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At present there is little comparative information available regarding campus and municipal police agencies and their personnel. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to examine the similarities and differences between municipal and campus police agencies with respect to various human resource characteristics and policies. The following research question guided the analysis: how do municipal and campus police agencies compare regarding the following human resource characteristics and policies: the proportion of sworn personnel, gender and race of sworn officers, salaries and benefits, educational requirements, levels of training required, drug testing policies and the extent of collective bargaining/unionization. The database is nationwide in scope. The findings of this study support the general notion that city and campus police departments are similar at least with respect to the human resource characteristics identified. Many campus departments have advanced well beyond the watchman era of campus policing. In a number of human resource areas such as use of civilians, education and training requirements, the campus police have progressed very well based on the comparisons made.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical examination of the characteristics of Indian reservation police agencies at the start of the twenty‐first century.

The paper uses national data on tribal police agencies from the 2000 Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies and from the 2002 Census of Tribal Justice Agencies (both conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics).

The analysis presented documents both common and distinctive trends in Indian Country policing, and compares tribal police agencies on reservations with non‐Indian police organizations generally.

The paper provides an empirical reference point for assessing future changes and developments in this mostly undocumented form of US policing.

Leadership plays a key role ensuring the achievement of desired outcomes in both formal and informal groups. Insufficient leadership in policing can result in significant negative consequences for agencies and their personnel. Despite the importance of effective leadership within police organizations little is known about the process of developing effective leaders and leadership behaviors. The paper contributes to the limited available empirical knowledge using data collected from police supervisors. The intent is to assess supervisors' perceptions of how leadership abilities might best be developed and to identify the barriers inhibiting such efforts.

Open‐ended surveys are administered to students attending the FBI's National Academy, a career development program for mid‐career police supervisors. Respondents report their experiences with and perceptions of leadership development. The purposive sample of respondents provides insights from supervisors representing police agencies of various sizes and types from around the world.

Respondents indicate leadership skills are best developed through a combination of education, experience, and mentorship. Developing more effective leadership is dependent on the ability to overcome barriers, both within the profession and within individual officers. Finite resources, macro and local aspects of police culture, and failures of leadership by current executives are all viewed as working against the growth of effective leadership practices.

Given the dearth of empirical research considering dimensions of police leadership, myriad implications for future research are identified and discussed.

The findings provide important preliminary insights into the experiences and beliefs of police supervisors.

The purpose of the study is to examine gun violence prevention practices among urban police in the USA, assessing their scope, effectiveness, limitations, and impacts.

A national survey was conducted with police agencies serving cities of 100,000 or more people.

Strategies used most frequently and rated as most effective include targeted efforts focussed on high‐risk places and groups, as well as multi‐agency problem‐solving efforts, particularly those involving federal authorities. However, most agencies make limited use of proactive strategies to reduce gun crime, and there are substantial gaps in the enforcement of many gun laws. Results also suggest that gun crime is lower in places where police engage in more intensive gun‐related enforcement and prevention efforts.

The survey focussed only on large US cities. Implementation of the strategies could not be examined in detail, and assessments of the effectiveness of strategies reflect the views of practitioners. There is a need for more in‐depth research on gun‐related enforcement and prevention practices, their effectiveness, and the organizational and environmental factors that facilitate or hinder them.

The study highlights strategies that should be given priority consideration in policy decisions. The findings also suggest that police efforts to address gun crime can be enhanced considerably – and that doing so may produce demonstrable reductions in gun crime. Further examination of policy changes necessary to facilitate these efforts is warranted.

This study represents the first national survey of gun violence reduction efforts by police in the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which community policing within campus law enforcement agencies is influenced by the organizational structure, agency characteristics and campus characteristics.

This study utilizes ordinary least squares regression modeling to examine community policing implementation. Data were drawn from a sample of 242 US colleges and universities included in the 2011–2012 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Survey of Campus Law Enforcement Agencies (SCLEA).

Findings show that within-campus law enforcement agencies, greater levels of community policing are associated with more formalization, larger numbers of employees, a higher task scope and higher rates of on-campus property crime.

Use of secondary data and reported crime rate limits the study. Future research should implement specialized surveys and qualitative methods to identify the specific needs and implementations of community policing.

This paper adds to the limited body of literature on the community policing in campus law enforcement through more recent data and the inclusion of campus community variables.

This paper aims to analyse and critique common performance indicators for the policing of organised crime, and to propose a new approach.

This paper was based on key respondent interviews with staff at an organised crime‐policing agency; literature review; analytical work and construction of a new model.

KPIs and other targets drive the policing of organised crime. Often these ultimately constitute numerical targets – amount of drugs seized; number of key nominals arrested, etc. – which are crude and which the research evidence base on the reduction or prevention of organised crime activity does not support as being suitable measures of success. Success in contemporary organised crime policing is increasingly becoming defined in terms of “harm reduction” (often at the “community level”). A new performance management framework for organised crime‐policing agencies is proposed, which is more sensitive than traditional measures to harm reduction. The proposed model comprises three components: programme logic; a pathway approach; and the use of evaluation panels.

The empirical research was only conducted in one organised crime agency and therefore provides a case study approach to performance management. The literature review suggests that the performance management framework of that agency was similar to other comparable agencies around the world, but more comparative research would be needed to confirm that. The model proposed would benefit from piloting and evaluation.

The analysis and modelling provided in this paper create the groundwork for the development of more effective performance indicators and targets in organised crime policing.

This lies in the attempt to tie business model drivers into policing that is more sensitive to reducing the adverse social outcomes of organised crime than traditional drivers that tend to create formal, rather than substantive, police interventions.

Descriptive analyses of campus police agencies reveal that agencies’ tactical and operational features are similar to those found in municipal agencies. The problem is that none of these studies have examined, using multivariate models, the structural characteristics of these organizations. Using LEMAS data collected in 1995, this study answered two main questions: what are the organizational characteristics of campus police agencies; and what factors, both internal and external, explain variation in the structural dimensions of the agencies. The results indicated that campus police agencies possess the same structural characteristics of municipal police agencies identified by 40 years of police organizational research, and internal agency characteristics were most important in explaining variation in the organizations’ structural dimensions. The degree to which campus agencies have adopted organizational structures that are similar to those of municipal police is discussed and framed within an institutional perspective.

Most police agencies in the USA make the claim that they use social media, and such use is drawing a great academic attention. Most studies on police use of social media focus on the content of police social media websites. Little research, however, has been conducted regarding what types of police agencies are in fact making use of social media. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap in the knowledge.

The study reported here analyzes the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) data set to identify the principal organizational characteristics of police agencies associated with the use of social media. Binary logistic regression is used to identify significant independent predictors of police use of social media, viewed here as a form of innovation.

The findings indicate that the workforce size (commissioned and civilian personnel) of a police agency, the level of participation in multi-jurisdictional task forces and the early use of an official agency website to communicate with the public are the predictors of police use of social media.

Three theories pertaining to organizational behavior (i.e. contingency theory, institutional theory, and resource dependency theory), as well as Maguire’s (2003) study, are used to establish the theoretical framework for the research reported here.

Viewed as a pioneering study testing organizational theories related to police use of social media, the current study sets forth findings that help deepen the collective understanding of contingency theory, institutional theory and resource dependency theory as frameworks for explaining organizational behavior in policing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between emergency preparedness and community policing within campus law enforcement agencies, as well as agency and campus characteristics that impact the level of emergency preparedness activities.

Using data from the 2011–2012 Survey of Campus Law Enforcement Agencies, this study employs ordinary least squares regression modeling to examine emergency preparedness and community policing relationships within 298 campus law enforcement agencies.

Community policing is the greatest predictor of emergency preparedness in campus law enforcement agencies. This finding refutes arguments that emergency preparedness and community policing are incompatible policing innovations.

This study is limited by the use of secondary data. Future research should utilize survey measures to better isolate the roles and functions of community policing and emergency preparedness.

The findings have implications for campus law enforcement agencies to view emergency preparedness and community policing activities as interrelated. Specifically, agency administration can benefit by taking a holistic approach to campus policing and preparedness.

This paper extends the current research in municipal policing to the campus police environment. This paper also adds to the limited body of literature on the relationships between community policing and emergency preparedness.