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Purpose: For contemporary policing, the police–public communication process is one of the most essential elements of law enforcement management. The promotion of police–public relations, police integrity, and police accountability all depend upon effective communication. While ever a challenge for law enforcement agencies, the coming of the COVID-19 pandemic changed substantially the character of both mediated and interpersonal communication between the police and those policed as of 2020.

Methodology/Approach: Building upon the concept of electronic community-oriented policing (E-COP), this chapter proposes an expanded theoretical model of police–public online communication during a time in which in-person contacts are constrained and various forms of mediated communication assume major importance.

Findings: Using a sample of COVID-related police Facebook posts collected between February 1 and May 31, 2020, this chapter illustrates how the expanded E-COP model is helpful in orchestrating an effective police response to a major public health emergency. It also advances the argument that police–public online communication will be not only become widely used during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but will likely become routinized.

Originality/Value: The proposed model also provides practical suggestions for law enforcement agency leaders who endeavor to advance the goals of community-oriented and guardianship-directed policing. Some likely barriers to more effective use of social media are singled out for special attention.

Law Enforcement agencies across the nation are in the midst of generational turnover in the workforce. Current practices place most of the decision-making authority and responsibility in the hands of professional managers, far-removed from routine contact with the public. It is the exercise of this authority that impacts organizational performance. Equity forms a cornerstone of a just society, and the functions of law enforcement lend themselves to demonstrate the multiple facets of equality. The underpinnings of this concept are based on the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance,” and Adams' Equity Theory of Motivation. A just society can only be based on the equitable treatment of all its members, regardless of relative status, and in practical terms, this chapter explores how law enforcement organizations can excel, or fail, based on how they practice fairness, both internally and externally.

As public employees, police leadership needs to be able to deal with the wealthy and powerful as well as the impoverished. Police Chiefs must work within the ethical framework of three diverse goals: responsiveness to the public, loyalty to the government they serve, and personal considerations of the individual and the employees. These goals can provide an environment in which leaders can sacrifice ethical principles for self-enrichment. For the overwhelming majority of non-elected public officials who genuinely wish to do the right thing, the high road of ethical aspiration can be obscure and difficult to travel. Police Leaders must model ethical behavior for their employees, gaining the trust and respect of the public. When confronting the opportunities of self-enrichment that shall be offered them, they must deny themselves, in favor of the ethical canons they preach to their subordinates. Self-enrichment often leads to unethical and illegal behavior, which destroys the ethical framework police leaders are sworn to uphold.

There is more than a bit of ‘ethical neediness’ in society. One good question is what can be done about it. The answer pursued here is that we should promote integrity aggressively and integritively. Directing attention to the arena of higher education and problems associated with academic or educational integrity, the chapter (a) discusses honor codes as a device for promoting academic integrity; (b) identifies and explains a key virtue and a vice of honor codes and, in relation to the values an honor code is meant to safeguard, a significant way in which honor codes are like a professional ethic; and (c) argues that success in this project requires abandonment of an attractive but misleading conception of ethics that suggests, wrongly, that acting rightly is simply a matter of rigid adherence to standards. To be sure, some questions about what one should do are straightforwardly and quite legitimately answered by reference to rules. In this, ethics may seem quite like law (adjudication). But one has to be careful here, lest one be seduced by the siren song of what Roscoe Pound called mechanical jurisprudence, for in law and ethics, as in the Greek myth, this does not have a happy ending. There is more to the story. In ethics (adjudication too) one confronts genuine complexity that cannot be dealt with algorithmically. This is something that we have to face head on, if we are committed to promoting integrity integritively.

In this paper, we present a conceptual and terminological system – what we term the ‘Comprehensive Integrity Framework’ – capable of applying to both personal and institutional integrity, and to different levels of institutions (including sub-institutions and institutional complexes). We distinguish between three sorts of integrity: consistency-integrity (whether the agent’s acts accord with her claimed values); coherence-integrity (whether the agent’s character and internal constitution accord with her claimed values); and context-integrity (whether the agent’s environment facilitates her living up to her claimed values). We then employ this conceptual system to explore similarities, differences and overlaps between personal and institutional integrity, drawing in particular on moral philosophic work on personal integrity (on the one hand) and on ‘integrity systems’ and public administration approaches to institutional integrity (on the other).

Several recent incidents of highly publicized police misconduct in the United States have intensified interest in controlling police behavior. Administrative control of police use of force is difficult because police officers are often the primary and most credible witnesses to police misconduct, effectively giving them enforcement power over rules they are subject to; police cooperation as both rule followers and rule enforcers is necessary for effectively constraining police misconduct. The authors develop a framework for examining how organizational and institutional variables can affect individual decision making. Using this framework, the authors identify three avenues for reducing police misconduct – increasing the information generated by non-police sources, increasing the incentive for officers to cooperate with external enforcement efforts, and changing the expectations of officers regarding the attitudes and behaviors of their peers – and present a case study of Oakland California Police Department to illustrate the implications.

Purpose – Statistics about the level of crime continue to attract public and political attention but are often presented in conflicting ways. In England and Wales, police-recorded crimes are no longer considered “national statistics” and, instead, the crime survey of England and Wales (CSEW) is used. However, it is not clear why partial population data (e.g., police-recorded crime) are considered less reliable or valid for measuring temporal crime trends in society than inferential statistical estimation models that are based on samples such as CSEW. This is particularly the case for approximating rare events like high-harm violence and specific harmful modus operandi (e.g., knife crime and firearms). In this chapter, the authors cross-reference victim survey and police-recorded data to determine similarities and contradictions in trends.

Methods – Using police data and CSEW estimates, the authors contrast variance and logarithmic trend lines since 1981 across a range of data categories and then triangulate the results with assault records from hospital consultations.

Findings – Change in crime rates in recent years is neither as unique nor extreme as promulgated in media coverage of crime. Moreover, analyses show conflicting narratives with a host of plausible but inconclusive depictions of the “actual” amount of crime committed in the society. The authors also conclude that neither source of data can serve as the benchmark of the other. Thus, both data systems suffer from major methodological perils, and the estimated crime means in CSEW, inferred from samples, are not necessarily more valid or accurate than police-recorded data (particularly for low-frequency and high-harm crimes). On the other hand police-recorded data are susceptible to variations in recording practices. As such, the authors propose a number of areas for further research, and a revised taxonomy of crime classifications to assist with future public interpretations of crime statistics.

Originality – There is much public and academic discourse about different sources of crime measurement yet infrequent analysis of the precise similarities and differences between the methods. This chapter offers a new perspective on long-term trends and highlights an issue of much contemporaneous concern: rising violent crime.