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This paper examines the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing's recommendation that police promote trust and legitimacy by creating a culture of transparency and accountability.

The study is based on a panel survey of 841 Chicago residents that was interrupted between the waves by a momentous local policing event that proved to be known to virtually every participant. The reinterview period encompassed this event, its political repercussions and subsequent efforts to hold Chicago Police accountable and increase transparency. The authors examine whether these events and reform efforts improved African Americans' assessments of police legitimacy and trust relative to other respondents.

Trust in Chicago Police improved by 21%, and trust in neighborhood police increased 30% among Black residents. In contrast, views of Whites became more negative, declining by 62% in their assessments about Chicago Police and by 39% regarding neighborhood police.

Events occurring between the waves of a panel survey created an opportunity to examine the impact of events on residents of a large and diverse city. The authors discuss why reforms promoting transparency and police accountability can alter levels of trust in the police but in different and politically consequential ways.

Purpose – This chapter examines some of the dilemmas involved in policing immigrant communities.

Methodology – The chapter is based upon the relatively limited research literature on policing immigrant communities, an ongoing review of the contemporary dynamics of this issue in cities and states using the Internet, and original research in Chicago where a large and rapidly growing immigrant Latino community offers examples of most of the observations made by others.

Findings – The chapter first examines some of the barriers limiting the ability of local police to work effectively in heavily immigrant areas. It then describes how these barriers are exacerbated by the presumed presence of significant concentrations of unauthorized migrants as well as legal residents. Demands that local police in the United States become more involved in enforcing immigration laws have become a point of great contention because this involvement runs at cross-purposes with community policing and other strategies to engage more closely with the community.

Research implications – The magnitude of this conflict is illustrated by current debate over “sanctuary cities.” These are communities where local officials have resisted the enforcement priorities of the federal government, and have continued to emphasize the role of the police in serving all residents.

Although typologies of violence have become more common, relatively little attention has been given to Donald Black’s (1983) distinction between moralistic and predatory violence. Moralistic violence is rooted in conflict; predatory violence is rooted in exploitation. We elaborate Black’s typology and show how it is similar to, but distinct from, other typologies of violence. We also address the criteria by which typologies of any kind might be judged. Borrowing from the literatures on typologies and on standards of scientific theory, we argue that explanatory typologies should be evaluated according to four criteria: the degree to which they are powerful, theoretical, general, and parsimonious. Applying the criteria to Black’s typology, we argue that the distinction between moralistic and predatory violence is an important contribution to the arsenal of the student of violence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the correlates of job satisfaction among civilian employees of law enforcement agencies, to assess how features of the policing workplace influence employee morale.

The data for this study were drawn from surveys conducted as part of the National Police Research Platform. In total, 472 civilians from 19 police agencies completed the survey.

The findings indicate that contentment with pay and benefits, lower levels of work-related stress, equality in the workplace, and feelings of acceptance were associated with civilian employee satisfaction.

The analyses presented here focusses on factors more unique to policing and did not include all of factors correlated with job satisfaction in past literature. Future research should address this as well as control for the effect of organizational-level factors.

The research identifies key factors in each of those categories that inhibit the effective incorporation of civilians into the workforce. It indicates that reaping the full advantages of civilianization is complex and requires attention to fundamental aspects of police organizations. How administrators deal with this reality will impact the efficiency and effectiveness of their organizations in important ways.

To date, much of what has been written about the place of civilians in policing consists of descriptions of their numeric representation and discussions of the presumed advantages of hiring them in larger numbers. Less is known about how well civilians have been integrated into the policing workforce.

We use Canadian data to examine the help‐seeking strategies of women dealing with the consequences of violent victimization. Consideration of the help‐seeking strategies of victimsmay provide insight into other decision‐making processes. The analytic framework integrates research on police reporting and intimate partner violence with the wider help‐seeking literature. This integration allows for an examination of the effect of the victim’s relationship to her offender on decisions to seek help from family, friends, doctors, social service agencies and the police. The research has two objectives. First, we aim to determine whether help‐seeking exists as isolated choices or whether there is a discernable set of help‐seeking strategies used by crime victims. Although many victims do not call the police, they often rely on family, friends, social service and mental health interventions.We find that those victims who report their victimizations to the police also seek support from family and friends. Second, we examine the correlates of these help‐seeking decisions. In doing so, we explore the effects of the offender relationship on decisions to seek help. We explore differences in help‐seeking across attacks by strangers, spousal offenders, dating offenders, and other known offenders. Our findings suggest that women victimized by a spousal offender are more likely than others to use a substantial help‐seeking strategy that includes disclosure to the police, doctors and social service agencies.

Although numerous studies recently have appeared that identify the most‐cited scholars and works in the general criminology and criminal justice literature and in several specialty areas, no previous citation study has specifically examined the police studies literature. Through an analysis of 370 articles and research notes appearing from 1991 to 1995 in the areas of police studies, published in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and four academic periodicals devoted to police studies, we list the 50 most‐cited scholars and the 36 most‐cited works. The lists of the most‐cited scholars and works in the specialty area of police studies are compared to general lists taken from leading criminology and criminal justice journals and introductory textbooks. We conclude with some thoughts about the relevance of citation analysis to specialists in police studies.

This article deals with a social phenomenon in which individuals organise locally to promote their personal safety.

Provide a general contemporary overview of street vending around the world, focusing on the major issues underlying its permanence as a phenomenon, and the ambivalent attitudes displayed towards it by governments and off‐street business communities. Focuses on street vendors as an occupational group ad includes arguments for and against their existence, the impact of their geographical and economic location, and role of the government.

This paper reports the results of a 1992 City of Tacoma, Washington study of police values which was designed to test similar research conducted by Milton Rokeach in 1971. Our data support the hypothesis that individual value systems are more important than occupational socialization in understanding police selection and behavior. Value patterns not only were consistent over time, but also reflected a pattern of conservative beliefs. This work suggests that any attempt to reform or improve police community relations must begin with the restructuring of recruiting practices and the re‐socialization of police practitioners.