A national analysis of trauma care proximity and firearm assault survival among U.S. police.

Past research on factors influencing firearm assault (FA) mortality have not focused on police officers who, compared to other U.S. workers and the general public, experience especially high rates of firearm victimization. This study focuses on this unique population of FA victims and examines the relationship between travel time to the nearest trauma care facility and the probability of survival among officers shot on duty. Combining data on trauma care center location and 7 years of data on U.S. police officers fatally or non-fatally assaulted with a firearm, we use logistic regression to model the probability of FA fatality among police by proximity of the FA to the nearest trauma care facility. We find that travel time to trauma care was not associated with reduced FA mortality among police from 2014 to 2020. FA mortality was significantly lower in 2020 than the six years prior.

American Policing and the Danger Imperative.

In spite of long-term declines in the violent victimization of U.S. police officers, the danger of police work continues to structure police socialization, culture, and behavior. Existing research, though attentive to police behavior and deviance that negatively affects the public, analytically ignores how the danger of policing engenders officer behavior that harms police themselves. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews in three U.S. police departments, this article describes how police are informally and formally socialized into the danger imperative-a cultural frame that emphasizes violence and the need for officer safety-and its effect on officer behavior. As a result of perception mediated through the danger imperative, officers engage in policy-compliant and policy-deviant behaviors to protect themselves from violence. Unfortunately, policy-deviant behaviors such as unauthorized highspeed driving and not wearing a seatbelt, though justified in the name of safety, lead to catastrophic car accidents that injure and kill both police and members of the public. This article concludes with discussion of how seemingly mundane policy deviant behaviors are a reflection of assumptions within police culture that undergird police practices that damage public wellbeing and perpetuate boarder inequalities in U.S. policing.

Bad apples and incredible certitude.

Research summary: Chalfin and Kaplan attend to the problem of police misconduct with a series of simulation analyses that leverage data on complaints and uses of force in the Chicago Police Department. They conclude that incapacitating officers has minimal effects on misconduct and that, given political constraints, policy makers may prefer broader reforms around accountability and management to removing "bad apples". In this comment, we argue that this conclusion and its policy implications are characterized by "incredible certitude" driven by a selective focus on a subset of their full simulation results and inadequate incorporation of network spillovers into their analysis. Policy implications: Contrary to CK's conclusions, their preferred estimates of the effect of incapacitating "bad apples" on misconduct are squarely within the range of other interventions aimed at reducing police complaints and use of force. Once network spillovers are accounted for, estimates are up to five times as large. We conclude with a discussion of how even small reductions in misconduct can have outsized benefits as measured in both dollars and human suffering, and argue that the removal of problem officers is a normative good that should be pursued on moral grounds.

Gun victimization in the line of duty: Fatal and nonfatal firearm assaults on police officers in the United States, 2014-2019.

Research Summary: Using open-source data from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), we analyze national- and state-level trends in fatal and nonfatal firearm assaults of U.S. police officers from 2014 to 2019 (N = 1,467). Results show that (a) most firearm assaults are nonfatal, (b) there is no compelling evidence that the national rate of firearm assault on police has substantially increased during the last 6 years, and (c) there is substantial state-level variation in rates of firearm assault on police officers. Policy Implications: GVA has decided strengths relative to existing data sources on police victimization and danger in policing. We consider the promises and pitfalls of this and other open-source data sets in policing research and recommend that recent state-level improvements in use-of-force data collection be replicated and expanded to include data on violence against police.

A field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy.

Despite decades of declining crime rates, longstanding tensions between police and the public continue to frustrate the formation of cooperative relationships necessary for the function of the police and the provision of public safety. In response, policy makers continue to promote community-oriented policing (COP) and its emphasis on positive, nonenforcement contact with the public as an effective strategy for enhancing public trust and police legitimacy. Prior research designs, however, have not leveraged the random assignment of police-public contact to identify the causal effect of such interactions on individual-level attitudes toward the police. Therefore, the question remains: Do positive, nonenforcement interactions with uniformed patrol officers actually cause meaningful improvements in attitudes toward the police? Here, we report on a randomized field experiment conducted in New Haven, CT, that sheds light on this question and identifies the individual-level consequences of positive, nonenforcement contact between police and the public. Findings indicate that a single instance of positive contact with a uniformed police officer can substantially improve public attitudes toward police, including legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. These effects persisted for up to 21 d and were not limited to individuals inclined to trust and cooperate with the police prior to the intervention. This study demonstrates that positive nonenforcement contact can improve public attitudes toward police and suggests that police departments would benefit from an increased focus on strategies that promote positive police-public interactions.