Custody-related deaths have become a major human rights issue in South Africa since the 1994 democratic elections and led to the formation of the Independent Complaints Directorate who, in April 2000, had recorded 2174 custody-related deaths since their inception. A 3-year retrospective descriptive study on all custody-related death cases at a Durban Medico-legal mortuary from January 1998 to D...

Advancement of problem-oriented policing has been stymied by over-attention to police organizations and under-attention to police problems. This paper develops a research agenda for understanding police problems by addressing four fundamental questions: What are problems? What causes problems? How can we find effective solutions to problems? And how can we learn from problem solving? For each q...

We conducted 2 studies to investigate how cultural stereotypes that depict Blacks as criminals affect the way Blacks experience encounters with police officers, expecting that such encounters induce Blacks to feel stereotype threat (i.e., concern about being judged and treated unfairly by police because of the stereotype). In Study 1, we asked Black and White participants to report how they fee...

A recommended vision standard for police officers is presented. The visual capabilities needed to perform various police duties are described. A specific vision standard, along with criteria for screening referral or screening failure are given for each category of visual skills required for police work.

This article reviews the existing literature on differences in police response to IPV (intimate partner violence) based on officer gender and suggests policy changes that could address common issues identified in the research. Authors reviewed research on the effect of police officer gender on arrest rates of abusers, the criteria officers consider when making the arrest decision, and whether o...

1. Collins PA, Gibbs AC. Stress in police officers: a study of the origins, prevalence and severity of stress-related symptoms within a county police force. Occup Med (Lond) 2003;53:256–264. 2. Schmidtke A, Fricke S, Lester D. Suicide among German federal and state police officers. Psychol Rep 1999;84:157–166. 3. McCafferty FL, McCafferty E, McCafferty MA. Stress and suicide in police officers:...

Police reform is widely undertaken in developing and postauthoritarian countries. The starting point for analysis of this phenomenon, it is suggested, is the absence of public trust in police that characterizes police–community relations in these countries. Without public trust in police, ‘policing by consent’ is difficult or impossible and public safety suffers. The nature of trust is examined...

This study was based on a larger survey on the socioeconomic, quality-of-life, occupational, and health characteristics of military and civil police in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The study triangulated quantitative methods (an anonymous questionnaire in a random sample of clusters involving 46 police units and 2,678 police force members) and qualitative ones (18 focus groups with 143 ...