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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.

This study, a content analysis, aims to analyze general communications from law enforcement via agency websites about the COVID-19 pandemic and how this affected police roles. The authors study the extent to which police departments used their websites to inform the public about COVID-19, changes to their policies and additional information they felt necessary to give members of the public. This is important for understanding how the police inform the public during a pandemic and how the pandemic affected their police role.

The data gathered for this project came from a content analysis of the official websites of the largest municipal police departments in the USA. The researchers collected quantitative data from the official websites of law enforcement agencies who serve the 200 largest cities in the USA in March 2020 and coded the information from the websites to determine what themes were most prevalent.

The messages most often provided on department websites included information about COVID-19 (52% of websites included this information), modifications to services (33%) and informing users that services such as fingerprinting would be altered (42%). Websites also reminded the public of restrictions on public gatherings (25%) and stay-at-home orders (38%). Further logistic regression analyses explored significant associations among these variables to understand how police/public communications influenced the role of law enforcement during the pandemic.

Little is known about how law enforcement communicates online with the public during a global pandemic like COVID-19 or how this might affect the police role. Police departments can use their websites to communicate important information to citizens and keep communities updated. Policy implications suggest that agencies continue to update websites with important information and be direct about expectations from the public regarding compliance while also being transparent about how police roles might change.

Using online survey data from a sample of 440 police officers in California throughout May 2020, the current study collected time-sensitive information on officers' perceptions and departmental experiences in the wake of the pandemic. It examined officers' perceptions of agency responsivity as well as their perceptions of morale, stress and risk following agency responses and changes in policy patterns, service delivery innovations and other administrative challenges.

COVID-19 had a tremendous impact on the law enforcement community, who continued to work and adapt in order to provide public safety. During the first few months of the pandemic, a number of national data collection efforts set out to understand what police agencies, at the organizational-level, were doing to address the crisis. Largely missing from these initial discussions were the perspectives of individual officers, particularly how they felt about their respective departments ensuring safety and balancing risk.

Results from ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions found that the number of departmental changes made in the wake of COVID-19 that reduced police–public contact was associated with (1) increased levels of perceived agency responsivity to officer needs (i.e. balancing officer safety, taking active steps to maintain officers' mental health) and (2) reduced levels of perceived negative outlook (e.g. stress, low morale, danger/risk). Policy implications and the importance of police executives' decisions during crisis are discussed.

This study is one of the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to examine perceptions of policing during the pandemic from an individual officer point of view rather than an organizational standpoint.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether indirect police contacts through observational learning models impact students’ trust in the police and their perceptions of police bias.

The study is based on a survey at two public universities in the mid-western and southern regions of the USA (921 out of 1,089 responses were retained for this study). The empirical analysis relied on a principle component factor analysis and a multivariate regression analysis.

Results show that three observational learning models (live, verbal, and symbolic) significantly influence perceptions of the police. In particular, the symbolic model is significant regardless of students’ direct and indirect contact experiences with the police.

This study is the first to examine the modeling effects on attitudes toward the police applying the classic social learning theory developed by Albert Bandura. The results highlight the importance of indirect police contact experiences in shaping young citizens’ perceptions of the police.

This paper describes the current state of policing in Norway. Interview data were collected from police administrators, police academy instructors, and police recruits. In addition, observational data were collected from patrol ride‐alongs. The organizational structure of Norwegian police at the national level; individual police stations; police recruitment and training; traffic regulation, law enforcement, order maintenance and crime prevention; and police‐public interactions in Norway are discussed. Distinct features of the Norwegian police include a flat hierarchy, strong union influence, and informal selection methods, all of which derive from the unique sociodemographic and geographic landscape of Norway combined with the influence of British and European models of policing.

More than a half a dozen published studies have observed the effect of body-worn cameras (BWCs) on complaints against the police. Nearly all, with varying degrees of methodological sophistication, tell a similar story: a strong reduction in complaints filed against the police once BWCs are in use. However, the entirety of the published evidence comes from English speaking countries, limited to the USA and the UK, and is restricted to the effects of BWCs on response policing. The purpose of this paper is to extend this body of research to Latin America, and to specialized policing jobs.

The authors measured the consequence of equipping traffic police officers with BWCs in five out of the 19 traffic police departments in Uruguay (n=208), and compared these settings to both the pre-test figures as well as to the non-treatment departments. Interrupted time-series analyses and repeated measures of analysis were used for significance testing.

Statistically significant differences emerged between the before–after as well as the between–groups comparisons: complaints were five times higher in the comparison vs the treatment jurisdictions, and there were 86 percent fewer cases compared to the pre-treatment period.

These outcomes suggest that the effect of BWCs on complaints is ubiquitous.

The findings indicate that BWCs provide an effective solution for reducing grievances against the police, which can potentially be a marker of increased accountability, transparency and legitimacy for the Latin American law enforcement departments.

This study is an extension of findings on BWCs to non-English-speaking police departments, with a focus on specialized policing rather than patrol policing.

This chapter examines how citizen journalism affects perceptions of legitimacy among local residents and police officers.

Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with residents and police officers.

Local residents are mostly willing to obey police commands, but a lack of trust in the police and fear of retaliation hinder willingness to cooperate with the police. Citizens’ willingness to follow police orders is mostly a way for them to end the encounter as quickly as possible so the contact will not extend for a prolonged period of time and cause even more serious consequences. Citizens have recorded the police in the past when they witnessed officers not following proper procedures. The police view citizens recording them as a form of defiance and while this makes policing challenging, police officers interviewed still hold high levels of self-legitimacy, most likely due to their organizational and occupational culture. Recording the police has emerged as a way for citizens to challenge police authority and legitimacy during encounters.

While recording the police has increased with recent technological advances, little empirical research has examined its impact on policing and police-community relations. This study connects three critical issues in policing – technology, citizen journalism, and police legitimacy – by assessing the impact of recording the police on police legitimacy in the eyes of the public and police officers. Not only does this study fill our gap in knowledge on citizens recording the police, but it also furnishes valuable implications for policy and future study.

This article examines how contact with the police led to the death of Michael Brown (an unarmed 18-year-old Black teenager from Ferguson, Missouri, who was shot and killed during an altercation with a police officer). And, how Darren Wilson (the White police officer from the Ferguson Police Department who shot and killed Michael Brown) was portrayed in mainstream newspaper articles covering the story of Brown’s death.

Using both frame analysis and Hall’s framework of discursive domains for organizing and making sense of events in social life, we analyzed news coverage of Brown in three of the top circulating daily newspapers in the US: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. The Lexis Nexis database was used to retrieve a set of newspapers using the search term “Michael Brown.” Articles from the three leading newspapers were collected from the day the event occurred, August 9, 2014, through the end of the year, December 31, 2014.

The news articles used in this study were mostly written with an episodic frame. The articles presenting the socioeconomic background of Brown and Wilson were described as profiles on each individual and the neighborhood they came from, rather than a discussion about where they fell on the economic structure of this country and the larger, upstream forces that might influence those positions. The feelings and attitudes of the reader are also likely to be influenced by details included in the articles and how they were presented.

The findings contribute to the broader literature looking at the relationships between police and Black communities. Public health can play a role in advocating and facilitating programs that build better linkages between police and community. The public health field can take a leadership role in holding the news media accountable when they are engaging in frenetic inaction. Only by having difficult and challenging conversations that examines the upstream causes of violence and deaths like Brown’s, can we make progress in preventing them.

Few studies track non‐lethal weapon use by law enforcement agencies (LEAs), the number/level of force used by these agencies, complaints for excessive force, and injuries to officers and suspects, both over time (especially recently) and with a national probability‐based sample. This study aims to address these gaps by developing longitudinal estimates to examine these use‐of‐force issues.

Two surveys of LEAs were conducted (n=518 and n=357 LEAs), covering 2003 to 2008, and statistical weights were used to align the data to be representative of all state and local LEAs in the USA, including adjustments for survey non‐response.

Conducted energy devices (CED) deployment has risen significantly (to about 70 percent of LEAs). However, standard baton use is down to 25 percent in 2008 and when available to the officer, batons are more likely to be left in their vehicles compared to CEDs. Baton use and empty‐hand tactics are becoming less commonly used by officers, but CED use was ranked among the most used tactics from 2005 to 2008. Excessive force complaints against LEAs, internally generated, have more than doubled from 2003 to 2008. Officer injuries varied little from 2003 to 2008, but they are still only about half as common as suspect injuries. Also, only 20 percent of LEAs collect injury data in a database, complicating future research.

This is one of the few studies to track, nationally, the types of non‐lethal weapons in use by LEAs, and force level used, providing aid to LEA executives and policymakers who need to follow new trends in non‐lethal weapons.

The purpose of this study is to examine how direct-negative and indirect-negative contact experiences affect students' attitudes toward the police by race and test the mediation effect of social distance on the relationship.

Using the data collected from two US 4-year public universities, this study employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the impacts of the key variables, direct-negative and indirect-negative contact experience, on the students' attitudes toward the police. This study also tests whether indirect negative contact with the police is a stronger factor than direct negative contacts among racial/ethnic minority people.

Results show that both direct-negative and indirect-negative contacts are stronger predictors of the dependent variable. In particular, the indirect-negative contact has significant direct and indirect effects through social distance on the dependent variable in racial minorities. The study also shows that indirect contact more strongly affects racial minorities than direct-negative contact experiences do.

This study is the first sophisticatedly to examine students' negative contact experiences into two variables: direct-negative and indirect-negative contacts with the police.