Research shows variation in police officers’ views of the police role; some are mainly crime control oriented, while others hold a broader role extending to order maintenance and service. Though the origins and nature of role orientations are not well understood, training and socialization are presumed to play key roles. Some conjecture holds that officers subscribe to a “warrior” mindset, and training fosters this orientation. A shift to a “guardian” mentality, prizing community partnership, is prescribed. We analyze two waves of panel survey data from four classes of New York State Police recruits to examine the content and structure of recruits’ role orientations and the direction and degree of change during basic training. We find that recruits enter training as both warriors and guardians, these “mindsets” are not incompatible with one another, and that academy training amplifies and strengthens attitudinal coherence for both sets of outlooks.

Little is known about the decision-making processes used when police encounter suspects who have never previously been stopped or about how police decide who to question in the first place. Literature suggests suspect race plays a role, but findings are contradictory, perhaps due to the confounding effects of prior records. We therefore focus here on a suspect’s first police stop. Drawing on three theoretical accounts—focal concerns, benign neglect, and de-policing—we identify plausible explanations for racial differences in self-reported police contact and arrest outcomes. We use Add Health data and matched logistic regression to examine race effects. We find that black respondents were less likely than white respondents to be stopped, but there was no disparity in arrest. Although suspect race was associated with the decision to stop a suspect, the association’s direction did not align with that of the traditional focal concerns perspective.

As “the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices into routine practice,” implementation science (IS) offers the potential to translate effective innovations in policing across agencies and local contexts with fidelity and sustainability in support of a commitment to evidence-based policing (EBP). Despite this potential, and its widespread use in adjacent fields facing similar challenges, implementation science remains almost completely unstudied and unutilized in police settings. To fill these gaps in research and practice, this paper provides an orientation to IS for police researchers and practitioners. It recounts EBP’s historical roots in an evidence-based approach to health care, demonstrates the commonalities that make IS as natural to policing as medicine, and surveys the existing literature on the employment of IS in policing. It adapts a conceptual model of IS to policing, presents two well-developed frameworks, and introduces three types of hybrid implementation/effectiveness trials suitable for use in dynamic police settings. It then provides illustrative cases in policing where the use of IS would be apt, and highlights the importance of the de-implementation of substandard or problematic practices as a key but often overlooked aspect of IS. It concludes by discussing how police practices that fully embrace evidence will nonetheless be guided by contestable values and norms, and how IS provides a way to address this concern. The paper provides research and practice agendas for integrating IS into EBP as police seek to adopt evidence-informed practices that deliver public safety, respect rights, and increase community satisfaction and trust.

Some proponents of the “war on cops” thesis have suggested that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement encourages people to murder police officers and is responsible for many civilian-on-police homicides. To evaluate such claims, this study examines all homicides of on-duty police officers by civilians from 2008 to 2021 ( n = 595) for ideological motives, and uses interrupted times series analysis to test for post-Ferguson trends. Ideological motivations were present in 12% of civilian-on-police homicides, and only 3% constituted terrorism. Right-wing motivations were far more common (6%) than left-wing motives (3%). Most analyses showed no significant increase in ideological civilian-on-police homicides after Ferguson. Although homicides with left-wing motives unconnected to personal revenge significantly increased after Ferguson, this only accounts for a small proportion of post-Ferguson homicides (4%). In short, there is no evidence that BLM unleashed a “war on cops” in which officers are increasingly targeted in ideological homicides.

Since procedural justice was proposed, this vein of research has gained much popularity in scholarship, empirical supports, and theoretical advancement. Yet, research on the procedural fairness within police organizations, particularly on the underlying and mediating mechanisms between internal and external procedural justice, remains understudied. Relying on survey data collected from Taiwanese police officers, this study expands the current literature by testing the direct relationships between supervisor, organizational, and social supports and external procedural justice and their indirect connections through supervisor trustworthiness and self-legitimacy. Supervisor and social supports were found to directly boost officers’ commitment to external procedural justice. Perceived organizational support promotes external procedural justice through cultivating officer self-legitimacy. This study concludes by discussing cross-border research and pragmatic implications for police training and management.

Despite decades of calls to diversify policing, women continue to be underrepresented in the field, and this problem compounds when looking up the ranks. One explanation is that police organizations are “gendered” in that their structures, processes, and cultures support men’s career advancement over women’s. To investigate this possibility, we analyzed survey results from 685 women police officers to examine whether career advancement is influenced by the composition of an agency’s promotional process. Most agencies used a combination of testing components, with written exams being the most common, but also a heavy reliance on interviews, assessment centers, and career portfolios. Exam format had a limited impact on women’s career advancement, while agency type, age, and education level were all significant correlates of women’s interest in promotions and career advancement.

The purpose of this study is to partially test the broken windows thesis, and to evaluate the effect of Houston’s Differential Response Team (DRT) in particular at the patrol division level using crime-related calls for service data (CFS) in the city. Monthly DRT assignment data over a period of 13 years in five different space-time patterns were utilized to estimate the effect of targeted disorder enforcement from 2005 to 2017. Our findings suggest that the DRT overall did not produce significant effects on crime-related calls, with only one out of five space-time patterns showing demonstrable benefit. We highlighted the underlying features generating differential rates of crime across geographic areas as an explanation in the discussion section. The unique feature of this study was the focus on routine police activities as opposed to arrests as the key indicator of law enforcement intervention in the management of crime.

Police problem-solving is one of the most recognized innovations of recent decades, and evidence provides practitioners with hope in their challenges to affect crime. Yet, practitioners need more than hope as they struggle to implement and institutionalize this innovation. This paper shares the results of an integrated problem-solving intervention situated within a comprehensive approach. A Case of Place intervention served as an instrument of problem-solving, which became institutionalized through analytical and Compstat changes. The intervention guided police and crime analysts through problem-solving processes, ensuring attention to each problem-solving step. Using interrupted time-series, post-intervention results revealed a significant reduction in aggravated assaults, motor vehicle breaks, and robberies, as compared to pre-intervention patterns. Additionally, organizational shifts moved the department towards the goal of holistic problem-solving. This study reveals positive results from the Case of Place problem-solving instrument and may offer a path to address the analytical and institutionalization shortcomings of problem-solving.

Use of force incidents involving police officers and civilians are complex, multi-faceted, and interactional. Officer force and civilian resistance are frequently measured at their maximum level or in relation to one another. While this approach is informative, it does not fully reflect the complexity of these encounters that contain a series of sequential actions taken by both parties. These processes are difficult to capture using traditional data collection efforts as they require time consuming independent coding of each action. Using data from two municipal police agencies, this study outlines a methodology for unpacking these complex interactions and examines sequentially based incident characteristics and their relation to the highest levels of force and resistance. Results reveal the importance of total actions and the starting point of force and resistance, which has specific implications for our understanding of how these interactional encounters change over time and police use of force more broadly.

At this important juncture in American policing, this essay sets forth a framework to encourage law enforcement leaders and scholars to reconceptualize the use of force from the ground up. It begins by outlining changes needed in police culture and how police view their mandate to use force in society. It next addresses use of force policy-making and synthesizes recent reviews of the policy landscape, including a recent analysis of the deadly force policy from one the nation’s largest county police agencies. It then suggests ways that better training can improve decision-making and produce better outcomes when force must be used. The essay concludes with a challenge to law enforcement leaders and policy-makers to leverage momentum from the tragic death of George Floyd to make fundamental changes in how police in America think about, train for, use, and manage coercive force in society.