Law Commons^™

Why We Need Police, Justin Mccrary, Deepak Premkumar

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter discusses the essential role that the police have in deterring and reducing crimes, particularly the most violent and costly ones to society, such as murder. We begin by providing a brief overview of deterrence theory before discussing the empirical evidence on the efficacy of police staffing and various policing strategies on crime reduction. Using a framework developed in Weisburd and Eck (2004), we quickly evaluate the model of standard policing and then mainly focus on evidence behind three current policing practices: hot spots, problem- oriented, and proactive. Finally, we use the empirical evidence of police staffing to provide …

The Salience Of Social Contextual Factors In Appraisals Of Police Interactions With Citizens: A Randomized Factorial Experiment, Anthony A. Braga, Christopher Winship, Tom Tyler, Jeffrey Fagan, Tracey L. Meares

Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: Prior research indicates that public assessments of the manner in which the police exercise their authority are a key antecedent of judgments about the legitimacy of the police. In this study, the importance of context in influencing people’s assessment of police wrongdoing is examined.

Methods: A randomized factorial experiment was used to test how respondents perceive and evaluate police–citizens interactions along a range of types of situations and encounters. 1,361 subjects were surveyed on factors hypothesized to be salient influences on how citizens perceive and evaluate citizen interactions with police. Subjects viewed videos of actual police – citizen encounters …