Criminal Justice

Lai extends the current knowledge of public attitudes toward the police (ATP) by examining two distinct dimensions: general and specific attitudes. The significant findings indicated that African Americans consistently reported unfavorable ATP across two dimensions, but the Hispanics did not have any significant influence. While ratings of police work were highly related to public ATP, victimization and violent crime incidents decreased the levels of public rating among all respondents. Meanwhile, coproduction increased the levels of public ATP. Finally, both citizen-initiated and police-initiated interactions had significant influence on public ATP but varied among racial/ethnical groups. Policy implications and limitations were addressed.

Can the police reduce crime? In 1991, when the first Executive Session on Policing concluded, the answer to that question was generally described as being in the eye of the beholder. Based on the scientific and practical knowledge available at the time, some well-respected criminologists and police scholars concluded that the police were not able to reduce crime. Promising evidence, however, suggested that if the police changed their approach to crime control and prevention, then they might be able to reduce crime. This book outlines the changes in the nature of police crime control conversations resulting from an unprecedented growth in rigorous evaluation research on what works in police crime prevention; examines what it means to be a leader within the policing field, and advocates for reframing leadership through the adoption of "learning organisations" to increase the capacity to fight crime; describes "rightful policing," which looks at elements of procedural justice in police encounters with the public as a way to organise police work; advocates for democratic ideals within law enforcement to combat the mindset that law enforcement officers are at war with the people they serve; presents the ideas for what police executives might do to alleviate the problems of race in contemporary policing; examines the term "black-on-black" violence, a simplistic and emotionally charged definition of urban violence that can be problematic when used by political commentators, politicians and police executives; summarises current understanding of the effects of ongoing trauma on young children, how these effects impair adolescent and young adult functioning, and the possible implications of this for policing; and finally, describes strategies police organisations could employ to more effectively measure their performance.

This analysis of policing throughout the modern world demonstrates how many of the contentious issues surrounding the police in recent years - from paramilitarism to community policing - have their origins in the fundamentals of the police role. The author argues that this results from a fundamental tension within this role. In liberal democratic societies, police are custodians of the state's monopoly of legitimate force, yet they also wield authority over citizens who have their own set of rights.

Criminal justice procedure is the bedrock of human rights. Surprisingly, however, in an era of unprecedented change in criminal justice around the world, it is often dismissed as technical and unimportant. This failure to take procedure seriously has a terrible cost, allowing reform to be driven by purely pragmatic considerations, cost-cutting or foreign influence. Current US political domination, for example, has produced a historic and global shift towards more adversarial procedure, which is widely misunderstood and inconsistently implemented. This book addresses such issues by bringing together a huge range of historical and contemporary research on criminal justice in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Americas. It proposes a theory of procedure derived from the three great international trial modes of 'inquisitorial justice', 'adversarial justice' and 'popular justice'. This approach opens up the possibility of assessing criminal justice from a more objective standpoint, as well as providing a sourcebook for comparative study and practical reform around the world.