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The purpose of this paper is to review officer support for the consolidation of law enforcement agencies.

The current study surveys 139 officers employed by four agencies that have recently undergone a consolidation of police services. The survey asked officers their level of support for consolidation of services as well as their views of how consolidation has affected employment conditions, organizational characteristics, and the delivery of police services.

While officers generally support consolidation, views on the effects of shared services vary significantly by level of support. Officers who most strongly support consolidation are also most likely to view it as leading to improvements in some working conditions (e.g. job satisfaction, morale), elements of organizational capacity (e.g. professionalism, investigative/intelligence capacity, recruitment), and the delivery of services (e.g. cost-effectiveness, quality and efficiency of services, and reductions in crime).

The sample size and response rate are low. Still, the study offers insights into officer views of consolidation not previously available.

This research offers insights to communities considering the consolidation of police services regarding what organizational, employment, and service conditions are most likely to appeal to officers, whose support is necessary for successful implementation.

While single case studies previously considered officer attitudes on these issues, this work is the first to comparatively examine views of shared services across varying levels of support for consolidation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a metric for validating the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative’s (NSI) sixteen-category instrument, which is designed to guide law enforcement in the collection and analysis of suspicious behaviors preceding serious crimes, including terrorist attacks.

Data on suspicious preoperational activities and terrorism incident outcomes in the USA between 1972 and 2013 come from the American Terrorism Study (ATS). Using a mixed-method approach, the authors conduct descriptive and multivariate analyses to examine the frequencies of the least and most prevalent suspicious activities (or SAR indicators) and how they predict the likelihood of terrorism prevention. In addition, the authors contextualize how configurations of SAR indicators are associated with the successful thwarting of terrorism incidents by law enforcement using an analytical method known as conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC).

The study reveals several key findings. First, certain behaviors categorized as suspicious, such as making threats, occur more frequently than others. Second, making threats, conducting surveillance and terrorist recruitment/financing predict law enforcement interdiction in terrorism plots, while misrepresentation (or the manufacturing and use of false documents) is more associated with terrorist success. Third, prevalent SAR indicators operate differently in the context of various combinations of suspicious activities to shape the likelihood for law enforcement interdiction.

The current study’s findings may not be generalizable to other forms of violent extremism and terrorism outside of the USA.

This study illuminates opportunities for the NSI to provide law enforcement with the necessary tools to reduce terrorism risk and prevent future attacks.

To our knowledge, no scholarly work to date has assessed how observable behavioral indicators of suspicious preoperational activities affect the outcomes of terrorist plots.

The purpose of this paper is to assess officer perceptions of consolidation of law enforcement agencies under three specific models: contracting, merger and a hybrid of regionalization and contracting.

A survey was administered to 139 officers employed by four agencies using one of the models of interest. The survey asked officers their views on consolidation and how it has affected organizational and employment characteristics.

Officers generally support consolidation, but views vary by agency type. Officers in the contracting agencies, for example, generally viewed consolidation as less cost effective than officers in other agencies viewed it, but were more likely to say crime decreased and job security and workload improved after consolidation. Officers in the hybrid agency were less positive about changes in some employment and organizational characteristics.

The sample size and response rates are low, and no comparison to other agencies is available, but the examination offers new information and lessons.

Communities considering police consolidation must consider a specific model and how to communicate changes to officers. This research illuminates officer perspectives on each.

This is the first investigation of views of shared services by specific model of consolidation. Such work is particularly valuable given increased interest in consolidation in recent years.

In this chapter, we examine several attributes of lone wolf terrorists and how their activities are temporally and geospatially patterned. In particular, we demonstrate how precursor behaviors and attack characteristics of lone wolves are similar and different compared to those of group-based terrorists.

Based on data drawn from the American Terrorism Study (ATS), we examine 268 federal terrorism “indictees” linked to 264 incidents. Three types of loners are identified based on group affiliations and levels of assistance in preparing for and executing terrorist attacks. A series of analyses comparatively examine loners who had no assistance and those actors that did.

The results of this study suggest that lone wolf terrorists are more educated and socially isolated than group-based actors. Lone wolves also engage in less precursor activities than group actors, but are willing to travel greater distances to prepare for and execute attacks. Explanations for why lone wolves are able to “survive” longer than terrorist groups by avoiding arrest may in part stem from their ability to temporally and geospatially position their planning and preparatory activities.

Studies on lone wolf terrorism remain few and many are plagued by methodological and conceptual limitations. The current study adds to this growing literature by relying on lone wolf terrorism data recently made available by the American Terrorism Study (ATS). Our findings are valuable for members of the law enforcement and intelligence communities responsible for the early detection and prevention of lone wolf terrorism in the United States.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how celebrated cases affect attitudes toward police, controlling for key demographic, police contact, and neighborhood contextual variables.

The paper presents two waves of public opinion data measuring attitudes toward police, police services, police harassment, and officer guilt before and after a celebrated police misconduct trial. Data were collected by telephone from residents living in three areas.

The findings in the paper suggest that news consumption of this celebrated case had no significant effects on general attitudes toward police, police services, and concerns about police harassment. Media coverage, however, did effect citizen evaluation of the guilt of the officers involved in the case. The more a citizen read a newspaper or read about the case, the more likely she was to think that the officers were guilty. Concern about crime in the neighborhood was an important predictor of attitudes toward the police, and race effects were much more pronounced after media coverage of the case.

This paper highlights the need to examine more closely media coverage of celebrated cases and the effects of such high profile cases. In addition, it illustrates that public opinion research must be careful of contextual variables when conducting a study at a single point in time.

These findings also have critical implications for law enforcement agencies. The findings highlight the importance of police departments being prepared to respond to crisis events.

This paper is valuable to scholars and police practitioners because of its close examination of the effects of a celebrated case on various measures of public opinion of the police. Although there have many studies examining this general topic, research has ignored the impact of media coverage generally and coverage of high profile incidents.

The adverse effects of alcohol consumption are massive. Alcohol is deemed to be the major factor in four per cent of the global burden of disease mortality (World Health Organisation, 2004). It has been suggested that there are two quite separate approaches to alcohol control policies. These supposedly different approaches are called the ‘public health approach’ and ‘harm minimisation’ or ‘harm reduction’. In fact, while there has been a clear difference in emphasis between some expressions of these two approaches, so much of what their exponents advocate is the same that there would appear to be no merit in continuing to regard them as mutually exclusive or in conflict. The public health approach emphasises curbing the level of alcohol‐related problems by reducing the per capita alcohol consumption (eg. Bruun et al, 1975; Edwards et al, 1995; Babor et al, 2003). Harm minimisation or harm reduction is intended to reduce the level of alcohol's adverse effects without necessarily reducing per capita alcohol consumption (Plant et al, 1997).

This chapter discusses teaching strategies designed to help students develop an open-minded and critically self-reflective worldview. By attending to the perceptual dimension of global citizenship education, students and instructors begin the important work of reflecting on the deeper influences that consciously or unconsciously influence one’s global perspective. Research suggests that these goals are best achieved through cross-cultural learning experiences that involve people of different backgrounds. The cross-cultural learning experiences discussed in this chapter include meeting with local residents who moved to the United States within the last decade and who now send their children to the schools that students enrolled in teacher education courses would teach in. Additionally, technology was used to connect graduate students seeking their teaching license in the United States with graduate students and teachers in Durban, South Africa as part of an ongoing reflection on how one develops perspective consciousness. The learning activities described below align with the tenets of global education because they are not specific to one discipline or content area but rather focus on ways to develop habits of mind, perspective consciousness, cross-cultural learning opportunities, and a sense of responsibility as aspiring educators that are applicable across the sciences, arts, and humanities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether threat assessment, an intelligence-led policing (ILP) tool, can prevent mass public shootings.

In order to gauge the potential effectiveness of this ILP tool, the authors conduct a retrospective analysis of 278 mass public shootings that occurred in the USA between 1966 and 2016. This retrospective analysis allows us to determine how successful threat assessment protocols could be in preventing mass public shootings by examining how successful this tool would have been in identifying the offenders in our data.

The results show that threat assessment has the potential to be an effective tool in the ILP arsenal to identify and prevent impending mass public shootings. However, our results also point to several obstacles for the effective implementation of this ILP tool. The underreporting of threats and using the content of threats and characteristics of threateners are problematic in correctly assigning risk. The authors make suggestions for how to overcome these obstacles.

This study makes several contributions to the intelligence-led policing and mass murder field. This is the first study to test the potential effectiveness of an intelligence-led policing tool to prevent mass public shootings. Additionally, this is one of the first studies to examine the leaks, types, context and follow-though of threats made by mass public shooters in the United States. Consequently, it provides unique information on the foreshowing behaviors of mass public shooters.

This paper aims to determine whether high school students can become agents of change in their local communities by participating in a formal internship program implemented through a partnership between academia (high schools and universities), nonprofit organizations and key community stakeholders.

Pre- and post-assessments, activity journals and on-line interviews are used to measure the impact of internships on high school students’ sustainability leadership, using a train-the-trainer intervention led by university interns. A conceptual problem-solving framework is proposed and empirically tested to explore the linkages between complex problem constellations, sustainability transition strategies and sustainability visions.

The five core leadership competencies (systems thinking, strategic, anticipatory, normative and interpersonal) may not be as uniquely discrete as suggested in the literature. An effective learning experience depends on students’ developing competence in their ability to implement a strategic intervention, which is better acquired through hands-on experience rather than a classroom setting.

Students need experiential learning outside of the classroom to make sustainability come alive as a viable option for their communities.

The principles of social responsivity, engagement, experiential learning, capacity-building and entrepreneurialism can be executed by transforming the campus into a learning lab, which includes the local community.

This study empirically demonstrates that students need involvement in strategic interventions to imagine and conceptualize sustainability visions. It also shows how academia can help fulfill the United Nations sustainable development goals.