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Forensic crime labs play an important role in the criminal justice system’s response to violent gun crimes in the USA. The purpose of this paper is to describe the methods of firearms analysis including ballistics imaging and proposed best practices for investigating gun crimes. A separate line of research has begun to explore the structure of forensic labs and how structure impacts lab performance.

To date, however, proposed best practices in firearms investigation have not been empirically tested within crime labs. The authors address this gap in the literature by using a mediation model examining organizational correlates of a limited number of tasks (identified by Peter Gagliardi’s 13 Critical Tasks) believed to enhance our final dependent measures, forensic crime lab outcomes (NIBIN acquisitions and hits). The authors examine, therefore, the relationship between organizational correlates, collected from a sample of publicly funded labs in the USA, on several of Gagliardi’s tasks and then explore the relationship of those tasks on our outcome variables: NIBIN acquisitions and hits.

Results indicate agency size and number of agencies serviced by a lab are significant factors associated with our mediating variables (Gagliardi’s tasks). Communication was identified as a significant task associated with achieving NIBIN acquisitions and hits. In general, this study underscores the importance of communication between labs and other institutional constituents for increasing ballistics imaging outputs. Furthermore, findings provide partial support for Gagliard’s tasks, by highlighting the role of enhanced communication on organization-based performance outcomes.

This study is the first to examine the mediating effect of Gagliardi’s tasks on the organizational performance of ballistics imaging systems within crime labs. In addition, this study examines the influence of organizational correlates on these mediating tasks.

This article presents the findings of a survey into the personal safety provisions, services and training for key public service providers and users in Leicester city. The article offers some definitions and approaches to personal safety, which illustrates the breadth and extent to which personal safety is understood. The survey highlights perceptions and experiences of personal safety of workers from a range of agencies in the community in Leicester city. The findings suggest that personal safety is important in terms of debates and decisions about occupational health and safety, delivery of public services, diversity, social inclusion and crime and disorder. The article advocates the need to raise the profile of personal safety especially in service provision, services and training.

This article discusses findings from a study of practitioners' perceptions of issues in implementing the Safer Communities initiative in areas of high ethnic diversity. It highlights perceived differences in responses to crime and safety between different ethnic groups and identifies a number of dilemmas facing practitioners.

Purpose – This study examined the impacts of racial discrimination on the self-reported health among Asian Americans.

Methodology/Approach – This study investigated a subsample of 1,090 Asian Americans from the 2008 National Asian American Survey. Three-category measure of self-reported health was constructed ain. Racial discrimination experiences encompassed (1) interpersonal discrimination, (2) institutional racism, and (3) hate crime. Ordered logistic regression models were employed to test the association between self-reported health and experiences of racial discrimination among Asian Americans.

Findings – With respect to ethnic origin, South Asians showed lower levels of self-reported health than East Asians/Asian Indians. Although the baseline effect of each discrimination indicator was insignificant, there was an interactional effect between ethnic origin and racial discrimination, indicating the more interpersonal discriminatory experiences, the worse health status for South Asians.

Research limitations – There remained some limitations including data and the measures of racial discrimination.

Originality/Value of Paper – Despite the limitations, this study revealed that as a risk factor, how experiences of racial discrimination shape health disparities among ethnic groups in the United States, focusing on the heterogeneity within Asian Americans.

Purpose: This study examines the affective dimension of racial threat. Most modern studies of threat are framed through Blumer's group position theory and measure threat as increases in levels of traditional racism or perceptions of competition. These measurements neglect to operationalize Blumer's affective conceptualizations of threat.

Methodology/Approach: Building on Blumer's theoretical framework, we outline threat's affective dimension through a presentation of new survey items designed to capture what threat feels like.

Findings: Using factor and regression analyses, we demonstrate how affect is distinct from perceived competition, and how it is positively associated with Blumer's theoretically predicted outcome of racial prejudice, in the form of increased levels of racial resentment.

Practical Implications: Future research by sociologists and other social and behavioral scientists should explicitly consider threat's affective dimension in order to provide a more robust picture of racial prejudice in the United States.