Research Summary Taking advantage of a large residential survey that was ongoing in Baltimore, Maryland, during the riots surrounding the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, in this study, we examined changes in attitudes of procedural justice and police legitimacy before and after the events occurred. We found little change in measures of obligation to obey the law, trustworthiness of the police, and procedural justice among residents of Baltimore. Policy Implications The police are facing a challenging period of turmoil and reform as incidents of police use of force against minorities continue to draw national attention. Our findings suggest, however, that these macro‐level events may have little immediate impact on views of police legitimacy and procedural justice, as contrasted with longer term historical relationships between the police and the public. We argue that more research is needed to understand broader societal factors that shape people's perceptions of the police as law enforcement and policy makers search for policies and programs to build trust with minority communities.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

5 We recognize that Google and Google Scholar may yield an unmanageable number of studies ("hits") and we thus will adjust/restrict our keyword search (e.g., add words such as evaluation or research) and our document search (e.g., only search for PDFs) as necessary when querying these databases.

Recently, there has been an increased push for the adoption of alternative responses to policing. With mental health calls, these efforts take the form of co-responder models, in which mental health professionals respond to calls alongside police, or more recently behavioural health teams that respond alone. For any alternative, it is important to understand the prevalence of the problem, here measured as the volume of calls. However, measuring calls involving persons with mental illness (PwMI) has been historically problematic due to data ambiguity and missing context. We partner with the Burlington Police Department in North Carolina to better identify the full universe of calls involving PwMI. Using supplementary data sources and mental health keyword identification, we find that less than half of all calls involving PwMI are identified as such in the original call. Understanding the full universe of calls has implications for resource allocation, decisions to adopt alternate responses, and providing context for the current state of interaction between police and the population of PwMI.

Hot spots of crime, and the criminology of place more generally, deviate from the traditional paradigm of criminology, in which the primary assumption and goal is to explain who is likely to commit crime and their motivations, and to explore interventions aimed at reducing individual criminality. Alternatively, crime hot spots account for the “where” of crime, specifically referring to the concentration of crime in small geographic areas. The criminology of place demands a rethinking in regard to how we understand the crime problem and offers alternate ways to predict, explain, and prevent crime. While place, as large geographic units, has been important since the inception of criminology as a discipline, research examining crime concentrations at a micro-geographic level has only recently begun to be developed. This approach has been facilitated by improvements to data availability, technology, and the understanding of crime as a function of the environment. The new crime and place paradigm is rooted in the past three decades of criminological research centered on routine activity theory, crime concentrations, and hot spots policing. The focus on crime hot spots has led to several core empirical findings. First, crime is meaningfully concentrated, such that a large proportion of crime events occur at relatively few places within larger geographies like cities. This may be termed the law of crime concentration at places (see Weisburd, 2015). Additionally, most hot spots of crime are stable over time, and thus present promising opportunities for crime prevention. Crime hot spots vary within higher geographic units, suggesting both that there is a loss of information at higher levels of aggregation and that there are clear “micro communities” within the larger conceptualization of a neighborhood. Finally, crime at place is predictable, which is important for being able to understand why crime is concentrated in one place and not another, as well as to develop crime prevention strategies. These empirical characteristics of crime hot spots have led to the development of successful police interventions to reduce crime. These interventions are generally termed hot spots policing.