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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 12:38 am
Time: 12:38 am
Results for police crackdowns
3 results foundAuthor: Sohoni, Mila Title: Crackdowns Summary: The crackdown is the executive decision to intensify the severity of enforcement of existing laws or regulations as to a selected class of offenders or offenses. Each year, federal, state, and local prosecutors and agencies carry out thousands of crackdowns on everything from trespassing to insider trading to minimum-wage violations at nail salons. Despite crackdowns’ ubiquity, legal scholarship has devoted little attention to the crackdown and to the distinctive legal and policy challenges that crackdowns can pose. This Article offers an examination and a critique of the crackdown as a tool of public law. The crackdown can be a benign and valuable law enforcement technique. But crackdowns can also stretch statutory authority to the breaking point, threaten to infringe on constitutional values, generate unjust or absurd results, and serve the venal interests of the law enforcer at the expense of the interests of the public. Surveying a spectrum of crackdowns from the criminal and administrative contexts, and from local, state, and federal law, this Article explores the many ways that crackdowns may quietly subvert democratic values. The obvious challenge, then, is to discourage the implementation of pathological crackdowns, while also preserving the needed flexibility to enforce the law, within the context of a legal and political system that imposes sparse restraints on the crackdown choice. This Article locates a foundation for tackling this challenge in the requirement of “faithful” execution in Article II’s Take Care Clause and its cognate clauses in the state constitutions. The crackdown decision should be faithful — to statutory text and context, to the interests of the public, and to constitutional and rule-of-law values. By elaborating the content of this obligation, this Article supplies a novel normative framework for evaluating the crackdown — and a much-needed legal platform for governing it. Cutting sharply against the grain of modern law, this Article calls for a broad rethinking of the principles and constraints that should frame the Executive’s power to selectively and programmatically augment enforcement. Details: San Diego: University of San Diego School of Law, 2017. 68p. Source: Internet Resource: Legal Studies Research Paper Series No. 16-236: Accessed December 14, 2016 at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2877476 Year: 2017 Country: United States URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2877476 Shelf Number: 144887 Keywords: Law EnforcementPolice Crackdowns |
Author: Bowers, Kate J. Title: Spatial displacement and diffusion of benefits among geographically focused policing initiatives Summary: What happens to surrounding neighborhoods when more police are put in high crime areas? Do criminals just move to nearby neighborhoods or do the crime-fighting benefits spread? A systematic review of international research finds that increasing police presence in problem areas not only reduces crime in those areas, but can also lead to less crime in nearby areas. A common criticism of focused policing efforts (such as hotspots policing, 'crackdowns', or problem-oriented policing) is that it does not address the root causes of crime; criminals just move to another neighborhood. This is known as 'crime displacement'. Criminal activity can in fact shift in a number of different ways. It can move from one neighborhood to another, the time of day crime occurs can change, different targets may be chosen, how the crime is commited may change (e.g. breaking windows versus picking locks). There can be changes in the type of offences committed and in the people engaging in crime (new offenders replace old). In theory, these kinds of changes in criminal activity can cancel out the benefits of increased police efforts in problem areas. It has also been argued, however, that increasing police presence in one area can have positive effects for nearby areas. There can be a 'bonus effect' of a reduction in crime in nearby neighborhoods. It is important to consider both negative and positive side effects of focused policing when deciding on policing strategies. This review includes 44 studies. The majority of the studies are from the USA (30) but studies from the United Kingdom (10) Sweden (3) and Australia (1) are also included. Each study evaluates a focused policing intervention which was limited to a physical area (smaller than a city/region), uses some quantitative measure of crime, and reports original research findings. The studies evaluate a broad range of interventions implemented in different contexts, including Problem-Orientated Policing (12), Police Crackdowns (10), Police Patrols (7), Community-oriented policing (5) and Hotspot policing (4). This review focuses on two primary outcomes: the effect of focused policing on crime levels in the target neighborhood; and the effect of focused policing on nearby neighborhoods. A meta-analysis of sixteen studies to examine the effect on the target neighborhood shows that focused policing reduces crime in the target neighborhood. The evidence also indicates that when focused policing is implemented, crime levels change in nearby areas more than would be expected if there was no focused policing in the target neighbourhood. The weight of the evidence shows that crime is reduced in these areas. This suggests that focused policing is more likely to result in a spread of crime control benefit than simply moving criminals to the closest neighbourhood. Details: Oslo: Campbell Collaboration, 2011. 147p. Source: Internet Resource: Campbell Systematic Reviews, 2011:3: Accessed March 19, 2018 at: https://www.campbellcollaboration.org/library/geographically-focused-policing.html Year: 2011 Country: International URL: https://www.campbellcollaboration.org/library/geographically-focused-policing.html Shelf Number: 149524 Keywords: Crime DisplacementFocused PolicingHigh Crime AreasHotspots of CrimePolice CrackdownsProblem-Oriented Policing |
Author: Doob, Anthony N. Title: Understanding the Impact of Police Stops Summary: Imagine that technology existed such that the police could, electronically, identify and track everyone and every motor vehicle in the city and that this information were stored electronically and available to the police, as required, for solving crime. Even if such information was not admissible as evidence, one could easily see its possible value in solving crime. If a home were broken into, one only would have to search a data base to find out who had been in the neighbourhood. If a pedestrian were hit by a car that did not remain at the scene of the accident, one would only need to see what vehicles had been at that scene around the time of the accident to narrow down the possible suspects considerably. If a person were found to be using or in possession of drugs, one would only need to see whom that person had been in close contact with in recent times to identify a fairly small group of suspects as the source of those drugs. If a person were thought to be a member of a gang, it would be easy to find out whom that person associated with on a regular basis. We don't live in such a society. Obviously the information that the police have about the non-criminal activities of ordinary citizens is much more limited than that described in the previous paragraph. But what if it turned out we did live in the world described in the previous paragraph and people suddenly expressed the desire no longer to live in a world with constant and complete police scrutiny of their ordinary activities? One could imagine the suggestion would be made that not allowing police the kind of surveillance described in the previous paragraph would limit their ability to solve crime. We raise this hypothetical scenario for a particular reason: There is no point in arguing whether complete or highly detailed information about the day-to-day movements or meetings that Canadians have might be useful to the police in solving crime. At a more mundane level, we see on an almost daily basis that footage from 'security' cameras is now routinely used to solve crime in a manner not too different from that described above. Our second example comes closer to the issue of police stops. Imagine that there were no controls whatsoever on the power of the police to stop pedestrians and motorists and ask them to identify themselves. Even if, in law, citizens were not required to identify themselves or to answer any questions, one could argue that maintaining whatever information was obtained could be useful if a crime took place in that neighbourhood or someone associated with the person who had been stopped was suspected of some wrongdoing. That this information could potentially be useful is not the point. The question that needs to be raised in both of these examples is a much more complex one: What might be the 'costs' and 'benefits' to society of these kinds of data gathering programs? Even these two hypothetical scenarios are missing something crucial: comparison groups. The question, in most public policy areas, is not whether there are some successful outcomes from a particular procedure, but whether there are better outcomes overall than there might be under some other procedure. For example, in each of the hypothetical scenarios described above, it might be that deployment of resources in some quite different way or a decision to address some quite different problem would serve the community better than the scenarios described. Or such procedures as described earlier might help solve crime but would lessen cooperation with the police on important matters. Comparison groups or procedures typically are not employed adequately when assessing possible policy choices, but in reality the need for a 'comparison' is usually important. In a discussion about police equipment (e.g., body worn cameras), not only might one want to know whether they affect police or citizen behaviour (implying a comparison with how police or citizens behave without the device), but a serious policy analysis should include an analysis of alternative uses of the resources that would be required for the purchase and use of the devices. An example of the inappropriate use of implied comparisons is when changes in police strength or police tactics are implemented after an unusual (e.g., serious, violent) incident. When police, understandably, change their approach to policing a neighbourhood that experienced an unusual incident or high concentration of serious incidents, they sometimes infer that any subsequent return to 'normal' levels of crime is 'caused' by changes they made in their presence in the neighbourhood. Without adequate comparison areas (e.g., areas that experienced a 'spike' that did not result in changes in policing), such causal inferences simply aren't defensible. The issues become more complex when one moves closer to reality. One fact about crime that noone questions is that it is not evenly (or even randomly) distributed across people, groups of people, or neighbourhoods in our society. Young males, for example, are disproportionately more likely to be involved in a variety of different kinds of crime than other people. People who live in certain kinds of neighbourhoods are more likely to commit offences than people in other neighbourhoods. But some neighbourhoods themselves appear to have characteristics that make them more likely to be the sites for crime above and beyond the characteristics of the individuals who live in them. In this context, a policing perspective that did not consider any other concerns could justify focusing surveillance resources on certain neighbourhoods or types of people (e.g., young males). The problem is that there almost always are other concerns, and concerns that could easily have the effect of undermining the crime control goal of proactive policing activities, such as police stops. This report examines some of the more reliable research that has been carried out on issues broadly related to 'street stops' of ordinary citizens. It makes the assumption that stops can have more than one effect and that some of these effects might, broadly speaking, be favourable and others unfavourable. Hence this report is more than an attempt to answer the question of whether street stops have a short term effect on local crime. We are not claiming to provide an exhaustive review of the literature that summarizes all of the research on issues related to street stops. Were we to do so, we would spend considerable resources reviewing and discarding inadequate research papers. Instead we are relying on Criminological Highlights, a research information service, produced by the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies of the University of Toronto. The papers summarized in this information service not only have been reviewed by reputable social science journals, but also by our editorial board (currently of about 11 people), which has read and evaluated each paper that is summarized in Criminological Highlights. The one page summaries of articles we cite are attached to this report and are an integral part of it. Most importantly, these summaries make it easy for readers to evaluate the information on which our conclusions are based. Details: Toronto: University of Toronto, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, 2017. 90p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed April 6, 2018 at: http://criminology.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/DoobGartnerPoliceStopsReport-17Jan2017r.pdf Year: 2017 Country: Canada URL: http://criminology.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/DoobGartnerPoliceStopsReport-17Jan2017r.pdf Shelf Number: 149726 Keywords: Crime HotspotsPolice CrackdownsPolice Policies and PracticesPolice SurveillancePolice-Citizen InteractionsRacial Profiling in Law EnforcementStop and FriskStop and Search |