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The purpose of this paper was to examine law enforcement officers' perspectives on job stress and barriers to supportive resources when working child sexual abuse cases in a large southern state. It is well documented in the literature that professionals who work in healthcare, emergency services and law enforcement face tremendous amounts of stress and consequences to their physical and mental health. Little research has been done to examine how child sexual abuse investigations impact law enforcement, and how these specialized officers perceive access to supportive resources.

This qualitative study was part of a larger quantitative study and included 20 law enforcement officers who participated in anonymous, semi-structured phone interviews.

Findings included (1) child sexual abuse cases are difficult, specialized and disturbing (2) barriers to supportive resources include law enforcement culture, the stigma of asking for help, awareness and accessibility of resources and leadership as gatekeeper to the resources and (3) officers perceive both formal and informal resources to be helpful and at best should be proactively available to all officers in the state. A model of the findings was developed to illustrate the implications for practitioners and scholars.

This study was not without weaknesses, specifically the small number of participants, volunteer sampling does not represent the general population and the sampling technique means some demographics may have been missed by researchers.

This study adds to the literature on law enforcement mental health, occupational health and mental health resources. It confirms established research in the literature and provides insight into officer perspectives about barriers that prevent access to informal and formal supports that could improve their emotional well-being.

This study is the first of its kind, to our knowledge, that asks detectives and investigators of child abuse cases about mental health resources. These law enforcement officers are at high-risk for traumatic stress, compassion fatigue and burnout due to the specialized cases they investigate.

We present the results of one of the only in-depth studies of a police agency’s internal and external response to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 (COVID-19). This study emphasizes the importance of law enforcement agencies conducting comprehensive case studies and after-action assessments to prepare, prevent and respond to prolonged public health crises and showcases the profound (and lingering) effects of COVID-19 on police organizations.

This multi-method case study combines document analysis, a workforce survey, a community survey, interviews and analysis of administrative data to detail and assess the agency’s internal and operational responses to the pandemic and the reactions of employees and community members to those responses.

Despite agency strategies to mitigate the pandemic’s effects, employees cited very high stress levels one year after the pandemic and a third of sworn officers considered leaving the policing profession altogether during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several policies intended by the agency to protect employee health and maintain staffing needs kept workforce levels steady but may have increased feelings of organizational injustice in both sworn and non-sworn individuals, with variation across racial and gender groups. A jurisdiction-wide community survey indicated general support for the police department’s responses but a preference for in-person rather than telephone-based responses to service calls. Officers, however, preferred continuing remote responses even after the pandemic subsided.

To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the only in-depth case studies that examine a police agency’s internal and external responses to COVID-19 and the sworn, non-sworn and community reactions to those responses.

The importance of multi-agency information sharing is recognised as central to tackling crime and disorder in an intelligence-driven environment. However, whilst technology can facilitate and enhance this process, barriers to effective agency information exchange are consistently reported. This paper aims to categorise how information sharing takes place in a law enforcement operational setting and whether there is scope to improve the process.

There were two stages to the method; firstly, a select group of practitioners with intelligence-related experience (n = 28) were interviewed to identify the most common approaches to operational information sharing. This generated a categorisation model, which was tested with a larger group of practitioners (n = 73). A mixed-methods approach was adopted.

The research found consensus surrounding four different approaches to information sharing, labelled as: (1) inform and request, (2) meet and share, (3) customised database and (4) integrated systems. These are used at various levels of frequency, dependent on the operational context.

This research provides original evidence-based research to show law enforcement practitioners vary in the way they share information. By demystifying and categorising the process, it provides understanding for practitioners, policymakers and researchers, allowing barriers to be more readily tackled in a much more cost-effective manner.

This paper aims to develop a framework for critical information infrastructure (CII) protection in smart government, an alternative measure for common cybersecurity frameworks such as NIST Cybersecurity Framework and ISO 27001. Smart government is defined as the government administration sector of CII due to its similarity as a core of smart technology.

To ensure the validity of the data, the research methodology used in this paper follows the predicting malfunctions in socio-technical systems (PreMiSTS) approach, a variation of the socio-technical system (STS) approach specifically designed to predict potential issues in the STS. In this study, PreMiSTS was enriched with observation and systematic literature review as its main data collection method, thematic analysis and validation by experts using fuzzy Delphi method (FDM).

The proposed CII protection framework comprises several dimensions: objectives, interdependency, functions, risk management, resources and governance. For all those dimensions, there are 20 elements and 41 variables.

This framework can be an alternative guideline for CII protection in smart government, particularly in government administration services.

The author uses PreMiSTS, a socio-technical approach combined with thematic analysis and FDM, to design a security framework for CII protection. This combination was designed as a mixed-method approach to improve the likelihood of success in an IT project.

The notion of deeper experiences of Hindu devotees inspired by divine images and sacred places has roots in the historical past, going back to the Vedic period (ca. 2500 BCE), where we find rich literature on performances, rituals and merits of pilgrimages. Considered the bridge between human beings and divinities, the experiences received are the resultant ‘blissful fruit’ (phala) that helps the spiritual healing of pilgrims through awakening conscience and understanding the manifested meanings, symbolism, purposes and gains. This system can be viewed concerning the ‘texts’ (the mythology, ancient text and related narratives) and the ‘context’ (contemporality and living tradition). These rules and performances have regional perspectives of distinctions, but they also carry the sense of universality, i.e. locality (sthānic) and universality (sarvavyāpika) interfaces. The devout Hindus reflect their experiences in conception, perception, reception and co-sharedness – altogether making the wholistic network of belief systems, i.e. the religious wholes in Hindu society. This chapter deals with four aspects: the historical and cultural contexts, the meanings and merits received, the motives and the journey and interfacing experiences. The study is based on the experiential and questionnaire-based exposition and interviews of pilgrims at nine holy places during 2015–2019 on various festive occasions and is illustrated with ancient texts and treatises. The sacred cities included are Prayagraj, Varanasi, Gaya, Ayodhya, Vindhyachal, Ganga Sagar, Chitrakut, Mathura Vrindavana and Bodh Gaya.