The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/viewpoints/)
After months of warning that authorities at his Washington State prison were unprepared for the pandemic, lifer Tomas Keen contracted the disease―and discovered that he had underestimated the potential for disaster.
Studies demonstrate that positive police-community relationships can reduce the likelihood of criminal behavior among young people. But many officers haven’t paid sufficient heed to the evidence, write two youth advocates.
Setting different political priorities is at the heart of the current protests against policing, and they can’t possibly be addressed by hiring a few more Black and Latino police officers to wage an ongoing war on the poor, write two leading criminologists.
Police at schools and colleges have become targets of the “defund police” movement. But advocates for lowering the profile of campus police and eliminating uniformed police in K-12 have not presented evidence on whether this will increase or decrease crime in schools, cautions the former director of campus security at one university.
With violent crime rising during the pandemic, the number of unsolved homicides around the U.S. is on track to increase, warns a cold case expert.
Prosecutors sometimes defend capital punishment as a means of providing closure to victims’ families. But there’s no evidence that it does, writes a DePaul University law professor.
“Bad cops” are created through assimilating to police culture and through peer interactions with other officers, writes a Brooklyn, N.Y., sociologist who argues that addressing the problem of police violence will require concerted efforts to address the cultural issues that allow police to avoid accountability for misconduct.
Although police departments today are more racially diverse, only about 9 percent of police officers are African American in departments serving populations over 100,000. Studies show that Black law enforcement officers improve Black residents’ trust in police and enhance their perception of police effectiveness.
The “moral squalor” of the closing days of the current administration, when frenzied efforts to execute prisoners coincided with granting pardons to cronies, provides the incoming president with justification for taking steps that make clear the era of treating criminal justice challenges with futile anti-crime gestures is over, writes TCR’s legal affairs columnist.
“Over-policing” of marijuana is not only taking a human toll on communities, but a financial toll at a time of shrinking budgets resulting from the pandemic, argue two former prosecutors and a retired police officer. They urge the Senate to approve the historic legalization bill already passed in the House.