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The purpose of this paper is to review the extant of the published literature on body-worn cameras (BWCs) in policing, specifically in the context of how BWCs affect both citizens and officers.

The current study is a narrative review of the impact of BWCs on police and citizens generated through a search of four repositories (Google Scholar, Criminal Justice Abstracts, EBSCO Host, PsychInfo).

The current narrative review identified 21 articles that matched the selection criteria. In general, this body of research demonstrates that: the police are supportive of BWC adoption; the evidence from BWC evaluations suggests that the use of BWCs can have benefits for police-public encounters.

The practical implications derived from this narrative review suggest police administrators that the adoption and effective implementation of BWCs are one mechanism that can strengthen police-community relationships and decrease police misconduct through enhanced legitimacy and accountability.

This study is useful for researchers who wish to further examine BWC issues in policing, for police managers/administrators who are currently utilizing BWC technology, and for those who are considering adopting BWC technology.

A growing body of literature focuses on crime hotspots; however, less is known about the spatial distribution of crime at mass transit systems, and even less is known about trajectory patterns of hotspots in non-English-speaking countries.

The spatiotemporal behaviour of 1,494 crimes reported to the Hong Kong’s Railway Police District across a two-year period was examined in this study. Crime harm weights were then applied to offences to estimate the distribution of crime severity across the transit system. Descriptive statistics are used to understand the temporal and spatial trends, and k-means longitudinal clustering are used to examine the developmental trajectories of crime in train stations over time.

Analyses suggest that 15.2% and 8.8% of stations accounted for 50% of all counted crime and crime harm scores, respectively, indicating the predictability of crime and harm to occur at certain stations but not others. Offending persists consistently, with low, moderate and high counts and harm stations remaining the same over time.

These findings suggest that more localised crime control initiatives are required to target crime effectively.

This is one of the only studies focusing on hotspots and harmspots in the mass transit system.

A recent body of evidence investigated repeated intimate partner violence (IPV) using crime harm indices (the severity of victimisation), instead of crime counts (the number of additional victimisation incidents). Yet, the predictive utility of harm scores in IPV remains unclear – except that high-harm IPV is not usually followed by any additional IPV incidents. The authors take cases of repeat IPV from North Zealand Police, Denmark, to predict subsequent IPV harm and counts based on the level of harm of the first reported IPV offence.

Using the Danish crime harm index (CHI) to estimate harm levels, non-linear regression models are applied (due to the non-linear nature of the data) to show that the CHI level of the index offence validly predicts gains in future CHI but does not predict IPV counts.

The findings suggest that whilst high-harm IPV is a rare event and repeat high-harm IPV even rarer, when they do occur, escalation in harm is likely to occur.

A simple metric of harm of the first reported IPV offence can validly predict future harm – however, scholars should apply more fitting analytical techniques than crude descriptive statistics, which fail to take into account the non-linear distribution of police records.

This is the first study to show the value of predicting future harm based on prior harm in IPV.

More than a half a dozen published studies have observed the effect of body-worn cameras (BWCs) on complaints against the police. Nearly all, with varying degrees of methodological sophistication, tell a similar story: a strong reduction in complaints filed against the police once BWCs are in use. However, the entirety of the published evidence comes from English speaking countries, limited to the USA and the UK, and is restricted to the effects of BWCs on response policing. The purpose of this paper is to extend this body of research to Latin America, and to specialized policing jobs.

The authors measured the consequence of equipping traffic police officers with BWCs in five out of the 19 traffic police departments in Uruguay (n=208), and compared these settings to both the pre-test figures as well as to the non-treatment departments. Interrupted time-series analyses and repeated measures of analysis were used for significance testing.

Statistically significant differences emerged between the before–after as well as the between–groups comparisons: complaints were five times higher in the comparison vs the treatment jurisdictions, and there were 86 percent fewer cases compared to the pre-treatment period.

These outcomes suggest that the effect of BWCs on complaints is ubiquitous.

The findings indicate that BWCs provide an effective solution for reducing grievances against the police, which can potentially be a marker of increased accountability, transparency and legitimacy for the Latin American law enforcement departments.

This study is an extension of findings on BWCs to non-English-speaking police departments, with a focus on specialized policing rather than patrol policing.

Virtually all analyses of hotspots have been devoted to a crude counting system, i.e. tallying the number of occurrences that take place in pre-specified units of space and time. Recent research shows that while usually half of all criminal events are concentrated in about 3 percent of places commonly referred to as “hotspots” of crime, similar proportions of harm concentrate in only 1 percent of places. These are “harmspots.” Identifying that harm is a more concentrated issue suggests wide policy and research implications, but what are the dynamics of these harmspots? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper provides a descriptive framework for measuring, as well as evidence about, these patterns and concentrations, harmspots in Sussex, England.

There are four discrete offense categories that account for 80 percent of all the harm within harmspots. These categories include: sexual offenses, violence against the person, robbery and theft. Within these high harmspots, crime counts and harm are strongly correlated (r=0.82, p=0.001). Temporal analyses show that harmspots are not evenly spread across time and place, with night time and weekends becoming substantially more susceptible to harm – more than count-based models. Harmspot trajectory analysis suggests evidence of stability over time within the high harmspots; most harmspots remain chronically inflicted with harm. Violence and sexual offenses are random in their spatial distribution between the harmspots, but robberies and theft are more closely coupled to particular harmspots than others.

Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of future research avenues and crime policy.

State leaders’ decision-making calculus is often attributed to external factors. The political arena, international community pressure and a country’s military stance all take centre stage in the analysis of national security decisions. Little weight is given to personal aspects of a leader’s psyche in explaining these decisions; this is true to the bulk of the research regarding this topic. This study theorizes and tests a positive link between Israeli leaders’ combat military experience and their propensity to enter into ‘peacemaking’ decisions namely, peace talks, cease fires and unilateral withdrawals. This research uses a new database comprising all peacemaking decision points in Israel’s history, looking at the pressure put on a leader from outside factors and his military experience to explain the decision taken. It finds a strong significant link between combat experience and the tendency to enter in a peacemaking decision with little regard to ideological affiliation, shedding a new light on Israeli politicians from both sides of the aisle.

Purpose – Statistics about the level of crime continue to attract public and political attention but are often presented in conflicting ways. In England and Wales, police-recorded crimes are no longer considered “national statistics” and, instead, the crime survey of England and Wales (CSEW) is used. However, it is not clear why partial population data (e.g., police-recorded crime) are considered less reliable or valid for measuring temporal crime trends in society than inferential statistical estimation models that are based on samples such as CSEW. This is particularly the case for approximating rare events like high-harm violence and specific harmful modus operandi (e.g., knife crime and firearms). In this chapter, the authors cross-reference victim survey and police-recorded data to determine similarities and contradictions in trends.

Methods – Using police data and CSEW estimates, the authors contrast variance and logarithmic trend lines since 1981 across a range of data categories and then triangulate the results with assault records from hospital consultations.

Findings – Change in crime rates in recent years is neither as unique nor extreme as promulgated in media coverage of crime. Moreover, analyses show conflicting narratives with a host of plausible but inconclusive depictions of the “actual” amount of crime committed in the society. The authors also conclude that neither source of data can serve as the benchmark of the other. Thus, both data systems suffer from major methodological perils, and the estimated crime means in CSEW, inferred from samples, are not necessarily more valid or accurate than police-recorded data (particularly for low-frequency and high-harm crimes). On the other hand police-recorded data are susceptible to variations in recording practices. As such, the authors propose a number of areas for further research, and a revised taxonomy of crime classifications to assist with future public interpretations of crime statistics.

Originality – There is much public and academic discourse about different sources of crime measurement yet infrequent analysis of the precise similarities and differences between the methods. This chapter offers a new perspective on long-term trends and highlights an issue of much contemporaneous concern: rising violent crime.

Jeliazkov and Poirier (2008) analyze the daily incidence of violence during the Second Intifada in a statistical way using an analytical Bayesian implementation of a second-order discrete Markov process. We tackle the same data and modeling problem from our perspective as cognitive scientists. First, we propose a psychological model of violence, based on a latent psychological construct we call “build up” that controls the retaliatory and repetitive violent behavior by both sides in the conflict. Build up is based on a social memory of recent violence and generates the probability and intensity of current violence. Our psychological model is implemented as a generative probabilistic graphical model, which allows for fully Bayesian inference using computational methods. We show that our model is both descriptively adequate, based on posterior predictive checks, and has good predictive performance. We then present a series of results that show how inferences based on the model can provide insight into the nature of the conflict. These inferences consider the base rates of violence in different periods of the Second Intifada, the nature of the social memory for recent violence, and the way repetitive versus retaliatory violent behavior affects each side in the conflict. Finally, we discuss possible extensions of our model and draw conclusions about the potential theoretical and methodological advantages of treating societal conflict as a cognitive modeling problem.