By Mike McLively and Brittany Nieto

Oakland, considered for many years to be among the most dangerous cities in America, has cut its annual shootings and homicides nearly in half since 2012. Now, city leaders and activists from around the country are traveling to Oakland to learn from this remarkable success. Oakland gives us reason to hope that reducing gun violence in our most impacted communities is possible, and a basic framework for how to get there. In 2012, after several failures and facing great pressure from community activists, Oakland city leaders committed to launching a citywide violence reduction strategy, known as Oakland Ceasefire, with the help of technical experts from the California Partnership for Safe Communities (CPSC). Oakland Ceasefire is an ongoing partnership between community members, social service providers, and law enforcement officials, who work together to reduce violence, build police-community trust, and improve outcomes for high-risk individuals. The strategy has five main components: Analysis of violent incidents and trends, referred to as a problem analysis, to identify individuals at the highest risk of participating in serious violence. Oakland’s problem analysis revealed several misconceptions about the city’s violence dynamics. It also showed that only 400 individuals—just 0.1% of Oakland’s total population—were at the highest risk for engaging in serious violence at any given time. Oakland Ceasefire partners intervene with this population. Respectful, in-person communications with high-risk individuals to warn about the risks of ongoing violence and provide a genuine offer of assistance. With Oakland Ceasefire, these communications primarily take the form of call-ins, interventions in which stakeholders communicate with small groups of those most at risk of serious violence, and custom notifications, a personalized method of heading off imminent violence. Relationship-based social services are provided to high-risk individuals through the Oakland Unite network of community-based organizations. Oakland Unite is a unique city agency that uses taxpayer money to fund organizations that provide services like intensive mentoring, economic and educational training, and direct assistance to victims of violence and their families. Narrowly focused law enforcement actions by the Oakland Police Department’s (OPD) Ceasefire Section, in addition to ongoing, department-wide training in the principles of procedural justice and other strategies to improve police-community relationships. Since reforming its approach to violence, OPD has seen a dramatic increase in its homicide solve rate, while use-of-force incidents and complaints against the department are on the decline. An intentional management structure built around regular communication between Oakland Ceasefire partners and city leaders to stay on top of changing violence dynamics and track progress toward yearly violence reduction goals. Regular meetings include weekly shooting reviews, bimonthly coordination meetings, and performance reviews led by Oakland’s mayor.     

Giffords Law Center, Faith in Action, and the Black and Brown Gun Violence Prevention Consortium, 2019. 107p/  

By Aline Ara Santos Carvalho , Táhcita Medrado Mizael , Angelo A S Sampaio

A police stop must be based on founded suspicion: an officer's ability to correctly discriminate suspicious behavior. However, police stops can be influenced by negative attitudes toward Black individuals. We conducted a systematic review of empirical articles published from 2014 to 2019 that investigated the relationship between racial prejudice and police stops on PsycInfo using keywords such as "race," "ethnic," "police stop," "traffic stop," and "stop and frisk." Results included 16 studies conducted in the United States, England, Wales, and the Netherlands and showed that Black men were the most frequent targets of police stops; that many individuals who have been stopped by the police reported negative perceptions of the police force; that the Stop, Question, and Frisk strategy used by some U.S. police departments proved to be a type of stop that favors racial selectivity; and that traffic stops were favorable environments for racially biased actions by officers. We conclude that institutional racism in police stops proves to be a problem shared by several countries, including Brazil. We suggest more investigations to characterize institutional racism in the police force and in other settings and interventions aimed at reducing individual biases and collective racist practices.

Behav Anal Pract. 2021 May 28;15(4):1213-1220. doi: 10.1007/s40617-021-00578-4. PMID: 36605162; PMCID: PMC9744975

By Hildy Saizow., et al. ., CNA

In May 2020, the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer shocked the nation. Recorded footage brought the image of his death to millions of people, and they responded as never before. As the summer unfolded, protests were organized in communities all across the nation, with people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, young and old alike, marching together asking for
police reform and sharing concerns over police brutality and systemic racism. In response, police reform proposals were introduced at the federal and state levels, with more than 30 states considering legislative changes on police practices and accountability. At the local level, government and police officials began proposing changes to police policy and practice, enacting bans on chokeholds, and promoting de-escalation training. In the City of Antioch, hundreds of concerned community members voiced their opinions on race relations and policing reform during three City Council meetings in June 2020. The issues they raised were wide ranging, including systemic racism, body-worn cameras, and police recruitment, training, and accountability. In response, the Antioch City Council decided to hold a series of roundtable
discussions called Bridging the Gap to hear the perspectives of additional community members and learn more about the kinds of changes in policing the community desired. The City wanted to better understand the community’s perspectives on racial injustice and police-community relations and to identify ways to address them. CNA, an independent national research and analysis firm, was hired
to organize and facilitate these roundtable discussions. Major incidents involving police can and have happened all around the country. As we were writing this report, we learned that they can happen in Antioch, too. During our initial conversations to understand the goals of the Bridging the Gap sessions, we often heard that Antioch was holding community dialogues because of things that happened in other places. Recently, an interaction between a young man and Antioch police officers ended in the death of the young man. Although it may be too soon to determine the circumstances that lead to his death, the timing of this incident should serve as a cautionary tale for other departments. The policing issues in Antioch are national, and the national issues matter in Antioch.

Process:

CNA, through its Center for Justice Research and Innovation, began planning the roundtable discussions in November 2020. As a nationally recognized leader in justice systems research, police-community relations, and police reform efforts, CNA brought significant technical skills and a deep understanding of community policing, the intersection of race and policing, and evidence-based policing to the project. For over a decade, CNA has worked with more than 400 police departments to assess their operations, recommend changes based on best practices, and provide the technical assistance needed to implement change.

Arlington, VA: CNA, 2021. 60p.

United States. Department Of Homeland Security. Office Of Inspector General

From the document: "The United States Secret Service (Secret Service) planned and conducted protective operations at several sites on January 6, 2021, including the Capitol, and took actions to assist the United States Capitol Police (USCP). We initiated this review to evaluate the Secret Service's preparation for, and response to, the events of January 6, 2021. [...] We conducted this review to evaluate the Secret Service's preparation for, and response to, the events of January 6, 2021. [...] We made six recommendations to improve the Secret Service's policies and processes for planning and responding to similar events."

United States. Department Of Homeland Security. Office Of Inspector General . 31 Jul, 2024 .

By: Louise E. Porter and Adam Graycar

Some places have no crime and some have a lot, and thus we study hotspots. Corruption is structured differently to crime, but hotspots still are notable. The difference is that hotspots are not places but clusters of activity. This paper analyses corruption cases from New York City to explore a way of identifying such clusters. Seventy-two cases were coded according to features that represent the elements of the crime triangle: offender and motivation, target and opportunity, and place and ability. Multidimensional scaling revealed three groups of cases, exhibiting different patterns of corrupt activity. Group one involved politicians involved in high value financial corruption. Group two primarily involved supervisors who created opportunities involving procurement and contracts. Group three involved inspectors, particularly in the infrastructure sector, who were involved with low value bribes to violate regulations. Each is discussed in relation to situational crime prevention principles to develop possible strategies for prevention.

Security Journal, Vol. 29 (3) 423-441.

By Timothy F. Leslie, Cara L. Frankenfeld & Angela J. Hattery 

Background: Police shootings are unevenly spatially distributed, with substantive spikes throughout the USA. While minorities are disproportionately the victims of the police force, social or structural factors associated with this distribution are not well understood. The objective of this work was to evaluate police shootings in relation to victim race or ethnicity and residential segregation and racial diversity.

Methods: Validated crowdsourced data from the Washington Post’s Fatal Force (2015–2020) were linked with census tract-level data from the American Community Survey. Residential minority dissimilarity, interaction, and a racial and ethnic diversity metric were calculated in order to assess the potentially variant importance of evenness in distribution, exposure likelihood, and general representation. Logistic and multinomial regression was used to model associations between segregation and diversity, adjusted for other ecological characteristics. Analyses were stratified by victim race or ethnicity (Black, Asian, or Hispanic).

Results: Across all races combined, the odds of a police shooting in a particular census tract were associated with non-Hispanic Black dissimilarity (OR = 0.98, 95% CI 0.97, 0.99) and racial and ethnic diversity (1.046, 95% CI 1.044, 1.060). Areas with higher racial diversity had a higher likelihood of having a police shooting event with Black victims (OR = 1.092, 95% CI 1.064, 1.120) or Asian victims (OR = 1.188, 1.051, 1.343) than less diverse areas. Higher non-Hispanic Black interaction was associated with a lower likelihood of having a police shooting event with Black victims (OR = 0.914, 95% CI 0.833, 0.946) than lower interaction areas. Higher Hispanic dissimilarity was associated with a lower likelihood of having a police shooting event with a Hispanic victim (OR = 0.398, 95% CI 0.324, 0.489) than in lower dissimilarity areas.

Conclusions: The variant effects of residential segregation are only seen when victims are analyzed separately by race. There appears to be a protective effect for Hispanic populations in Hispanic communities, while the reverse is true of Black individuals. We urge law enforcement responsible for locations with segregated communities to monitor individual interactions that police have with residents as well as the patterns of frequency and context of those interactions.

Injury Epidemiology volume 9, Article number: 8 (2022)