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The purpose of this paper is to present a state-of-the-art review on the topic of neighborhood/ecological influence on police use of force. In doing so, it provides an overview of the theoretical formulation and early ethnographic work on the topic as well as an in-depth critique of the issues that require further discussion.

Using several databases, a literature search was performed to collect the available empirical studies on the topic.

An analysis of the extant literature suggests that neighborhood/ecological influence on police use of force might not be as uniform as previously discussed, and it suffers from the ability to make sufficient comparisons. Tests vary based on the use of force measures, units of analysis, and the neighborhood-level variables examined.

This review should serve as a point of departure for scholars working in this area moving forward. It is hoped that the review provides thought-provoking commentary on the limitations of previous studies and the challenges facing this line of inquiry in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to examine police use of force using individual, contextual, and police training factors, expanding prior research by including multiple police agencies in the sample, thus producing research findings that can be more easily generalized.

The data for the current study were derived from several primary sources: the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Census, Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and 1997 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS).

Among individual level variables, age and arrestee's resistance were significant explanatory factors. Violent crime rate and unemployment rate were significant factors as the neighborhood contextual variables. Finally, in‐service training was a significant organizational‐level explanatory factor for levels of police use of force.

The paper bridges the gap in research between contextual factors and police use of force. It also deepens our understandings of the association between organizational factors and use of force by incorporating police training into the analytical model.

This study explored implementation of the middle school concept (MSC) in Illinois middle-level schools, examining relationships between MSC implementation and schools' relative wealth, racial/ethnic composition, and achievement levels.

This quantitative study utilized a sample of 137 Illinois middle-level schools, defined as containing any combination of grades 5–9, including at least two consecutive grade levels and grade 7. Principals completed an online survey, identifying levels of implementation of advisory, teaming with common planning time (CPT), and a composite of both advisory and teaming with CPT.

Schools with high advisory implementation had significantly higher rates of Latinx enrollments. Schools with lower operating expenditures per pupil were significantly less likely to implement advisory or advisory and teaming. Teaming had a significant relationship with composite PARCC test scores, but there was no significant effect for advisory and no significant interaction of advisory and teaming together.

MSC is more expensive to implement, and affluent districts may have the financial means to absorb these costs. Although teaming facilitated improved state test scores, advisory programming did not result in significantly improved scores.

Lack of access to MSC programming in less affluent communities presents an equity issue for low-income students and students of color.

This study contributes to research examining underlying issues of race and poverty and their effects on academic achievement and the effectiveness of the MSC.

Police factor in extra‐legal as well as legal context in their decision to arrest a suspect. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of extra‐legal factors at both situational and neighborhood levels.

Using hierarchical generalized linear modeling, over 9,000 domestic violence cases across 421 census tracts in Houston, Texas were examined. Situational information was derived from police reports, and neighborhood factors were measured by population characteristics drawn from the US Census Bureau. The model also controls for spatial autocorrelation of arrest rates between census tracts in the estimation of officer's arrest decision.

At the neighborhood level, concentrated disadvantage and immigration concentration had positive effect on the odds of arrest. At the situational level, the time of day, day of the week, premise type, and gender and racial relations between suspect and complainant, along with offense type and weapons use, had significant impact.

The scant literature has not yet provided an affirmative set of extra‐legal factors affecting police arrest decision. The paper's findings may contribute to the literature and suggest the need for guidelines concerning officer discretion exercised in the line of duty.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to verify the predicted relationship between the demographic (i.e. tenure, functional background, etc.) difference and cognitive difference among top managers and examine how such a relationship is affected by the communication among top managers.

The authors hypothesized that there is a positive relationship between demographic deviation and cognitive deviation of a focal manager on a TMT, and that such a relationship is mediated by the degree of communication that the focal manager has with other team members on the TMT. Using Structural Equation Modeling techniques, these hypotheses were tested based on a sample of 348 top managers that consist of 28 top management teams.

It was found that the hypothesized relationship between demographic deviation and cognitive deviation of a focal top manager was supported with respect to the tenure of a manager, but not the functional background of a manager. Moreover, it was found that communication frequency of a focal manager with other team members mediated the relationship between the tenure deviation and the cognitive deviation of the focal manager and that tenure deviation negatively influenced communication frequency, which in turn, negatively influenced the cognitive deviation of the manager.

These findings imply that: when constructing a competitive top management, practitioners such as boards of directors of a firm should pay more attention to the tenure diversity of a top management team because tenure diversity influences the cognitive diversity of the team; and communication among members of a management team can reduce the cognitive differences among members. However, communication happens more frequently among managers with similar tenure than among managers with dissimilar tenure. To promote consensus, managers need to watch for the forming of group fault lines along tenure within their teams.

As far as is known, this is the first study that uses relational demography to examine the influence of tenure difference on cognitive difference among members of a top management team and to expose a mediating role played by communication frequency.

Residential segregation based on race/ethnicity is associated with higher crime rates. However, when there is greater diversity within a neighbourhood, there may be less clustering of crime. One sign of such diversity beyond direct measures of racial similarity may be the proportion of minority officers employed by municipal police departments. As such, the purpose of this paper is to test the effect of the proportion of minority police officers on violent crime within minority communities, controlling for residential segregation.

Multi-level modelling of 91 American cities from the 2000 National Neighbourhood Crime Study was used.

It was found that as minority populations within census tracts increase, violent crime also increases; and crime is associated with an increase in segregation. However, racial composition of police departments can moderate the impact that community racial composition has on violent crime.

The current findings point to crime control strategies relevant to municipalities which focus on creating neighbourhoods of racial heterogeneity and more diverse police agencies.

The purpose of this study is to re‐examine the nature of the sergeant‐officer attitudinal relationship. Using person‐environment fit as a framework, the current study tests the influence that sergeant‐officer attitudinal congruence concerning role orientations has on officer role ambiguity.

The study uses survey data from 765 patrol officers and 146 sergeants across five police departments. Polynomial regression, calculated values, and response surface plots were used to examine the effect of sergeant‐officer attitudinal congruence on role ambiguity.

First, there was modest empirical evidence that the relationship between sergeant and officer views toward order maintenance and role ambiguity was nonlinear. Second, role ambiguity was lowest for officers supervised by sergeants who highly accepted order maintenance activities. Finally, role ambiguity was higher when both officers and sergeants failed to view order maintenance and law enforcement as important functions of the police role.

The findings highlight the need to incorporate additional research approaches that capture differences in officer and sergeant views toward police work. Such differences might impact other attitudinal outcomes or officer discretionary behaviors.

When looking at attitudinal congruence, the results show that sergeants have the capacity to attenuate or amplify officer role ambiguity. This emphasizes the need for police administrators to ensure that sergeants communicate job expectations to their subordinate officers that are in line with the department's values.

The study adds to the limited body of research on frontline supervision by examining the nature of the sergeant‐officer attitudinal relationship from an alternative theoretical approach.

Recent highly publicized acts of violence and shootings on school campuses have prompted numerous crime prevention responses. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of protective measures such as law enforcement, security policies, and school/neighborhood characteristics on school violence within the context of the racial composition of the school and grade level.

The data used in this study were part of the School Survey on Crime and Safety collected in 2006. The dependent measures of school violence include reports of serious violence, physical attacks/fights, gun or knife possession, and threats and attacks with a weapon. The sample was divided by racial composition of the school (predominately white, and predominately minority schools) and by grade level (high schools, and all other grades). A negative binomial regression was conducted due the count-based dependent variables.

Findings revealed that minority schools often face higher levels of reported violence and had a heavier law enforcement presence, which often had mixed or counterproductive results for reducing school violence. School characteristics, such as reports of bullying, location, gang activity, and security measures yielded numerous statistically significant results.

Officials proposing school violence prevention efforts should strongly consider the importance of school and community characteristics, most notably grade level, and the unique context of a predominately white or minority school as there were different statistically significant results. Furthermore, officials should be cautious about relying on simple efforts such as more security personnel to address school violence. Violence and crime on school grounds should not be viewed as being isolated from violence and other forms of crime in the community. Policy recommendations and suggestions for future research are provided.

This study differs from much of the previous literature, which typically examines student and administrator attitudes about victimization and crime prevention. The current study examines detailed information on the effects of school violence prevention efforts and moves beyond most other works as it considers school safety approaches within the context of racial composition of the school and by different grade levels.

Increasing minority representation in law enforcement has long been viewed as a primary means to improve police-citizen relations. The recommendation to diversify police departments was endorsed by the Kerner Commission and, most recently, the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. While these recommendations make intuitive sense, little scholarly attention has examined whether greater levels of minority representation translate into positive police-community relations. The purpose of this paper is to use the representative bureaucracy and minority threat frameworks to assess the impact of the racial/ethnic composition of both police departments and municipalities on disparities in traffic stops.

A series of ordinary least squares regression analyses are tested using a sample of more than 150 local police agencies from Illinois and Missouri.

Higher levels of departmental representativeness are not associated with fewer racial/ethnic disparities in stops. Instead, the racial/ethnic composition of municipalities is more predictive of racial patterns of traffic stops.

This study provides one of the few investigations of representative bureaucracy in law enforcement using individual departments as the unit of analysis. It examines Hispanic as well as black disparities in traffic stops, employing a more representative sample of different size agencies.

This study aims to examine the interplay between culturally relevant materials, child racial ethnic classroom composition and positive emotional climate in regard to high levels of peer play in low-income, urban preschools located in African-American and Mexican immigrant/Mexican-American communities in the USA.

The sample includes state or city subsidized child care programs in the USA which were traditionally African-American programs that experienced an influx of Latino immigrant enrollment. Instruments included structured observations of classroom peer play and cultural artifacts. Hierarchical multiple regression was run to determine whether cultural artifacts and child ethnic composition within classrooms contributed to the prediction of high-peer play over positive emotional climate alone.

The final model indicates that cultural artifacts reflective of African-American culture positively predict high levels of peer play, while Mexican-American cultural items are negatively predictive. In classrooms with a majority African-American population, predicted high-peer play is 7.994 greater than that predicted for majority of Latino classrooms.

Positive emotional climate in these programs was not very high, and it is not clear whether the findings discussed in this report would hold in contexts that exhibit much higher levels of positive emotional climate. It is also not clear that the inclusion of cultural artifacts in contexts in which African-American children are the minority or in racial-ethnically heterogeneous classrooms would lead to the same findings.

ECE classroom should make specific choices as to what culturally relevant materials to include in early childhood classrooms. Teachers of young children of color must facilitate children’s engagement with these materials by ensuring that they are representative of the children’s cultural experiences and by supporting children’s engagement with peers through the formation of emotionally positive classroom climates.

This study points to interesting relationships between what teachers have in classrooms and children’s engagement with each other within those contexts. The findings from this study also exemplify that a one-size-fits-all approach toward childhood development may be counterproductive. Children bring with them ethnic and cultural heritages, which when combined with the preschool culture, create unique experiences for them that should not be ignored or controlled for analysis, but rather, understood.

This study provides a unique analysis of seldom considered contexts by examining the use of culturally relevant materials in urban, early childhood contexts. Teachers of young children have been found to consider a focus on race and ethnicity as unnecessary or to engage in a colorblind approach with young children. This study demonstrates how paying careful consideration to the cultural environment in classrooms also supports children’s exploration and play quality.