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Drug and alcohol offences represent a significant portion of police work. Officers commonly rely on subjective indicators of intoxication, and prosecutors depend on officer evidence collection, written reports, and testimony at trial. Police body-worn cameras (BWCs) have diffused widely in policing partly due to their perceived evidentiary value, but the extent to which BWCs affect the adjudication of such offences remains unanswered. The current study explores this question with 7,000 misdemeanour cases from Tempe (Arizona), filed from 2014 to 2017. The Tempe Police Department deployed BWCs from November 2015 to May 2016. Results indicate that BWCs had no impact on guilty outcomes, but cameras were associated with significantly shorter time to adjudication. We discuss the important policy implications of these thought-provoking findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research on police body-worn cameras (BWCs) has rapidly expanded to evaluate the technology's impact on a range of police outcomes. Far fewer studies have addressed the various effects on downstream criminal justice actors, and those that do have focused almost entirely on prosecutors. Thus, public defenders have remained on the periphery of the police BWC discussion, despite playing an important role as an end-user of the technology. This study draws on qualitative data from focus groups with public defenders in the Commonwealth of Virginia to discuss the perception of BWCs as neutral observers in a police–citizen encounter. We then provide implications and recommend avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the JCCJ special issue on illicit networks seeks to accomplish three objectives. First, we offer a brief explanation of the network paradigm and its importance to criminology; our purpose is to convince readers of the utility of social network analysis (SNA). Second, we summarize the benefits of working groups with the aim of providing readers with the context from which they can understand why these informal collectives are critical to the advancement of science. And finally, the remainder of the article introduces the research assembled for this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Illicit markets capitalize on the vulnerabilities of trade systems. When these weaknesses involve mechanisms common to several aspects of transnational commerce, the effect of illicit behavior, and conversely of anti-crime policy, can be magnified. This study introduces a script-network method to estimate the impact of targeting illicit behavior within the context of an entire market system. Using the high-value art and antiquities market as a case study, we anticipate the effects of two anti-crime policy directives--movement control and monitoring financial transactions. In addition to advancing a new method, two original metrics are presented--one measures the complexity of sectors in a trade system (complexity) and the other anticipates the incentive to work around crime control efforts (transformity). In consideration of these system characteristics, our results suggest that maximum decoupling of illicit\legal trade is more likely with the introduction of safeguards targeting central trade functions that are associated with valuing and gifting objects. Network-oriented research could help the prevailing market reduction approach (MRA) to be more effective in reducing transnational illicit trade because network analytics are specially crafted for dealing with the statistical challenges that are inherent to studying transnational illicit market systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facilities that draw youth from different communities are prone to become offender convergence settings and intercity crime generators. Applying network analysis to self-nominated hangouts of 5,082 delinquent youth residing in Southern California revealed specific facilities acting as regional convergence settings. A small number of magnetic locations (measured by popularity and breadth of appeal) enable the congregation and interaction of youth that would otherwise not be exposed to each other. As predicted, the sociocirculatory structure of place networks remains relatively constant over time. In-degree and betweenness centrality statistics offer a viable analytic strategy to identify facilities operating as stable regional convergence locations. Crime prevention programs invoking effective place management through ordinances may offer a way to publicly govern these private facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Structural analysis of illicit markets suggests that criminal enterprise is to some degree linked with legitimate enterprise, and that, networks generally comprise groups and clusters of individuals with varying subgroup structural characteristics. Rather than investigating networks formed exclusively through formal organizational ties, this study compares the structure of criminal networks formed by different types of ties (co-offending, kinship, formal organization membership and legitimate business or other non-criminal connections) using p*(exponential random graph) models. The results indicate that kinship and formal organization networks are highly cohesive and have low fragmentation probabilities. Therefore, the results show that blood, both through kinship ties or the metaphoric blood that ties formal criminal organizations is thicker than the ties that bind co-offending groups. Policy implications for policing techniques are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence by patients against staff has been a growing concern in hospitals not only in the U.S., but in Canada and the U.K. as well. Such violence is not limited to hospitals, but is on the increase in long term care facilities, thanks, in part, to a growing population of patients with dementia. Very little information about programs that deal with patient violence in long term care facilities has been available. The following article, which describes a multi-year project in five British Columbia nursing homes, provides considerable insight for health care managers on the many different aspects of long term care violence and methods which staff can employ to curb or prevent it.