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Community-police relations have gained increasing public attention during the past decade. The purpose of the present study was to better understand the relationship between perceived community support and police officer burnout and engagement.

Data were gathered via online survey from 117 officers from a city police department in the Southeastern United States.

Community support was negatively correlated with burnout and positively correlated with engagement. Moreover, multiple regression analyses showed that community support explained significant incremental variance in most dimensions of burnout and engagement, above and beyond demographic factors and community stressors. Qualitative results showed that police officers had mixed perceptions of how they were viewed by the general public, with more negative than positive responses. However, officers felt more positively perceived in their own communities, but concerns were raised that national events affected the perceptions of officers even in positive relationships with their communities. Finally, officers felt that public perceptions impacted their job satisfaction, job performance and personal lives.

The results have practical implications for how to encourage positive interactions between officers and their community, with recommendations for both law enforcement leaders and civilians.

This study is one of the few that highlights the officers' perspective on how public perceptions affect their work. This is important in understanding how to maximize quality community interactions while minimizing conditions that would increase burnout.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the errors arising from the numerical treatment of model processes, paying particular attention to the impact of key system features including widely variable dispersion coefficients, spatiotemporal velocities of algal cells, and the aggregation of algae from single cells to large colonies. An advection–dispersion model has been presented to describe the vertical transport of colonial and motile harmful algae in a lake environment.

Model performance is examined for two different numerical treatments of the advective term: first-order upwind and quadratic upwind with a stability-preserving flux limiter (SMART). To determine how these schemes impact predictions, comparisons are made across a sequence of models with increasing complexity.

Using first-order upwinding for advection–dispersion calculations with a time oscillating velocity field leads to oscillatory numerical dispersion. Subjecting an initially uniform distribution of large-sized algal colonies to a spatiotemporal velocity creates a concentration pulse, which reaches a steady-state width at high-grid Peclet numbers when using the SMART scheme; the pulse exhibits contraction–expansion behavior throughout a velocity cycle at all Peclet numbers when using first-order upwinding. When aggregation dynamics are included with advection-dominated spatiotemporal transport, results indicate the SMART scheme predicts larger peak concentration values than those predicted by first-order upwind, but peak location and the time to large colony appearance remain largely unchanged between the two advective schemes.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first numerical investigation of a novel advection–dispersion model of vertical algal transport. In addition, a generalized expression for the effective dispersion coefficient of temporally variable flow fields is presented.