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Research Summary: This evaluation of a directed police patrol project utilizes a pre‐post quasi‐experimental design with a non‐equivalent control group as well as an interrupted time series analysis. The results suggest that directed patrol had an impact on firearms crime in one of the target areas but not the other. Policy Implications: The results suggest that a specific deterrence strategy whereby the police utilize directed patrol to focus on suspicious activities and locations reduced violent gun crime. In contrast, a general deterrence strategy focused on maximizing vehicle stops did not have an apparent effect.

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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how celebrated cases affect attitudes toward police, controlling for key demographic, police contact, and neighborhood contextual variables.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents two waves of public opinion data measuring attitudes toward police, police services, police harassment, and officer guilt before and after a celebrated police misconduct trial. Data were collected by telephone from residents living in three areas.FindingsThe findings in the paper suggest that news consumption of this celebrated case had no significant effects on general attitudes toward police, police services, and concerns about police harassment. Media coverage, however, did effect citizen evaluation of the guilt of the officers involved in the case. The more a citizen read a newspaper or read about the case, the more likely she was to think that the officers were guilty. Concern about crime in the neighborhood was an important predictor of attitudes toward the police, and race effects were much more pronounced after media coverage of the case.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper highlights the need to examine more closely media coverage of celebrated cases and the effects of such high profile cases. In addition, it illustrates that public opinion research must be careful of contextual variables when conducting a study at a single point in time.Practical implicationsThese findings also have critical implications for law enforcement agencies. The findings highlight the importance of police departments being prepared to respond to crisis events.Originality/valueThis paper is valuable to scholars and police practitioners because of its close examination of the effects of a celebrated case on various measures of public opinion of the police. Although there have many studies examining this general topic, research has ignored the impact of media coverage generally and coverage of high profile incidents.

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If you have issues viewing or accessing this file, please contact us at NCJRS.gov. Restorative Justice Conferences as an Early Response to Young Offenders The highly publicized and disturbing series of school shootings and homicides in a number of communities across the United States have focused public and policymaker attention on the issues of youth violence and school safety. As important as these issues are, they tend to divert attention away from an additional challenge for juvenile justice officials, delinquency committed by very young children. In 1997, over 250,000 youths under the age of 13 were arrested (Snyder and Sickmund, 1999). Prior research has shown that children entering juvenile court at such young ages are at very high risk for continued offending. For example, approximately 60 percent of youths ages 10-12 who are referred to juvenile court are subsequently returned to court. For those youths referred to court a second time, the odds increase to over 80 percent that they will be returned to court at a later date (Snyder and Sickmund, 1995: 158). Yet, because these youths have typically not committed a particularly serious or violent offense, and because children this young have not usually accumulated a long prior record, they typically do not receive a great deal of attention by juvenile justice officials. Given the high likelihood of re-offending, however, failure to develop and implement effective early interventions for very young offending youths may be misguided. One potential form of early intervention involves the use of restorative justice conferences. Restorative justice conferences, sometimes referred to as family group conferences, have become quite common in Australia and New Zealand and are increasingly utilized throughout the world (Thames Valley Police, 1999). Although used in some jurisdictions for a wide variety of offenses, including adult offending, restorative justice conferences may be particularly appropriate for very young offenders. Advocates argue that they offer a meaningful response to youthful offending without consuming significant court resources. The Challenge Very Young Offenders Pose for Juvenile Justice Systems Thirty years ago a Presidential Commission Report (Lemert, 1967) criticized the nation's juvenile courts for what was labeled the "one minute hour." The heavy volume of cases was forcing courts to spend approximately one minute on juvenile cases rather than to take the time for careful assessment and linkage to services as the juvenile courts were intended to do. Since that time the volume of cases has increased dramatically without a corresponding increase in resources. The rising tide of juvenile arrests has forced courts into what Lawrence Sherman ~ has described as a "triage" system of conserving scarce resources for the most serious cases. Juvenile offenders are often given many "bites of the apple" whereby their cases are dismissed or placed on probation supervision with overworked probation officers until the time they have accumulated a long hi...

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