Identifying the ways in which male and female sex offenders differ is an important but understudied topic. Studies that do exist have been challenged by a reliance on small and select samples. Improving on these limitations, we use the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to compare male and female sex offenders among all 802,150 incidents of sexual assault reported to police across 37 states between 1991 and 2011. Findings indicated some broad similarities between groups, including the most prominent offense location (home), most common victim-offender relationship (acquaintance), and the rarity of injuries or drug abuse during crimes. However, the data also showed several important differences between male and female sexual offenders. Most notably, females offended with male accomplices in more than 30% of their sexual crimes--far more often than occurred among male sexual offenders (2%). Likewise, females offended against a victim of the same sex in nearly half of their crimes, yet this was only true in approximately 10% of male sexual offenses. Implications for future research are discussed.

The assault of law enforcement officers is an important but understudied topic. To better understand this form of violence, this study drew on the National Incident-Based Reporting System-the nation's largest data set tracking assaults against police alongside detailed information on situations surrounding attacks. Risk factors were examined within a fixed-effects logistic regression framework via a case-control method in which all incidents involving assault against police (n = 20,140) were compared with a random sample of arrest encounters that did not involve this form of aggression (n = 20,118). The data showed that a number of victim, offender, and situational characteristics predicted violence against officers, and the models were able to explain a substantial portion of the variance. Implications for research are discussed.

Much has been written in recent years about advances in assessment technologies designed to aid decision making in the juvenile justice system. Adoption and implementation of this latest generation of actuarial tools, however, have lagged behind their development. Assessment in juvenile justice exemplifies the “science-practice gap” that has spurred a growing national interest in technology transfer. This article describes and assesses efforts in one jurisdiction to close the assessment technology gap through a progressive series of research-based strategies introducing field supervisors and staff to best practices concepts and tools while gauging their capacity for assimilating change, participative decision making and peer training, and integration of the technology with existing, related practices. Researchers’ use of various data-driven monitoring reports for enhancing staff accountability and implementation fidelity, addressing resistance to the use of dynamic need factors in assessment protocols, and ongoing program and policy development and are also presented and discussed.

Firearm violence directed at law enforcement officers has become an increasingly prominent topic among policy makers, the press, and academics. This prominence is driven in part by recent growth in the number of officers killed or injured by gunfire. Although researchers have studied less serious forms of resisting arrest, little is known about risk factors for firearm violence directed at police. This study drew on the National Incident-Based Reporting System to compare all incidents in which police officers were the victim of firearm violence with a random sample of police encounters without this form of aggression. A variety of offender and situational factors identified in prior literature on resisting arrest, as well as new constructs introduced here, were compared between these two groups within a multivariate logistic regression framework. The data showed several important patterns regarding risk to officers, some of which reverse or refine earlier work produced from studies of less serious forms of resistance.

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