.

By  Livia Mucciolo, Fay Walker, and Aravind Boddupalli 

State and local officials are starting to consider the disproportionate effects of criminal legal fines and fees on the lives of families with low incomes—especially Black, Latine, and Native American families. Although policymakers have focused mostly on court and prison fees, most individuals may interact with the criminal legal system via parking tickets, which if left unpaid can turn into lifelong financial burdens. Parking tickets serve as a way to streamline city services like plowing, accessibility to fire hydrants, and street cleaning, but research and news investigations show they can also especially harm people of color and those with low incomes (Brazil 2018). 1 Parking tickets (also called “tickets”) refer to citations issued by police officers or other government traffic officials to inactive motor vehicles for violations of local laws. In this research brief, we analyze three aspects of parking tickets: locations in cities where tickets are issued, the number and dollar amount of tickets assessed, and the types of violations for which tickets are assessed. We look at tickets between January 2018 to December 2019, and we focus on three large cities: Austin, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Portland, Oregon. We selected these cities because of their accessible data and because they were not among the prominent places studied in fines and fees literature so far. Our analysis shows a majority of parking tickets were issued in downtown areas, which typically have a higher density of office buildings, shops, and restaurants. This likely corresponds to the higher concentration of parking meters installed and monitored in commercial corridors. Overall, the largest contributors to parking tickets by type included expired or missing meter receipts and failure to display registration and parking in no-parking and tow-away zones. Because of data limitations, we could not determine the demographic composition of those ticketed. 

Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2023. 26p.

By Aravind Boddupalli and Livia Mucciolo

State and local governments collected $16 billion in fiscal year 2019 from financial penalties imposed on people who had contact with the justice system, according to US Census Bureau data. These penalties included speeding tickets (including those from automated traffic cameras), parking tickets, court-imposed administrative fees, and forfeitures or seizures of property believed by law enforcement officials to be connected to crimes.1 In total, fines, fees, and forfeitures account for less than 1 percent of total state and local general revenue, but the way they are enforced can create unjust burdens. These financial penalties often disproportionately fall on low-income people of color, particularly Black people (O’Neill, Kennedy, and Harris 2021; Sances and You 2017). In addition, consequences for those unable to pay can be severe (Menendez et al. 2019). Reliance on fines, fees, and forfeitures as a revenue source can also engender conflicts of interest for government officials. For example, states and localities have ramped up speeding ticket enforcement and arrests for various violations in response to budgetary shortfalls and political pressures (Makowsky, Stratmann, and Tabarrok 2019). In this report, we first examine how much states and localities report collecting from fines, fees, and forfeitures, highlighting the states and localities most reliant on them as a revenue source. While the average state and local share of revenue from fines, fees, and forfeitures is relatively small, these shares are larger for some local governments, especially small cities. We then explore how revenue from some fines and fees (we exclude forfeitures from this analysis) are allocated in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and a handful of cities. We specifically focus on speeding tickets as an illustrative example. Overall, we find that in at least 43 states, some portion of speeding ticket revenue is allocated toward a court or law enforcement fund. This finding reveals the potential for conflicts of interest and misaligned fiscal incentives. That is, police officers and judges might levy fines and fees with the intent of funding their respective agencies, as was demonstrated by the 2015 US Department of Justice investigation into Ferguson, Missouri’s police department (US Department of Justice 2015). We additionally find that many states use fines and fees to fund general government services unrelated to cost recovery for the justice system, such as special funds for health care or highway initiatives.

Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2022. 39p.

By Ashlin Oglesby-Neal, KiDeuk Kim, Sam Tecotzky, Josh Fording

Since 2014, Oakland residents have supported violence reduction strategies through the Public Safety and Services Violence Prevention Act, commonly referred to as Measure Z. Measure Z funds strategies implemented by the Oakland Police Department (OPD) and the Oakland Department of Violence Prevention. The Urban Institute and the Urban Strategies Council were contracted by the City of Oakland to evaluate these strategies. This report focuses on the strategies implemented by the OPD under Measure Z since July 2022. Specifically, this report provides a process evaluation of Measure Z strategies implemented by the OPD, incorporating community survey results to capture residents' experiences and safety concerns. To conduct this evaluation, we analyzed OPD administrative data, interviewed OPD staff, participated in dealongs with officers, reviewed program documents, observed neighborhood council meetings, and surveyed Oakland residents regarding their experiences with crime and their perceptions of the OPD. Key Findings Our key findings are as follows:  The rate of violent crime in Oakland was on a downward trend from 1,977 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2013 to 1,299 in 2017, then plateaued from 2018 to 2020. The violent crime rate then increased by 35 percent from 2020 to 2023. » Relatedly, the number of shootings and homicides increased in 2020–2021 compared with 2017–2019. The number of shootings and homicides decreased in 2022–2023, but remained above 2017–2019 levels.  The City of Oakland receives hundreds of thousands of 911 calls for police service a year, with a large increase having occurred in calls involving shootings in 2020. The number of shooting calls decreased from 2022 to 2024, but remained higher than in 2017 to 2019. » From 2018 to 2024, the average response time to 911 calls for potential violent crimes became slower.  The OPD is implementing all three of the strategies funded under Measure Z: (1) geographic policing through crime reduction teams, (2) community policing through community resource officers (CROs), and (3) addressing domestic violence and child abuse through the Special Victims Section. » All three strategies face staffing shortages, with fewer officers assigned to the positions than were authorized or envisioned at the outset of Measure Z. » Coinciding with the reduced staffing, CROs implemented markedly fewer community policing projects from 2022 to 2024 than from 2011 to 2019. Alongside a rise in violent crime, the Special Victims Section (SVS), operating with approximately two-thirds of its positions filled, had several hundred cases a year assigned to each investigator in 2022 to 2024.  Oakland residents who participated in a community survey administered by the project team in the summer of 2023 reported mixed views of the social cohesion in their neighborhoods, but overall are happy with living in Oakland. » Most do not feel safe after dark, and more than 7 in 10 respondents are concerned about becoming victims of many types of crime, including robbery, burglary, and shootings. » Roughly 4 in 10 respondents have negative views of the OPD’s ability to make fair decisions and keep their neighborhoods safe, while 2 in 10 have positive views of the OPD’s ability to do so. The remaining 3 in 10 have neutral views. » For respondents who had called 911 in the past year, half said that the dispatcher treated them respectfully and half said the call was not answered in a timely manner.

Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2025. 60p.