Law Commons^™

2022 Annual Campus Security And Fire Safety Report, Otterbein Police Department

Otterbein Police Department

2022 Annual Campus Security and Fire Safety Report from the Otterbein Police Department. The crime and arrest statistics compiled by OPD are from calendar years 2019, 2020, and 2021.

The Political Economy Of Enforcer Liability For Wrongful Police Stops, Tim Friehe, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

This article questions whether excessive policing practices can persist in an environment where law enforcement policies are subject to political pressures. Specifically, it considers a setting where the police decide whether to conduct stops based on the suspiciousness of a person's behavior and the potential liability for conducting a wrongful stop. We establish that the liability level that results in a voting equilibrium is smaller than optimal, and consequently, that excessive policing practices emerge in equilibrium.

Crime And The Mythology Of Police, Shima Baughman

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The legal policing literature has espoused one theory of policing after another in an effort to address the frayed relationship between police and the communities they serve. All have aimed to diagnose chronic policing problems in working towards structural police reform. The core principles emanating from these theoretical critiques is that the mistrust of police among communities of color results from maltreatment, illegitimacy and marginalization from the law and its enforcers. Remedies have included police training to encourage treating people with dignity, investing in body cameras and other technology, providing legal avenues to encourage constitutional action by police, and creating …

The Troubling Alliance Between Feminism And Policing, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Racial Profiling: Past, Present, And Future, David A. Harris

Articles

It has been more than two decades since the introduction of the first bill in Congress that addressed racial profiling in 1997. Between then and now, Congress never passed legislation on the topic, but more than half the states passed laws and many police departments put anti-profiling policies in place to combat it. The research and data on racial profiling has grown markedly over the last twenty-plus years. We know that the practice is real (contrary to many denials), and the data reveal racial profiling’s shortcomings and great social costs. Nevertheless, racial profiling persists. While it took root most prominently …

Safe Streets, Inc. : The 'Hustle' To End Black Gang Violence In Philadelphia, 1969-1976, Menika Dirkson

Arlen Specter Center Research Fellowship

From 1962 to 1968, gang stabbings and murders in Philadelphia drastically increased, inspiring Philadelphia District Attorney Arlen Specter (from 1965-1973) to establish Safe Streets, Inc. in August 1969 as a non-profit, anti-gang program designed to reduce gang violence, end turf wars between rival gangs, and provide social services like job training and academic tutoring to juveniles. Since the program came into existence amidst the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968), numerous cases of police brutality, and over 200 race riots in post-industrial cities, the yearly Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) grant from the federal government offered to cities under the Omnibus Crime …

Crime, Punishment, And Legal Error: A Review Of The Experimental Literature, Kathryn Zeiler, Erica Puccetti

Faculty Scholarship

When individuals violate the law, detection and verification of the violation are rarely, if ever, perfect. Before the state can dole out punishment, it must first identify a suspect and then produce sufficient evidence to persuade a judge and/or jury beyond some threshold level of confidence that the suspect, in fact, violated the law. The court might be uncertain that the state has the right person. If the suspect is undoubtedly the one who caused the harm, the court might be unsure about whether his act constitutes a violation of the law (e.g., whether the suspect was, in fact, speeding). …

Do The Ends Justify The Means? Policing And Rights Tradeoffs In New York City, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom R. Tyler

Faculty Scholarship

Policing has become an integral component of urban life. New models of proactive policing create a double-edged sword for communities with strong police presence. While the new policing creates conditions that may deter and prevent crime, close surveillance and frequent intrusive police-citizen contacts have strained police-community relations. The burdens of the new policing often fall on communities with high proportions of African American and Latino residents, yet the returns to crime control are small and the risks of intrusive, impersonal, aggressive non-productive interactions are high. As part of the proffered tradeoff, citizens are often asked to view and accept these …

Pretrial Detention And Bail, Megan Stevenson, Sandra G. Mayson

All Faculty Scholarship

Our current pretrial system imposes high costs on both the people who are detained pretrial and the taxpayers who foot the bill. These costs have prompted a surge of bail reform around the country. Reformers seek to reduce pretrial detention rates, as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities in the pretrial system, while simultaneously improving appearance rates and reducing pretrial crime. The current state of pretrial practice suggests that there is ample room for improvement. Bail hearings are often cursory, with no defense counsel present. Money-bail practices lead to high rates of detention even among misdemeanor defendants and those who …

How Should Justice Policy Treat Young Offenders?, B J. Casey, Richard J. Bonnie, Andre Davis, David L. Faigman, Morris B. Hoffman, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer A. Richeson, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim A. Taylor-Thompson, Anthony D. Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

The justice system in the United States has long recognized that juvenile offenders are not the same as adults, and has tried to incorporate those differences into law and policy. But only in recent decades have behavioral scientists and neuroscientists, along with policymakers, looked rigorously at developmental differences, seeking answers to two overarching questions: Are young offenders, purely by virtue of their immaturity, different from older individuals who commit crimes? And, if they are, how should justice policy take this into account?

A growing body of research on adolescent development now confirms that teenagers are indeed inherently different from adults, …

De-Policing, Stephen Rushin, Griffin Sims Edwards

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Critics have long claimed that when the law regulates police behavior it inadvertently reduces officer aggressiveness, thereby increasing crime. This hypothesis has taken on new significance in recent years as prominent politicians and law enforcement leaders have argued that increased oversight of police officers in the wake of the events in Ferguson, Missouri has led to an increase in national crime rates. Using a panel of American law enforcement agencies and difference-in-difference regression analyses, this Article tests whether the introduction of public scrutiny or external regulation is associated with changes in crime rates. To do this, this Article relies on …

Punishment, Liberalism, And Public Reason, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

The article argues for a conception of the justification of punishment that is compatible with a modern, politically liberal regime. Section I deals with what some have thought are the obvious social interests society has in punishing criminals, and tries to develop those possible interests somewhat sympathetically. Section II suggests that many of those reasons are not good ones if punishment is regarded (as it should be) from the perspective of political philosophy. Social responses to bad things happening to people cannot be grounded in controversial metaphysical views about what is good for people or what people deserve, but many …

Understanding Recent Spikes And Longer Trends In American Murders, Jeffery Fagan, Daniel Richman

Faculty Scholarship

On September 7, 2016, four of the nation’s newspapers of record weighed in on the connected crises in crime and policing. The New York Times revealed the tensions between the Mayor’s office in Chicago and several community and professional groups over a plan to overhaul Chicago’s police disciplinary board – a plan developed in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed teenager, Laquan McDonald, and the release of a video of that killing. The Wall Street Journal related a vigorous defense of New York City’s “broken windows” policing strategy – a strategy that has been a recurring source of …

Tasers Help Police Avoid Fatal Mistakes, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This op-ed piece argues that police will inevitably be placed in impossible situations in which they reasonably believe they must shoot to defend themselves but where the shooting in fact turns out to be unnecessary. What can save the police, and the community, from these regular tragedies is a more concerted shift to police use of nonlethal weapons. Taser technology, for example, continues to become increasingly more effective and reliable. While we will always have reasonable mistakes by police in the use of force, it need not be the case that each ends in death or permanent injury. Such a …

Group Threat, Police Officer Diversity And The Deadly Use Of Police Force, Joscha Legewie, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Officer-involved killings and racial bias in policing are controversial political issues. Prior research indicates that (perceived) group threat related to political mobilization, economic competition, and the threat of black crime are is an important explanations for variations in police killings across cities in the United States. We argue that a diverse police force that proportionally represents the population it serves mitigates group threat and thereby reduces the number of officer-involved killings. Count models support our argument. They show that group threat is largely driven by the threat of black crime. Black-on-white homicides increase officer-involved killings of African Americans but black-on-black …

Street Stops And Police Legitimacy In New York, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom Tyler, Tracey L. Meares

Faculty Scholarship

Police-initiated citizen encounters in American cities often are non-neutral events. Encounters range from routine traffic stops to police interdiction of pedestrians during their everyday movements through both residential and commercial areas to aggressive enforcement of social disorder offenses. As a crime detection and control strategy central to the “new policing,” these encounters often are unproductive and inefficient. They rarely result in arrest or seizure of contraband, and often provoke ill will between citizens and legal authorities that discourages citizen cooperation with police and compliance with law. In this chapter, we describe the range of potentially adverse reactions or harms that …

Stops And Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, And Race In The New Policing, Jeffrey Fagan, Anthony A. Braga, Rod K. Brunson, April Pattavina

Faculty Scholarship

The use of proactive tactics to disrupt criminal activities, such as Terry street stops and concentrated misdemeanor arrests, are essential to the "new policing." This model applies complex metrics, strong management, and aggressive enforcement and surveillance to focus policing on high crime risk persons and places. The tactics endemic to the "newpolicing"gave rise in the 1990s to popular, legal, political, and social science concerns about disparate treatment of minority groups in their everyday encounters with law enforcement. Empirical evidence showed that minorities were indeed stopped and arrested more frequently than similarly situated Whites, even when controlling for local social and …

Ua12/8 Annual Campus Safety & Security Report, Wku Police

WKU Archives Records

A statement of current campus policies regarding procedures for students and others to report criminal actions or other emergencies occurring on campus and policies concerning the institution's response to such reports.

Discounting And Criminals' Implied Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

It is commonly assumed that potential offenders are more responsive to increases in the certainty than increases in the severity of punishment. An important implication of this assumption within the Beckerian law enforcement model is that criminals are risk-seeking. This note adds to existing literature by showing that offenders who discount future monetary benefits can be more responsive to the certainty rather than the severity of punishment, even when they are risk averse, and even when their disutility from imprisonment rises proportionally (or more than proportionally) with the length of the sentence.

Empirical Law And Economics, Jonah B. Gelbach, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

Empirical work has grown in importance in law and economics. This growth coincides with improvements in research designs in empirical microeconomics more generally. In this essay, we provide a stylized discussion of some trends over the last two or three decades, linking the credibility revolution in empirical micro to the ascendancy of empirical work in law and economics. We then provide some methodological observations about a number of commonly used approaches to estimating policy effects. The literature on the economics of crime and criminal procedure illustrates the ways in which many of these techniques have been used successfully. Other fields, …

Legal Punishment As Civil Ritual: Making Cultural Sense Of Harsh Punishment, Spearit

Articles

This work examines mass incarceration through a ritual studies perspective, paying explicit attention to the religious underpinnings. Conventional analyses of criminal punishment focus on the purpose of punishment in relation to legal or moral norms, or attempt to provide a general theory of punishment. The goals of this work are different, and instead try to understand the cultural aspects of punishment that have helped make the United States a global leader in imprisonment and execution. It links the boom in incarceration to social ruptures of the 1950s and 1960s and posits the United States’ world leader status as having more …

The Imprisoner's Dilemma: A Cost-Benefit Approach To Incarceration, David S. Abrams

All Faculty Scholarship

Depriving an individual of life or liberty is one of the most intrusive powers that governments wield. Decisions about imprisonment capture the public imagination. The stories are told daily in newspapers and on TV, dramatized in literature and on film, and debated by scholars. The United States has created an ever-increasing amount of material for discussion as the state incarceration rate quadrupled between 1980 and 2000. While the decision to incarcerate an individual is given focused attention by a judge, prosecutor, and (occasionally) a jury, the overall incarceration rate is not. In this article, I apply a cost-benefit approach to …

The Effect Of Private Police On Crime: Evidence From A Geographic Regression Discontinuity Design, John M. Macdonald, Jonathan Klick, Ben Grunwald

All Faculty Scholarship

Research demonstrates that police reduce crime. The implication of this research for investment in a particular form of extra police services, those provided by private institutions, has not been rigorously examined. We capitalize on the discontinuity in police force size at the geographic boundary of a private university police department to estimate the effect of the extra police services on crime. Extra police provided by the university generate approximately 45-60 percent fewer crimes in the surrounding neighborhood. These effects appear to be similar to other estimates in the literature.

Uncomfortable Places, Close Spaces: Theorizing Female Correctional Officers’ Sexual Interactions With Men And Boys In Custody, Brenda V. Smith

Project on Addressing Prison Rape - Articles

This Article examines female-perpetrated sexual abuse in custodial settings and its place at the intersection of race, class, and gender in order to disentangle complex and overlapping narratives of abuse, sex, desire, and transgression. Ultimately, this Article confronts our discomfort with and reluctance to acknowledge the fact that women sexually abuse men and boys in custody, and it offers possible explanations for these behaviors.

The Law And Economics Of Fluctuating Criminal Tendencies And Incapacitation, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analyses of criminal law are frequently and heavily criticized for being unable to explain many criminal law rules and doctrines that people find intuitively just. Existing economic models cannot properly explain, for instance, why criminal law distinguishes between (i) repeat offenders and first-time offenders, (ii) murder and voluntary manslaughter, and (iii) remorseful and non-remorseful offenders.

In this Article, I propose a new and richer economic theory of crime that captures the rationales behind these practices, and potentially behind many other important criminal law principles and doctrines. Unlike an overwhelming majority of previous economic analyses, my theory accounts not only …

Prevention Of Identity Theft: A Review Of The Literature, Portland State University. Criminology And Criminal Justice Senior Capstone

Criminology and Criminal Justice Senior Capstone Project

With advances in technology and increases in impersonal electronic transactions, identity theft IT) is becoming a major problem in today’s society. One may ask why IT is growing in America. The answer is simple, as a review of literature reveals: IT is extremely hard to detect, prevent, and prosecute.

There are many ways people can protect themselves, their identities and secure their personal information; many do not concern themselves with this knowledge, however, until they become victims of this crime, themselves. With advances in technology, offenders are often turning to new methods to access information and use it for financial …

Street Stops And Broken Windows Revisited: The Demography And Logic Of Proactive Policing In A Safe And Changing City, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller, Garth Davies, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines the development of “order maintenance policing” in New York City. It studies the stop-and-frisk activities of New York City police officers by examining temporal and spatial patterns of stops from 1999, 2003, and 2006. Findings reveal that stop rates have increased by 500 percent since 1999 despite little change in crime rates Stop activity was greatest in poor and minority communities, and stop patterns were more closely tied to demographic and social conditions than to disorder or crime. The efficiency of stops, measured as “hit rates,” dropped considerably, with the sharpest declines occurring in minority neighborhoods. Overall, …

Ua12/8 Wku Police - Annual Security Report, Wku Police

WKU Archives Records

This report is designed to provide students, potential students, parents, facility and staff with crime statistics and information on university services and crime prevention programs. These programs are designed to help inform our campus communities about safety practices that will help you reduce the risk of being a crime victim. I feel hat these lessons can give people information that they can carry with them beyond college and will help keep them safe for the rest of their lives.

The Order-Maintenance Agenda As Land Use Policy, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Debates about the broken windows hypothesis focus almost exclusively on whether the order-maintenance agenda represents wise criminal law policy — specifically on whether, when, and at what cost, order-maintenance policing techniques reduce serious crime. These questions are important, but incomplete. This Essay, which was solicited for a symposium on urban-development policy, considers potential benefits of order-maintenance policies other than crime-reduction, especially reducing the fear of crime. The Broken Windows essay itself urged that attention to disorder was important not just because disorder was a precursor to more serious crime, but also because disorder undermined residents’ sense of security. The later …

Thug Life: Hip Hop’S Curious Relationship With Criminal Justice, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Faculty Scholarship

I argue that hip hop music and culture profoundly influences attitudes toward and perceptions about criminal justice in the United States. At base, hip hop lyrics and their cultural accoutrements turns U.S. punishment philosophy upon its head, effectively defeating the foundational purposes of American crime and punishment. Prison and punishment philosophy in the U.S. is based on clear principles of retribution and incapacitation, where prison time for crime should serve to deter individuals from engaging in criminal behavior. In addition, the stigma that attaches to imprisonment should dissuade criminals from recidivism. Hip hop culture denounces crime and punishment in the …