Research Summary In this study, we investigate how a police officer's exposure to peers accused of misconduct shapes his or her involvement in excessive use of force. By drawing from 8,642 Chicago police officers named in multiple complaints, we reconstruct police misconduct ego‐networks using complaint records. Our results show that officer involvement in excessive use of force complaints is predicted by having a greater proportion of co‐accused with a history of such behaviors. Policy Implications Our findings indicate officers’ peers may serve as social conduits through which misconduct may be learned and transmitted. Isolating officers that engage in improper use of force, at least until problematic behaviors are addressed, seems to be critical to reducing police misconduct and department‐wide citizen complaints. Future studies should be aimed at investigating how social networks shape police misconduct and the ways network analysis might be used to diffuse intervention strategies within departments.

Former or current injecting drug users that were sampled were surrounded by a relatively rich harm reduction network, but the network approach showed that only a minority of individuals were true harm reduction "champions". Recruitment of a combination of well-connected harm reduction champions, and strategically connected articulation points, would be most effective in planning network interventions that encourage harm reduction behaviors among this population.

Definitional problems in the area of organized crime have traditionally led to measurement problems that trickle down the criminal justice system. This study quantifies the broad conception of organized crime in the Canadian legal context and examines the types of crimes in which criminal organizations (and organized criminals) are involved. To estimate incidents potentially related to organized crime, we combine police-reported data from Montreal, Canada, with the three components of organized crime as prescribed by the Criminal Code of Canada: size, offence severity and continuity. The strategy of combining models on a continuum, varying in co-offending unit size, as well as offence severity provides both restrictive and inclusive estimates, accounting for the main discrepancy dividing scholarly and policy assessments of organized crime. Results showed that from 2005 to 2009, the extent and severity of incidents potentially related to organized crime that emerged from the three family of models proposed varied, ranging from 184 to 2086 incidents. The models also showed variations in incident rates across crime classification types with most organized crime incidents attributed to property and violent offences. This study is one of the first to propose a set of methods to detect incidents potentially related to organized crime using police data and to illustrate the potential implications of restrictive and inclusive measures for estimating its prevalence.

No abstract

Purpose Target prioritization is routinely done among law enforcement agencies, but the criteria to establish which targets will lead to the most crime reduction are neither systematic, nor do they take into account the networks in which offenders are embedded. The purpose of this paper is to propose network capital as a guide for prioritization exercises. The approach simultaneously considers a participant’s network centrality and their crime-affiliated attributes. Design/methodology/approach Data on all police interactions are used to map the social networks of two mutually connected police targets from a mid-size city in British Columbia, Canada. Network capital is captured by combining the extent to which individuals act as brokers between otherwise unconnected individuals (betweenness centrality), their number of contacts in the network (degree centrality), and whether they have a criminal record, gang ties, and a firearm carrier status. Findings The network comprises 101 associates, with nine mutual contacts amongst the two targets, and half of the network having a crime-affiliated attribute. Network capital directed the prioritization process to seven associates who stood out. Targeting strategies from two different investigative outcomes are compared. Research limitations/implications The specific recommendations of the study can only be interpreted within the context of the initial targets around which the network was constructed. As a prioritization approach, however, network capital is generalizable to other contexts with implications for law enforcement officials and, more broadly, the community. Originality/value The study provides insights into the practical application of network analysis with already existing police data. Network capital is data driven, which comes with its own limitations, but which constitutes an improvement over purely informal approaches to target prioritization.