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This article offers a tri-national comparison between Malaysia, England and Wales and the United States of America

It is based on reviewing, collating, comparing and contrasting previous research findings and official reports on the topic with a view to identify recurrent commonalities in the three countries studied.

Three key common themes are identified and presented in the article: (1) The relevance of the cultural positioning of volunteers in policing; (2) the importance of understanding the roles and capability of police volunteers; (3) recognizing prerequisites for recruitment of volunteers and the nature of their subsequent training.

We suggest that more detailed comparative studies of volunteer policing structures and officer roles would be valuable.

The practice implications of these findings are discussed, and the potential value of and major challenges in carrying out cross-national national comparative study in the field of volunteer policing shown.

The paper discusses important issues in the role and value of police volunteerism to criminal justice and society.

There are few international comparisons of volunteer policing and even fewer that compare approaches between Western and Eastern countries. This is the first study to do so.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the work roles of the Royal Malaysia Police Volunteer Reserve officers.

A grounded theory approach was utilized for the generation and analysis of the data. Data were collected through interviews, observations and follow-ups. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 male and female volunteer reserve officers and 5 regular police officers aged between 24 and 58 years of mixed socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities and ranking in the Royal Malaysia Police force. Two civilian respondents (spouses of the Police Volunteer Reserve officers) were also interviewed for this study for the purpose of theory sampling.

The data were analyzed qualitatively resulting in a model of Royal Malaysia Police Volunteer Reserve officer roles consisting of four orientations.

Study outcomes are discussed theoretically and administratively. The four role orientations identified will assist researchers studying police reserve volunteerism.

Study outcomes allow administrators to utilize and deploy police reservists in consonance with the four role orientations identified.

This study provides insight into how police reservists conceive of and execute their roles as they negotiate them in relation to the regular police officers they work with and the public from which they are drawn.

This is the first study of police volunteerism in Malaysia.

There are a number of individual and contextual variables that influence public opinion of the police but we know little about the public opinion regarding state law enforcement agencies. Prior studies involving municipal police and other criminal justice agencies indicate that the perceptions of procedural justice, or fair treatment, are important predictors of citizen satisfaction with police services. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether individuals who perceive procedurally just treatment during their contact with a state patrol officer improve the levels of satisfaction with the state patrol.

This paper presents the results of a public opinion study (n=846) regarding the Colorado State Patrol conducted in 2009. A subsample of 393 individuals who had contact with the state patrol and were further surveyed about their contact with the officer. Logistic regression models were used to examine individual- and contextual-level variables influence satisfaction with the state patrol and whether this relationship was mediated by the perceptions of procedural justice.

The authors found that individuals who perceive higher levels of procedural justice expressed higher satisfaction with the state patrol. Females, older respondents, and non-white respondents expressed greater satisfaction, as well as those who had voluntary contact or were not arrested. More importantly, procedural justice mediated the effect of involuntary contact and arrest on levels of satisfaction, and while non-white respondents were less likely to experience procedural justice, when levels of procedural justice are controlled for, they have higher levels of satisfaction.

The findings emphasize the significance of citizen perceptions of procedural justice during contacts with members of the state patrol. The current study contributes to our knowledge of procedural justice and citizen satisfaction with police encounters given previous research on citizen satisfaction with police focuses almost exclusively on local-level agencies, and research on procedural justice asks the respondents almost exclusively about the police in general.

Policing is associated with a pronounced occupational subculture. Policing is also known for physical and mental stressors that are, arguably, more than other professions. The purpose of this paper is to hypothesize that those police officers who perceive themselves as not a part of the subculture (i.e. “out-group”) would experience more occupational stress in comparison to those who perceive themselves as a part of it (i.e. “in-group”).

The authors use data from the Work and Family Services for Law Enforcement Personnel in the US survey (Delprino, 1997) and OLS regression to assess the direct association between officers’ perceptions of policing subculture membership and occupational stress.

Results support the hypothesis, with in-group officers reporting significantly less occupational stress than out-group officers. This finding holds, with slight variations, when demographic and experiential variables are introduced as controls.

Findings are from an earlier survey and based on responses from 1,632 officers in 51 agencies. They are geographically limited.

The importance of the protective function of subculture needs to be taken into account when attempting to deal with police stress.

This study provides ideas on how departments can utilize occupational subcultures to deal with the stress experienced by members.

The relationship between police subculture and stress has not been examined empirically before. This study documents the positive impact of police subculture in terms of helping members deal with stress.

The call to defund the police emerges globally from the voices of those who stand up to police brutality. Reallocating funds so that non-criminalising entities can meet community needs is crucial, but it does not address the problem in the system of policing. Further, the call for accountability cannot just emerge after a police-related death but must extend to the process of police work, beginning with police academy training. The author can identify and solve the most pressing issues by examining officer training as it is foundational to departmental work culture, organisational structure, and daily decision-making. Based on participant observation of academy lectures, scenario training, and informal conversations at two police academies in the Midwestern part of the United States, the author uncovers daily processes in which new recruits are socialised into their role as officers. Data reveal officers are taught a racialised decision-making logic that prioritises arrest, and perpetuates harm against its citizens. Training also devalues formal education, undermining knowledge that can expand officer thinking and critical self-reflection. Adhering to the goals of activist criminology, this chapter illuminates deeply rooted patterns of oppression and suggests reform aligned with critical social justice and anti-racist principles.

The widespread acceptance of community policing necessitates the need for training of recruits into its philosophy and practices. We provide a suggested curriculum for such training after describing its three basic premises. This is followed by discussions of the rationale for the curriculum, and a promising training method that can be used in its implementation. All of the above are summarized in our conclusion.

Public opinion regarding the police is generally positive, although there are number of individual and contextual variables that affect these views. Yet research examining public perceptions regarding state law enforcement agencies (particularly state patrols) is rare.

The paper utilizes a representative state‐wide sample of state residents and examine their perceptions of the Colorado State Patrol (CSP).

The paper finds positive views of the CSP overall and place particular emphasis on how individual, contextual, and contact‐related variables affect opinions.

The study focusses on one state patrol and is not generalizable to all state patrols and to other forms of state law enforcement.

The paper fills a void in the research on public opinion regarding state law enforcement and discuss similarities and differences in how they are viewed when compared to municipal agencies.

The literature on the vocabularies of motive and associated concepts of accounts, neutralizations, and aligning actions has been exceptionally productive in documenting how actors mitigate the threat of stigmatization in a variety of circumstances. This paper reviews this literature that has been published since the last major reviews of this literature. It identifies two recent developments in the study of vocabularies of motive: account giving in situations of cultural ambiguity and in times of conflict. Taken together, this work yields several insights into how actors use motives to advance their goals. Finally, the chapter argues that the insights from this burgeoning body of work should be applied to the study of the culture wars. Such scholarship would help to further establish the importance of interactionist thought by correcting some of the limitations in current approaches to the study of cultural conflict that provides reified and overdetermined explanations.

This study aims to provide foundational information about the nature and extent of calls responded to by a university co-responder team to better understand how these teams are utilized by the university community.

We use data collected from the University of Florida Police Department (UFPD) co-responder program from 2022 to 2024.

We find that UFPD co-responder teams respond to a diverse population. Use of force and arrests are low frequency events.

Little is known about how campus police agencies adopt co-responder teams and how encounters involving people with mental illnesses are resolved.

In the absence of new funding dedicated to cold case investigation, innovation is required.

The number of unresolved homicides in the USA has surpassed a quarter million, and the figure grows by thousands every year. Homicides that do not yield a quick arrest are time and labor intensive. This creates a staffing and resource dilemma for law enforcement administrators, as allocating time for older cases comes at the expense of investigating current ones, and vice versa.

Universities offer the enthusiastic labor of college students to “defrost” cold cases. One such partnership has been in place for nearly three years in an unusual collaboration between a state police agency and a regional state university. Small groups of students systematically organize, review and present case files. They create investigative recommendations and prioritize cases by solvability. Investigators can then select a case that may be relatively close to an arrest, access the case details very quickly and have the investigative recommendations as a place to begin a renewed investigation. Additionally, cases that are appropriate for new forensic testing or new forensic tools are identified and advanced.

Partnerships such the one described here are rare but lucrative. We recommend new collaborations like ours to reduce the number of unresolved homicide cases.