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.
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.
An expert workshop of correctional administrators and researchers explored how technology can be used to address key challenges faced by community corrections agencies. Participants recommended developing best practices for leveraging technology to improve officer safety, improve officer competencies, facilitate positive offender behaviors, hold offenders accountable, and improve agencies' operational effectiveness.
This paper assesses community perceptions of crime and the police before and after the implementation of an intervention aimed at eliminating overt drug markets through focused deterrence and police-community partnerships emphasizing racial reconciliation.
An expert panel of law enforcement leaders identified promising efforts to combat the opioid crisis, including connecting people with opioid use disorder to medication-assisted treatment; building lasting partnerships to achieve community buy-in, enable information sharing, and effectively tackle challenges; and addressing community and other stakeholder concerns before high-priority harm-reduction approaches can be pursued.
Forensic DNA databases help solve crimes after the investigative trail has gone cold. Familial DNA and moderate stringency searches are logical extensions in cases where there is no exact DNA match, but these methods are not widely used. The authors present evidence from current practices in the United States, England, and Wales to support policymakers as they make decisions on the use and effects of familial and moderate stringency search.
An expert panel of law enforcement leaders identified challenges facing law enforcement today; their priorities are presented in this report. Panel members reported feeling that the challenges were tractable but that addressing them will take concerted and collective effort across the criminal justice community, including stakeholders from local communities, social service providers, vendors, and researchers.
Some jurisdictions are making great strides with respect to how the criminal justice system deals with individuals with serious mental illness (SMI), but significant challenges and opportunities remain. This report presents the results of an expert workshop convened to identify the needs associated with how individuals with SMI become justice-involved and how to achieve better outcomes before and after they come under correctional control.
The Colorado State Patrol (CSP) seeks to better reflect the demographic representation of the state of Colorado. This report offers an exploratory examination of how CSP's recruiting and selection policies and procedures relate to that objective. The authors identified potential barriers to diversity in CSP's early career stages and provide recommendations to mitigate and remove these barriers.
In 2018, RAND researchers began an evaluation to assess the effects of the New York City Police Department's Neighborhood Policing philosophy on public safety and the public's trust in police. The results of this work will be available in 2021.
This paper generates state-level, crime-specific, average variable cost estimates for crime-response services conducted by police by crime type.
The diffusion of video technology means that law enforcement will increasingly have streaming video feeds from in-car and body-worn cameras that may be monitored to help protect the safety of officers and bystanders. This report examines the potential of such technologies while weighing the challenges they pose, the innovation that they need to be ideally developed and implemented, and the civil liberties protections required by their use.
An examination of a body worn cameras test that was in violation of a valid experiment. The study demonstrates a clear line beyond which spillover of treatment renders experimental results misleading.
This case study explores the potential for crowd behaviour modelling to inform crowd management strategies to minimise the risk of violent or antisocial behaviour taking place during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, and to reduce harm if it does take place.
This case study gathers and critically assesses the available evidence on violent and antisocial behaviour at football events in the MENA region, as well as strategies to prevent and reduce the occurrence of these behaviours.
RAND Europe was commissioned to undertake a study into violence and disorder at major international sporting events. This study gathers and critically assesses the available evidence into the prevalence, nature and causes of violence and disorder at other major sporting events, and to draw on promising practices to prevent and respond to these harms.
This case study focuses on: 1) The relationship between alcohol consumption and problem behaviours. 2) Fans' preferences and expectations regarding alcohol at international football events. 3) International approaches to managing the sale and consumption of alcohol at football events. 4) The effectiveness and fans' perception of these approaches.
This case study examines the available evidence on violent and antisocial behaviour during the 2018 World Cup; effectiveness of policing tactics deployed during the tournament; intelligence-sharing and international cooperation between law enforcement agencies; sale and consumption of alcohol; and the facilitation of positive crowd behaviour through event organisation.
