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The purpose of this article is to describe an innovative research methods framework designed to address some of the persistent challenges to a social scientific understanding of civilian-led police oversight commissions.

The project design begins by acknowledging that oversight commissions take multiple and varied forms, which are contingent on local histories, institutional dynamics and discursive strategies for indexing racial inequality. The authors find such variation not to be an impediment to insightful research design. Rather, the methodological frame makes use of multi-sited ethnographic methods, organized at the county level across three research clusters (in this example, Milwaukee Co, WI; San Diego Co., CA; and Washtenaw Co, MI), to draw attention to the effects of such multiplicity to complicate, localize and render visible the specific practices of policing and its critique through civilian oversight.

Amongst an increasing national concern with the racialized nature of police violence, one evolving strategy for police reform among municipalities is to establish civilian oversight boards that can monitor, make recommendations for, and potentially direct police policy. However, there is very little research on such commissions, leaving many unanswered questions for proponents of evidence-based criminal justice policy. One reason for this lack is that the tremendous variability of such commissions has led some researchers to abandon hope for a comparative analysis which might offer generalizable conclusions beyond individual case studies. Lessons learned from previous reform efforts suggest that without a solid evidentiary basis, such reform efforts can easily succumb to institutional inertia or even failure. This danger is especially present when policy and practice recommendations are not based on research designs particularly attuned to making audible the experiences and concerns of the most marginalized targets of police attention.

The value of this method rests in its ability to provide comparative insights into the ways in which oversight commissions operate within a broader pluralized security landscape that both makes possible and constrains democratic participation along racial lines. The method contextualizes and renders audible ways of understanding, evaluating, and practicing democratic community as it is articulated through the issue of police and its oversight.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the community level factors associated with police strength and operational costs in Aboriginal police services from four different geographic zones, including remote communities inaccessible by road[1].

Analysis of variance was used to determine whether there was a statistically significant difference in per capita policing costs, the officer to resident ratio, an index of community well-being and crime severity in 236 rural and remote Canadian communities.

The authors found that places that were geographically inaccessible or further from urban areas had rates of police-reported crime several times the national average and low levels of community well-being. Consistent with those results, the per capita costs of policing were many times greater than the national average, in part due to higher officer to resident ratios.

These results are from rural Canada and might not be generalizable to other nations.

Given the complex needs of these communities, these findings reinforce the importance of delivering full-time professional police services in rural and remote communities. Short duration or temporary postings may reduce police legitimacy as residents may perceive that their rural or Aboriginal status makes them less valued than city dwellers. As a result, agencies should prioritize the retention of experienced officers in these communities.

These findings validate the observations of officers about the challenges that must be overcome in policing these distinctive communities. This information can be used to inform future studies of rural and remote policing.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the contours of the police code of silence, a critical component of the ability to control misconduct and enhance integrity within any police agency. Unlike the extant research, dominated by single-country studies, this paper provides an in-depth exploration of the code across five countries and tests the relation between the code of science and societal characteristics.

A police integrity survey was used to measure the contours of the code of silence among police officers in Australia (n=856), Croatia (n=966), South Africa (n=871), South Korea (n=379) and the USA (n=664). The respondents evaluated 11 hypothetical scenarios describing various forms of police misconduct.

Bivariate analyses reveal considerable divergence in the code of silence across the five countries. Multivariate models of the code of silence show that, next to organizational factors (i.e. the respondents’ assessment of peers’ willingness to report, evaluations of misconduct seriousness and expected discipline) and individual factors (i.e. supervisory status), societal factors (i.e. the Corruption Perceptions Index score and the percent of irreligious citizens) are significant predictors of the respondents’ willingness to report.

While the same questionnaire was used in all five countries, the nature of the data collection differed somewhat across the countries (e.g. online survey vs paper-and-pencil survey), as did the nature of the samples (e.g. representative sample vs convenience sample).

Perceived peer pressure, measured as the perceptions of whether other police officers would adhere to the code of silence, is the key variable explaining the police officers’ expressed willingness to adhere to the code of silence. Changing the police officers’ perceptions of peer culture and potentially changing the peer culture itself should be critical elements in the toolbox of any administrator willing to curtail the code of silence.

Whereas the study of the code of silence has started several decades ago, no prior study has tested the effects of organizational and societal variables on the code of silence in a comparative perspective.

This paper aims to examine the many unusual roles played by the Italian Guardia di Finanza (GdF), and how that unique blend of missions sometimes overlaps as much with conceptions of domestic security as it does with the policing of financial crimes.

This paper analyzes the agency's historical organization and evolution, legal authorities and changing missions. It uses publicly available government documents and secondary analysis.

This organization, for historical reasons, was an early version of a hybrid agency that conducted both crime control and national protective missions – policing economic crime, patrolling borders and coasts and attempting to regulate the flows of goods and people into and out of the Italian state.

This analysis uses data collected from annual reports of the Guardia di Finanza, as well as journalistic reporting and scholarly analysis, to assess the changing agency, but it does not use internal sources or direct observation, which could inform future related analyses.

GdF’s unique set of undertakings is particularly relevant as the comparative policing and financial crime literatures grow, and particularly as they continue to overlap with the broader comparative security literature.

Policing, and police reform, has been very high profile in recent years, and will continue to be. The unusual structure of Italian policing, and the GdF in particular, have insights that could inform other nations police and policing.

This analysis is designed to describe an unusual case – of financial policing, of policing in general, and of domestic security policy – and illustrating how those issues overlap and relate. National police agencies often have missions that evolve over time, and this is a case study in such evolution.

Long a tradition in the USA, surveys of citizen perceptions of the police are beginning to gain prominence in emerging democracies. Recently, citizen surveys using common items were conducted in New York and St Petersburg, Russia. This paper reports on a cross‐national analysis of data on citizen perceptions of the police using data from these two surveys. The analyses include comparisons of voluntary and involuntary contacts with the police, perceptions of police effectiveness, and perceptions of police misconduct. Results suggest that residents of St Petersburg are more likely to be stopped by the police, while residents of New York are more likely to contact the police for assistance with crime and other neighborhood problems. Police in New York were generally seen as more effective than their counterparts in St Petersburg. In both cities, roughly half of those surveyed believed that the police engaged in misconduct.

The Korean police have been greatly affected by the political developments of the twentieth century. Political neutrality and structural autonomy of the police from the government has not been ensured at all times since the establishment of the Korean police. Instead, the police had been used as an instrument for ruling regimes to seize and maintain their political power. The Korean police, siding with the authoritative governments, emphasized politically‐oriented policing rather than citizen‐oriented policing, frequently violating constitutional and human rights in the process, all of which has contributed to the crisis the Korean police now face. To prevent the political manipulation of the police and ensure their autonomy, more structural reforms should occur.

The primary objective of the current study is to examine the impact that the size of a police department and workload on a department have on response time. Secondarily, the authors look at the effect that incident-level factors such as the severity of a call for service (CFS) and community-level factors such as ethnic diversity have on police response time.

The current study examined CFSs data collected over a three-year period and organizational information from 26 police departments in Northeast Texas, as well as community-level information. In order to measure the effect of organizational variables, community factors and incident-level variables on police response time, the authors employed the use of hierarchical linear models (HLMs).

The results of hierarchical linear modeling indicated that incident-level factors and police department size are significant predictors of response time.

There are two primary limitations: first, there were a lack of available organizational structure correlates such as age and differentiation. Second, the primary data set had a significant number of incomplete or repeating cases, thereby limiting the accuracy of the current study’s analysis.

The most unique aspect of this manuscript is that it examines how organizational factors affect police response time. Numerous studies analyzed determinants of police response time such as incident- and community-level factors, but the importance of organizational factors has not been analyzed.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was the explicit base for the politically shared, though tenuous, internal government of Northern Ireland. This ensuing process has highlighted the centrality of the national police, as a country or state attempts to shift towards a contemporary, pluralistic democracy. To clarify, the police force, which was previously an instrument of control, must now become an organization that strives for the consent and support of the public. Using Mawby’s models of policing as an organizational framework, this article focuses attention on the policing paradigms of Northern Ireland over the course of its social history. It puts forth the argument that, despite some strategic changes, it is only upon the heels of the Good Friday Agreement and the consequent governmental change that the police force has begun to shift its operational paradigm away from the colonial model toward an Anglo‐Saxon paradigm.

Although numerous studies recently have appeared that identify the most‐cited scholars and works in the general criminology and criminal justice literature and in several specialty areas, no previous citation study has specifically examined the police studies literature. Through an analysis of 370 articles and research notes appearing from 1991 to 1995 in the areas of police studies, published in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and four academic periodicals devoted to police studies, we list the 50 most‐cited scholars and the 36 most‐cited works. The lists of the most‐cited scholars and works in the specialty area of police studies are compared to general lists taken from leading criminology and criminal justice journals and introductory textbooks. We conclude with some thoughts about the relevance of citation analysis to specialists in police studies.

There is a prevailing perception that police officers are antagonistic to any civilian review process. This perception also includes the assumption that all police officers are one in denouncing any civilian review. This research examines the degree to which these prevailing perceptions about police officers' views of civilian reviews reflect reality. This research contends that there is reason to question the overwhelming assumption in the literature that police officers are united in their views about civilian review. The research found that police officers have varying perceptions about civilian review. Furthermore, these differences in perceptions are correlated with the experience of being subjected to these reviews. The data indicate that experience with civilian review tend to draw positive perceptions from the police. On the other hand, police officers who have never been subjected to civilian review have less than positive perceptions of review boards. The research findings also indicate that civilian review boards need to overcome these initial negative perceptions especially among police officers who have never had a case adjudicated by a civilian review board.