Police Foundation

About: Police Foundation is a nonprofit organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Poison control & Crime prevention. The organization has 54 authors who have published 75 publications receiving 3392 citations.

The specific deterrent effects of arrest for domestic assault.

Abstract: The specific deterrence doctrine and labeling theory predict opposite effects of punishment on individual rates of deviance. The limited cross-sectional evidence available on the question is inconsistent, and experimental evidence has been lacking. The Police Foundation and the Minneapolis Police Department tested these hypotheses in a field experiment on domestic violence. Three police responses to simple assault were randomly assigned to legally eligible suspects: an arrest; "advice" (including, in some cases, informal mediation); and an order to the suspect to leave for eight hours. The behavior of the suspect was trackedfor six months after the police intervention, with both official data and victim reports. The official recidivism measures show that the arrested suspects manifested significantly less subsequent violence than those who were ordered to leave. The victim report data show that the arrested subjects manifested significantly less subsequent violence than those who were advised. The findings falsify a deviance amplification model of labeling theory beyond initial labeling, and fail to falsify the specific deterrence prediction for a group of offenders with a high percentage of prior histories of both domestic violence and other kinds of crime.

Good intentions meet hard realities: an evaluation of the project greenlight reentry program

Abstract: Research Summary: The literature on correctional interventions (“What Works”) suggests that programs incorporating multimodal or cognitive-behavioral skills training consistently show moderate results in reducing offender recidivism. Project Greenlight was an innovative, short-term, prison-based reentry program that drew extensively from that literature. Survival analyses show that intervention participants performed significantly worse on multiple measures of recidivism after one year, and multivariate analyses indicate that covariates fail to mediate the observed relationships. The authors offer several potential explanations for their findings, but they speculate that the answer lies somewhere in a combination of implementation difficulties, program design, and a mismatch between the targeted offender population and the program. Policy Implications: Although there is extensive empirical support for multimodal programs in correctional interventions, especially those that involve or rest on cognitive skills foundations, little is actually known about the efficacy or limitations of different program models. The authors' analysis suggests that some short-term, prison-based programs, especially attractive to states and criminal justice agencies because of the low cost and capability to handle large numbers of offenders, may be poorly situated to address the multiple needs of offenders as they return to the community, and may in fact, increase the probability of criminal behavior. These findings also suggest that correctional interventions need to pay attention to the treatment principles underlying successful interventions and not simply the components of programs known to work.

The Effect of a Community Policing Management Style on Officers' Attitudes:

Abstract: Quality management, a form of participatory management modeled on the theories of Edwards Deming, was implemented in the Madison, Wisconsin Police Department as a basis for the implementation of community policing. Personnel surveys conducted in 1987 and 1989 found a significant increase over time in the belief that the organization practiced participatory management. The increase in this belief was positively and significantly related to (a) satisfaction with work, the organization, supervision, and job growth potential; (b) perceived significance of work; (c) task identity; and (d) work autonomy. A composite measure of satisfaction was, in turn, significantly related to officers' receptivity to change.