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The purpose of this paper is to examine the spatial influence of features of the physical environment on the risk of aggression toward law enforcement.

The spatial analytic technique, risk terrain modeling was performed on felonious battery data provided by the Chicago Police Department.

Out of the 991 batteries against law enforcement officers (LEOs) in Chicago, 11 features of the physical environment were identified as presenting a statistically significant spatial risk of battery to LEOs. Calls for service within three blocks of foreclosures and/or within a dense area of problem buildings pose as much as two times greater risk of battery to police officers than what is presented by other significant spatial factors in the model.

An abundance of existing research on aggression toward law enforcement is situated from the perspective of characteristics of the suspect or officer. The research advances the field of violence studies by illustrating the importance of incorporating physical features of the environment into empirical studies of aggression.

Police technology fundamentally shapes the police role, and the adoption of technology is even linked to the success of police reforms. Police adoption of emerging technological tools changes the way police interact with citizens. The change in police citizen interactions can then have serious implications for the social control that police have over citizens, the civil liberties citizens enjoy, police accountability, and the legitimacy that the police hold in contemporary American society.

While technology impacts these critical issues in policing, not all technology adopted by the police is likely to influence their relationship with the public. As such, this chapter closely examines the ways that several emerging technologies adopted by the police (i.e., body-worn cameras (BWC), aerial surveillance, visual surveillance, social media, mapping and crime prediction, and less lethal force technology) impact issues related to social control, accountability, and legitimacy. The current literature seems to indicate that some innovations such as BWCs enhance police accountability and legitimacy, and also expand social control. Other technologies such as aerial surveillance and conducted energy devices increase social control, and display a complicated or unclear influence over police legitimacy.

This study aims to investigate critical differences between police officer willingness to use and recommend an employee assistance program (EAP) to a peer, including the relationship between officer perceptions of macro-level organizational support and micro-level EAP support.

A survey of 213 police officers from a large, urban police department in the Northeast United States of America is used to evaluate the relationship between officer perceptions of the EAP and the officers' willingness to use and recommend the EAP to peers. Generalized linear regression models are used to evaluate the moderating effect of perceived organizational support (POS) on perceived EAP support.

The findings of this study suggest that POS strongly predicts willingness to use the EAP, but POS has no significant relationship with willingness to recommend the EAP. There is evidence that POS moderates the relationship of EAP support on willingness to recommend the EAP to a peer. When POS decreases, the relationship of EAP support with willingness to recommend the EAP to peers becomes stronger.

The current study is limited by the study's focus on only one police department and the department's use of cross-sectional data, which may limit the generalizability of the results to agencies that differ in size and type.

This research has practical implications for those who seek to improve officer receptivity to mental health support and improve the quality of police services provided to the public. The findings demonstrate that improving officer willingness to recommend the EAP to peers may be a more sustainable pathway to addressing officer mental health than willingness to use the EAP considering the current movement toward police reform.

The research unveils significant differences in police officer decision-making between using the EAP and recommending it to a peer. The research also adds empirical evidence to existing research on the role of POS in policing and the altruistic, peer-focused nature of the police subculture.

Homicide is the most severe form of crime and one that imposes the greatest societal costs. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the homicide circumplex, a set of traits, behaviors, psychological and psychiatric features that are associated with greater homicidal ideation, homicidal social cognitive biases, homicide offending and victimization, and psychopathology that is facilitative of homicide.

Using the data from a near population of federal supervised release offenders from the Midwestern USA, ANOVA, multinomial logistic, Poisson and negative binomial regression models were developed.

Greater homicidal ideation is associated with homicide offending, attempted homicide offending and attempted homicide victimization and predicted by gang activity, alias usage, antisocial personality disorder and intermittent explosive disorder. These behavioral disorders, more extensive criminal careers, African American status and gang activity also exhibited significant associations with dimensions of the homicide circumplex.

Developing behavioral profiles of offenders that exhibit homicidal ideation and behaviors are critical for identifying clients at greatest risk for lethal violence. The homicide circumplex is an innovation toward the goal that requires additional empirical validation.

This chapter offers a survey of education development in the Baltic region and the dynamics of global forces in the three Baltic states’ contexts. First, a brief overview of the incoming new-liberal global trend that impacted the education in the Post-Socialist European region will be provided, followed by a discussion of similarities and differences in the development of education in Baltic states as co-shaped by contextual contours of the post-socialist region at whole. It shows that the contextual social and cultural realities of Estonia-Latvia-Lithuania not only have a powerful mediating role on the impact of global forces but are in their own right an agency in shaping the education response of Post-socialist societies of this region. Second, the knowledge of the interrelationship between education and societal cultural contexts in the Baltic region will be explained, stressing the lack of research on informal settlements or the informal economy and its intersection with education. The International Comparative Education research agenda will not only be of significance for the Baltic states but to the entire world. Many aspects of the contextual architecture of the region are becoming increasingly evident world-wide tending the neo-liberalism in education as distinct from liberalism insofar as it does not advocate market-economic policy but instead is highly constructivist and approve a strong state to bring reforms in every aspect of society transforming the education and teaching labor market.