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The purpose of this paper is to apply focal concerns theory as a theoretical explanation for police officer decision making during a traffic stop that results in a consent search. The study uses coefficients testing to better examine the issue of racial profiling through the use of a race-specific model.

The data for this study come from traffic stops conducted by the Louisville Police Department between January 1 and December 31, 2002.

The results show that the three components of focal concerns theory can explain police officer decision making for consent searches. Yet, the components of focal concerns theory play a greater role in stops of Caucasian male drivers.

The data for this study are cross-sectional and self-reported from police officers.

This paper shows the utility of applying focal concerns theory as a theoretical explanation for police officer decision making on consent searches and how the effects of focal concerns vary depending on driver race.

The findings based on focal concerns theory can provide an opportunity for police officers or departments to explain what factors impact the decision making during consent searches.

This is the first study (to the researchers’ knowledge) that examines the racial effects of focal concerns on traffic stop consent searchers using coefficients testing.

This article's overarching purpose is to serve as an initial theoretical and empirical step in applying rights consciousness inquiry to the criminal procedure context. First, building on previous work within the legal consciousness and rights consciousness traditions, I discuss the ways in which attention to criminal procedure can inform our understanding of rights consciousness and enumerate differences between the way rights consciousness approaches civil law and the ways it might approach criminal law. Additionally, I suggest that understanding the relationship between people's subjective impressions of procedures and procedures’ legal and moral validity offers a novel means of studying procedure that I term “procedural rights consciousness.” In the second part of the article, I report results of two studies designed as first empirical steps in applying rights consciousness as the first part suggests. My findings indicate that not only do people lack knowledge about their rights in criminal investigations but they also think about these rights in patterned ways that reflect a method of understanding law characterized by “lay jurisprudence” reasoning, in which culturally prevalent “tenets” are applied to specific situations. This mechanism often leads people to erroneous conclusions about the rights they possess. The final part of the article sets out an agenda for further rights consciousness research.

The current study examines the effects of race, agency and environment on traffic stops in rural and non-rural spaces.

Using traffic stop data collected in a Midwest US County from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021, the current study uses logistic regression to examine racial disparities in traffic stops.

The results indicate that police decision-making in traffic stops may be influenced by other factors besides a driver’s race or ethnicity. In other words, the police officer’s decision making in a traffic stop varies between small and large agencies as well as rural and non-rural places.

This study provides one of the few examinations of racial disparities in traffic stops in rural places.

Rhetorically, the notion of choice has always been a powerful one in politics and law. This chapter is intended to offer a note of caution about its use. Despite its progressive hue of individual freedom, the rhetoric of choice increasingly tends to be a notion used to defend and uphold existing matrices of economic and social power. This is because the rhetoric of choice is an excellent way to support existing power relationships. The assertion that people acting within such power relationships are simply choosing their current situation undermines efforts to change those relationships. The powerful stay powerful; the weak stay weak. This is true in a number of areas, from discussions about school vouchers, to debates about tort reform, to the disagreements surrounding the regulation of pornography.

The dependence on choice rhetoric also exists in corporate law, where the school of thought currently dominant in corporate law doctrine holds that the corporation is best seen as a voluntary arrangement among all the various stakeholders of the corporation. The rhetoric of choice is thus a powerful tool to fight against any reform of current relationships within the corporation that would embolden and empower stakeholders traditionally left out of the corporate power structure. Those involved with the corporation, whether shareholders, employees, or communities, have chosen their position, and thus should not complain when they do not receive more than what they explicitly contracted to receive. In this way, the notion of choice is used to bolster a view of corporate law that protects those already within the corporate power structure and excludes important stakeholders from corporate decision making. The rhetoric of choice is used in the same way in corporate law discourse as it is used elsewhere by the right – to justify or bolster existing matrices of economic and social power.

The purpose of this paper is to draw a better understanding of the potential impact of daylight in officer decision making. In order to this, the authors test the veil of darkness hypothesis, which theorizes that racial bias in traffic stops can be tested by controlling for the impact of daylight, while operating under the assumption that driver patterns remain constant across race.

Publicly available traffic-stop records from the Louisville Metro Police Department for January 2010–2019. The analysis includes both propensity score matching to examine the impact of daylight in similarly situated stops and coefficients testing to analyze how VOD may vary in citation-specific models.

The results show that using PSM following the VOD hypothesis does show evidence of racial bias, with Black drivers more likely to be stopped. Moreover, the effects of daylight significantly varied across citation-specific models.

The data are self-reported from the officer and do not contain information on the vehicle make or model.

This paper shows that utilizing PSM and coefficients testing provides for a better analysis following the VOD hypothesis and does a better job of understanding the impact of daylight and the officer decision-making on traffic stops.

Based on the quality of the data, the findings show that the use of VOD allows for the performance of more rigorous analyses of traffic stop data – giving police departments a better way to examine if racial profiling is evident.

This is the first study (to the researchers' knowledge) that applies the statistical analyses of PSM to the confines of the veil of darkness hypothesis.

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the elements, developmental stages, and operational steps of an open‐air drug market intervention employed in two North Carolina communities in an effort to produce a model that can be duplicated by other law enforcement agencies.

A systematic and practitioner‐informed analysis of the steps and stages of the initiative is presented here. Law enforcement partners at the command and operational levels collectively contributed their voices to the synthesis of this model. Through purposive sampling, 13 key law enforcement stakeholders from the two police departments in North Carolina participated in semi‐structured interviews conducted by a member of the research team. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed to extract participants' perceptions and recommendations regarding the intervention.

Based on analyses of the interviews, the street‐drug elimination strategy has been synthesized into several major steps. This paper elucidates the elements, developmental stages, and operational steps of the intervention.

This paper underscores important ingredients of the intervention and presents a model for other police departments to implement. Further examination of the strategy is necessary including research on improving the intervention, clarifying the factors that moderate the strategy's effectiveness, explicating the roles and perceptions of non‐law enforcement partners and examining the continued impact of the initiative.

The paper illustrates that this intervention has shown promise in reducing drug and violent crime associated with open‐air drug markets and the research is of value to other police agencies that desire to implement this intervention.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a UK-based assessment of oral history technology and to identify the most important features that should be available in any oral history search system.

A co-design approach involving interviews and focus groups was adopted. The framework approach with elements of grounded theory was used to analyse transcripts to identify themes.

The analysis found that “ethics, consent and control”, “accessibility and engagement”, “publicity and awareness”, and “innovative technologies” were the four major themes identified. It was also established that there is limited understanding of oral history in the digital age, numerous interests, ethical concerns, lack of publicity and several key attributes that those designing an oral history search system or archive should strive for. The findings also identified that further exploration into sampling selected technologies on different user groups is required in order to develop software that would benefit the field.

Participants were all recruited from one geographic region. The qualitative methodology utilised could be deemed to have elements of subjectivity.

This study has identified important features of any oral history search system and offered design recommendations for any developer of an oral history search systems.

This research has validated some previous findings for oral history search systems from more limited user studies. New issues for consideration including usability, software development and marketing have also been identified.

Investor access to timely, financial resource consent information is problematic, consequently the purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic importance of New Zealand resource consent announcements to the stock exchange.

The authors apply event study methodology and cross‐sectional rank regression using a sample of resource consent announcements from 1993 to 2007.

Evidence of excess return volatility is found both on and before resource consent announcement dates. The results show that stock market reactions to resource consent announcements are positive for news of successes and negative for news of setbacks. Uncertainty associated with resource consent announcements appears to contribute to a delayed negative market response. In contrast, price reactions to announcements of resource consent success are immediate and significantly positive only when the news is concurrently disseminated via the media.

The findings imply that resource consent announcements are newsworthy and provide valuable information to the stock market regarding future regulatory compliance costs. Media dissemination is suggested to play an important role in the price‐adjustment process for news of resource consent successes. Given the increasing prominence of environmental compliance issues, the authors suggest that more informative disclosures regarding the types of consent(s) sought, the dollar value of expected compliance costs, expected time to gain consent, project investment costs and consent conditions imposed, would better assist investors to assess the economic impact of firm capital expenditures.

This study adds evidence to the literature on the role of environmental disclosures in disseminating information and reducing information asymmetry and offers suggestions to enhance the informativeness of environmental disseminations.