This study takes as a starting place the inherent tension between public safety and civil rights in considering mental illness as a significant concern for firearms policy and law. This means grappling with the full range of social benefits and costs that may accrue in casting a wide net with a broad mesh to find a few dangerous people among the many with largely non-dangerous disorders of thought, mood, and behavior.
This monograph illuminates one key component of service systems, policing, highlighting the role of police officers as front-line workers in the community, and it examines trends in thinking and practice and common challenges surrounding policing and mental illnesses internationally.
This study improved on the existing work by examining these issues with a more rigorous scientific design. The researchers first examined the relationship between land-use law, the built environment, and crime using detailed block-level crime data and careful observations conducted on 205 blocks in eight different relatively high-crime areas of Los Angeles. They then analyzed the relationship between changes in land-use zones and crime in all neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
This paper describes how the Philadelphia Police Department instituted a large-scale randomized controlled trial of foot patrol as a policing strategy and experienced 23 percent fewer violent crimes during the treatment period. The authors examine whether activities patrol officers were conducting might have produced the crime reduction. The activities of foot and car patrol officers research takes a closer look at what types are examined separately and differences between car patrol activities pre-intervention and during the intervention are explored.
This study revisited the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment and explored the longitudinal deterrent effects of foot patrol in violent crime hot spots using Sherman’s concepts of initial and residual deterrence decay as a theoretical framework. It also explored whether the displacement uncovered during the initial evaluation decayed after the experiment ended. Multi-level growth curve models revealed that beats staffed for 22 weeks had a decaying deterrent effect during the course of the experiment whereas those staffed for 12 weeks did not.
This paper reports on field observations of foot patrol officers involved in a recent experiment in Philadelphia, which were designed to capture officers' perceptions of, and experiences with the foot patrol function.
In this article, the authors report on the efforts of more than 200 foot patrol officers during the summer of 2009 in Philadelphia. The results suggest that targeted foot patrols in violent crime hotspots can significantly reduce violent crime levels as long as a threshold level of violence exists initially. The authors suggest that intensive foot patrol efforts in violent hotspots may achieve deterrence at a microspatial level, primarily by increasing the certainty of disruption, apprehension, and arrest.
University of Washington, Office of Sponsored Programs
Patricia Kuszler, MD, JD •
University of Washington, Office of Sponsored Programs
Opioid overdoses are an important public health concern. Concerns about police involvement at overdose events may decrease calls to 911 for emergency medical care thereby increasing the chances than an overdose becomesfatal. To address this concern, Washington State passed a law that provides immunity from drug possession charges and facilitates the availability of take-home-naloxone (the opioid overdose antidote) to bystanders in 2010.
The Philadelphia Lead Court (PLC) was created as an innovative law enforcement strategy to compel property owners to comply with city health codes to remediate their properties of lead hazards, which had led to elevated blood lead levels and lead poisoning in resident children. This study presents a detailed account of and analyzes the opinions of fifteen key informants drawn from the Philadelphia health and law departments and judicial system that staff and run the PLC in response to a fifteen-question structured survey.
This study determined whether Philadelphia Lead Court is effective in enforcing lead hazard remediation in the homes of children with elevated blood lead levels.
