This brief highlights the challenges that the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic posed for the court system, how courts adapted to those challenges, and a discussion of which adaptations might hold promise after the pandemic.
This brief highlights the challenges that the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic posed for community supervision organizations, how they adapted to those challenges, and a discussion of which adaptations might hold promise after the pandemic.
This brief highlights the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic created, shows how corrections agencies adapted to the challenges, describes which adaptations may hold promise, and provides evaluations to demonstrate the efficacy of such adaptations.
This brief highlights the challenges that the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic posed for victims services providers, describes how they adapted to those challenges, and discusses which adaptations might hold promise after the pandemic.
This report, part of RAND's Gun Policy in America project, presents a collection of essays that synthesize the available scientific data on several gun policy topics. In particular, the authors examine mass shootings, firearm and ammunition taxes, the effects of the 1996 National Firearms Agreement in Australia, whether mental illness is a risk factor for gun violence, and law enforcement approaches to reduce community gun violence.
In spring 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 swept through the United States, infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. The Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative convened workshops in fall 2020 to gather lessons learned from the responses of different justice agencies to the pandemic. Participants identified challenges caused by the pandemic, innovations in response, and lessons for future justice reform.
This report provides preliminary findings on the Aerial Investigations Research pilot program, a Baltimore Police Department program in which manned aircraft equipped with cameras gathered evidence to support crime investigations. This pilot was designed to facilitate police investigations of four types of crime (homicides, nonfatal shootings, armed robberies, and carjackings) and ran from May through October 2020.
In this study, we try to understand the causal role that school resource officers play in school safety and the day-to-day practice of school discipline by using incident-level administrative data from North Carolina public schools.
This paper reports the result of a two-year pilot study that developed a framework for implementing low-cost, game-based, virtual reality technology for training police officers to improve their decision-making under stress.
The purpose of this paper is to determine if a police academy using adult learning techniques instills higher levels of perceived competence in recruits than an academy using traditional pedagogical methods.
This presentation advocates a systems approach to change, and significant changes to LAPD's recruit academy to enhance critical applied skills.
Data from wearable sensor technologies (WSTs) could be used to assess and improve police officer health and well-being, but these technologies are not yet sufficiently developed for law enforcement purposes. A panel of experts identified ways for law enforcement to participate in the development of WSTs, determine what WSTs are suitable, implement them in law enforcement settings, evaluate their performance, and obtain buy-in from officers.
The goal of this exploratory project is to help fill gaps in the literature by empirically measuring levels of explicit provider-based stigma toward persons who use opioids.
Police often are the first (and sometimes the only) point of government contact for persons experiencing homelessness (PEH). Police responses have shifted to approaches designed to foster positive relationships with PEH, help assess the individual needs of each person or area, and guide homeless or unsheltered individuals to the services they require. A panel of experts identified ways to address related challenges.
Police have expressed frustration with being expected to handle complex social problems, such as homelessness and substance use, that could be solved using nonenforcement strategies. In this Perspective, the authors describe police perspectives on defunding the police — i.e., budgeting less money for police and more for other public safety strategies — and explain why revisiting law enforcement's role in society could have broad appeal.
Autonomous vehicles promise many benefits, but questions remain about how law enforcement officers will interact with them. Officers likely will encounter new challenges related to technology, procedures, and constitutional authority. A panel of experts identified ways to address these challenges.
Any institution-from workplaces to schools to correctional settings to law enforcement agencies-seeking to prevent suicide must take a comprehensive approach. Science suggests that there are five components that define what such an approach looks like.
How much taxpayer money is spent on police, courts, and legal services to respond to crime? RAND researchers provide estimated costs by crime type and by state in a new tool. The tool includes a map that allows users to visualize the differences in costs across the United States. Users can download parts of the data or the full data set in a variety of formats.
The proliferation of online platforms that enable users to interact virtually and often anonymously has given rise to new methods of perpetrating criminal behaviors that compromise victims' privacy and safety. These types of acts can involve the use or distribution of the victim's personal information, which compromises the victim's privacy and poses a threat to their safety. A panel of experts identified ways to address this challenge.
Driving under the influence of drugs (DUID) is a serious and growing threat to public safety. Addressing DUID cases involves various challenges, including identifying and characterizing impairment and presenting complex evidence in court. A panel of experts from law enforcement, forensic toxicology, the research community, and government agencies discussed the challenges related to DUID cases and identified ways to overcome these obstacles.
In this report, the authors focus on common needs that apply to all three sections of the justice system: law enforcement, the courts, and corrections agencies. Starting with the deep pool of feedback and input collected from the practitioner community across the five-year Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative project, the authors abstracted insights about innovation needs for the justice system as a whole.
The RAND Corporation and partners are carrying out a research effort to assess and prioritize technology needs across the criminal justice community. Since 2015, the Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative has published more than 20 reports identifying and prioritizing criminal justice needs for innovation. This product provides a database of all of the needs generated during the first five years of the Initiative.
This paper aims to answer the question, "Does the Command College achieve its intended goals?"
The Chicago Police Department's Strategic Decision Support Centers (SDSCs) serve as command, control, and communications hubs for staff to gain awareness of what is happening in their districts and decide on responses. In this report, the authors evaluate the processes, organizational structures, and technologies employed in the SDSCs. They also assess the extent to which the introduction of SDSCs was associated with reductions in crime levels.
With the advent of the dark web, criminals can conduct their activities in ways that are difficult for law enforcement to discover, monitor, and investigate. This report describes the findings of an expert workshop of federal, state, and local law enforcement practitioners and researchers who explored how law enforcement agencies should conduct criminal investigations while dealing with evidence on the dark web.
