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Cyberbullying – using technology to intentionally and repeatedly engage in bullying behaviors – has gained considerable public attention over the last decade. Parents and educators regularly instruct students about appropriate online behaviors and threaten consequences for misbehaviors. The role and responsibility of law enforcement officers in preventing and responding to cyberbullying incidents remains uncertain. While clear violations of the law (e.g. threats of physical harm) most directly implicate the police, other – more common behaviors – such as rumor spreading or hurtful online commenting do not. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The current study surveyed 1,596 law enforcement supervisors attending the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Academy (NA) program. The survey instrument assessed perceptions of law enforcement responsibility in cyberbullying incidents. Data were collected in three waves over a nine-year period, allowing the measurement of attitudinal changes over time.

The authors find that certain officer characteristics are associated with a greater interest in responding to different types of cyberbullying (including having children at home and having previous experience dealing with cyberbullying) and that these perceptions have evolved over time.

The data are specific to law enforcement leaders who participated in the NA and are therefore not generalizable to all officers. Nevertheless, implications for explaining variance and law enforcement involvement in cyberbullying incidents are discussed.

This is the first study to survey law enforcement leaders over time to assess their evolving perceptions of law enforcement’s role in addressing cyberbullying among youth.

To date, there is a gap in the literature exploring the perceptions and experiences of law enforcement regarding enforcement of online and offline prostitution. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the perceptions of law enforcement in the USA regarding the safety and mobility of individuals who prostitute online compared to those who sell sexual services offline. The next section will explain the methodology of the exploratory study, including the method of original data collection.

All police departments in the USA located in a jurisdiction of 50,000 people or more were requested participation in the study (n=689). Respondents were sent an initial mailing of a cover letter and survey, followed by an e-mail reminder and a second mailing of a cover letter and survey. Individual respondents were asked questions about their own perceptions of behaviors and lifestyles of offline vs online prostitutes.

The majority of law enforcement respondents did not feel as if online prostitutes were safer compared to offline prostitutes. However, the majority of respondents did believe that online prostitutes are afforded a better lifestyle and are more mobile.

The majority of the respondents were from the Northeast and Southwest may mean that their perceptions could be different from those that are not located within either region. In addition, since almost 80 percent of the agencies were in a jurisdiction with a population between 50,000 and 249,000, this too may have influenced their perceptions. Law enforcement in a smaller or larger area may have felt differently or have had different experiences to report.

This study is very unique as to date, another study with the same methodology and question content was not found.

Public opinion regarding the police is generally positive, although there are number of individual and contextual variables that affect these views. Yet research examining public perceptions regarding state law enforcement agencies (particularly state patrols) is rare.

The paper utilizes a representative state‐wide sample of state residents and examine their perceptions of the Colorado State Patrol (CSP).

The paper finds positive views of the CSP overall and place particular emphasis on how individual, contextual, and contact‐related variables affect opinions.

The study focusses on one state patrol and is not generalizable to all state patrols and to other forms of state law enforcement.

The paper fills a void in the research on public opinion regarding state law enforcement and discuss similarities and differences in how they are viewed when compared to municipal agencies.

Little empirical research exists regarding how local law enforcement has responded to cybercrime. This paper aims to understand: the law enforcement agencies that line officers believe should be primarily responsible for investigating cybercrime cases; their perceptions about their agency's current ability to respond to these offenses; and their beliefs regarding the best ways to improve the social response to cybercrime.

The authors surveyed patrol officers in the Charlotte‐Mecklenburg and Savannah‐Chatham Metropolitan police departments.

The authors found that officers do not believe that local law enforcement should be primarily responsible for handling cybercrime cases and they have little information on how upper management is addressing cybercrime. Officers indicated that the best strategies to deal with cybercrime were greater care taken by citizens online and improvements to the legal system.

Local law enforcement agencies feel they are unable to fully address cybercrime. Although the findings were generally consistent across demographic and experiential characteristics and cities, two cities in the southeastern United States were surveyed.

According to these officers, they want citizens to be more careful online and for clarification of cybercrime laws and increased prosecutions. They do not favor local cybercrime units and additional computer training for line officers as much as scholars and police administrators advocate.

This paper studied the perceptions of patrol officers, who are the first responders to most crime scenes, on local law enforcement responses to cybercrime and the strategies they view to be most effective in combating cybercrime.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the perspectives of law enforcement executives and public school principals regarding school resource officers (SROs), armed teachers, and armed school administrators in order to inform the policy discussion surrounding school safety issues.

This study utilizes data collected from two surveys that were sent to law enforcement executives and public school principals in South Carolina. Respondents were asked about their experience with SROs and their perspectives on these officers’ ability to maintain school safety. Both groups of respondents were also asked about their attitudes regarding arming school employees.

There is a large amount of support for SROs from both law enforcement executives and principals. However, in general, both groups of respondents do not believe armed administrators or armed teachers to be an effective school safety strategy.

SROs have been the primary strategy adopted by schools to maintain safety, but in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, public outcry and political debate has spawned a number of proposed alternatives. Among these alternative security measures has been the idea of arming school teachers and/or administrators. However, there appears to have been little effort to empirically consider the perspectives of those directly impacted by school safety policy decisions. In particular, a gap in the literature remains regarding the perceptions of police executives and school principals concerning school safety policies and how the attitudes of these key actors compare. Thus, the current study addresses this gap by exploring the perspectives of key school safety stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to determine what factors may affect taxpayer (TP) compliance.

This research uses five independent variables such as income, TP’s perception on tax penalties, law and enforcement, fair tax treatment and the use of tax money in a transparent and accountable way. The dependent variable is the compliance of individual TPs non-employees. The data used are primary data obtained from questionnaires on KPP Surabaya Rungkut and processed using a multiple linear regression method with SPSS 21.0 Software for Windows.

The results show that partially income does not affect the compliance of individual TP non-employees; however, four other independent variables on the TP’s perception of penalties, law enforcement, tax treatment and the use of tax money simultaneously had a positive effect.

All independent variables had a positive effect on compliance by individual TP non-employees on KPP Surabaya Rungkut.

The purpose of the study was to provide greater understanding of the policing recruitment crisis by exploring if and how recruit decisions to become an officer were influenced by negative media publicity, As police recruits are a viable source for recruitment data.

Basic law enforcement (BLE) candidates attending a southeastern state police academy were surveyed (N = 395) on perceptions of danger and current officer motivation (i.e. the “Ferguson Effect”), as well as motivation variables for entering police work.

Results found little to no influence of negative media on decisions and career motivations, despite respondents acknowledging agreement to Ferguson Effect variables.

Findings suggest negative media publicity was not a contributing factor for the studied sample; however, further recruit-based research is advocated to understand contemporary law enforcement recruitment strategies.

As police organizations continue to face difficulty in hiring and retaining qualified candidates, understanding the next generation of officers has never been more crucial. This study provides a model for police organizations to incorporate recruit data into evidence-based procedures.

As findings suggest the acknowledgment of Ferguson Effect variables to be present, social implications include the possible long-term impacts of these perceptions on officer career progression and the police culture.

At the time of this study, no known work has examined police recruit motivations against the backdrop of negative media. This study is the first known research to explore the potential impact of Ferguson Effect variables on police academy recruits in the United States.

In this study, the aim is to address the void in the comparative literature of criminology and criminal justice by investigating public attitudes toward law enforcement in a rapidly developing country, Turkey.

Three different models of satisfaction with law enforcement, the demographic model, the quality of life model and the experiential model are subjected to empirical scrutiny in the context of policing in Turkey. In line with extant research on satisfaction with law enforcement in the West, all three models significantly explain the variation of satisfaction with law enforcement across a random sample of 6,713 individuals living in urban and rural parts of Turkey. Specifically, the quality of life model and the experiential model had considerable impact on public satisfaction with law enforcement and in general, all three models produced results in the predicted direction.

Overall, the findings suggest the robust nature of the integrated demographic, quality of life, and experiential models in explaining public satisfaction with law enforcement. In the demographic model, however, income and education had significant negative impact on global satisfaction with law enforcement. Considering the fact that more educated and well off citizens are likely to value freedom more and that law enforcement may represent an oppressive part of a democratic government, this might account for the reaction of higher socioeconomic classes to the power distance between the state, the police in particular, and civil society.

In terms of policy recommendations, to the extent that community policing is regarded as a set of strategies for improving the quality of police‐citizen encounters and reforming police organizations, these findings lend support for the potential of community policing in Turkey.

The purpose of this paper was to examine law enforcement officers' perspectives on job stress and barriers to supportive resources when working child sexual abuse cases in a large southern state. It is well documented in the literature that professionals who work in healthcare, emergency services and law enforcement face tremendous amounts of stress and consequences to their physical and mental health. Little research has been done to examine how child sexual abuse investigations impact law enforcement, and how these specialized officers perceive access to supportive resources.

This qualitative study was part of a larger quantitative study and included 20 law enforcement officers who participated in anonymous, semi-structured phone interviews.

Findings included (1) child sexual abuse cases are difficult, specialized and disturbing (2) barriers to supportive resources include law enforcement culture, the stigma of asking for help, awareness and accessibility of resources and leadership as gatekeeper to the resources and (3) officers perceive both formal and informal resources to be helpful and at best should be proactively available to all officers in the state. A model of the findings was developed to illustrate the implications for practitioners and scholars.

This study was not without weaknesses, specifically the small number of participants, volunteer sampling does not represent the general population and the sampling technique means some demographics may have been missed by researchers.

This study adds to the literature on law enforcement mental health, occupational health and mental health resources. It confirms established research in the literature and provides insight into officer perspectives about barriers that prevent access to informal and formal supports that could improve their emotional well-being.

This study is the first of its kind, to our knowledge, that asks detectives and investigators of child abuse cases about mental health resources. These law enforcement officers are at high-risk for traumatic stress, compassion fatigue and burnout due to the specialized cases they investigate.

The COVID-19 pandemic placed many challenges on policing, from limiting officers' ability to interact with citizens to enforcing regulations to prevent the spread of the virus. One of those regulations, and the focus of the current study, is mask mandates.

Using a sample of over 550 US adults recruited on Amazon MTurk, the current study examines factors that may influence citizen attitudes toward the police's role in mask enforcement, with a specific focus on perceptions of the police, political leanings, and views about COVID-19 and mask-wearing.

The authors find that when respondents believed COVID-19 was serious and a major public health threat, they were more likely to believe the police should enforce masks, regardless of attitudes about the police, political party affiliation or other demographics.

The enforcement of public health mandates, such as mask wearing, often result in arguments related to the infringement of rights and questions about the overall legality of enforcement. This often puts law enforcement in a difficult position regarding how such mandates should be enforced and whether it is the responsibility of the police. Additional policy implications are discussed.