Search

Case C‑205/21 VS v Ministerstvo na vatreshnite raboti, Glavna direktsia za borba s organiziranata prestapnost, Judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 26 January 2023 The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decided that the systematic collection of biometric and genetic data of any accused individual in order for them to be entered in police records in an indiscriminate and generalised manner is not in compliance with the Union law. After summarising the judgment, this case note first questions whether the CJEU misclassified the personal data in question as genetic data. Then, it points out that the condition enshrined in Article 10 of the Law Enforcement Directive that allows sensitive data processing by law enforcement authorities only where strictly necessary is considered by the CJEU as a specific manifestation of lato sensu proportionality assessment. Considering that law enforcement authorities in the EU rely more and more on (biometric) technologies to prevent and fight against crimes, it concludes by speculating on some of the potential implications of this interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every state has a set of transparency statutes that bind state and local governments. In theory, these statutes apply with equal force to every agency. Yet, in practice, law enforcement agencies enjoy a wide variety of unique secrecy protections denied to other government entities. Legislators write police-specific exemptions into public records laws. Judges develop procedural approaches that they apply exclusively to police and prosecutorial records. Police departments claim special secrecy protections from the bottom up. This Article maps the legal infrastructure of police-records secrecy. It draws upon the text of the public records statutes in all fifty states, along with case law and public records datasets, to illuminate the ways that judges, legislators, and police officers use transparency statutes to shield law enforcement agencies from public view. It argues that this robust web of police secrecy protections operates as a kind of police secrecy exceptionalism, analogous in some ways to the exceptional protections granted to national security secrets in the federal context. The Article then examines the doctrinal and policy-oriented underpinnings of this exceptional treatment, finding that these arguments generally fall into one of three buckets: protection against circumvention of the law, protection of citizen or police officer privacy, and preservation of the effectiveness or efficiency of policing. It concludesthat none of these defenses justify the extraordinary informational protections currently extended to law enforcement agencies. Moreover, these secrecy protections impose substantial harms. By excavating these overlooked mechanisms of police secrecy, the Article illuminates new avenues of legal reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: To better understand domestic violence, data sources from multiple sectors such as police, justice, health, and welfare are needed. Linking police data to data collections from other agencies could provide unique insights and promote an all-of-government response to domestic violence. The New South Wales Police Force attends domestic violence events and records information in the form of both structured data and a free-text narrative, with the latter shown to be a rich source of information on the mental health status of persons of interest (POIs) and victims, abuse types, and sustained injuries. Objective: This study aims to examine the concordance (ie, matching) between mental illness mentions extracted from the police's event narratives and mental health diagnoses from hospital and emergency department records. Methods: We applied a rule-based text mining method on 416,441 domestic violence police event narratives between December 2005 and January 2016 to identify mental illness mentions for POIs and victims. Using different window periods (1, 3, 6, and 12 months) before and after a domestic violence event, we linked the extracted mental illness mentions of victims and POIs to clinical records from the Emergency Department Data Collection and the Admitted Patient Data Collection in New South Wales, Australia using a unique identifier for each individual in the same cohort. Results: Using a 2-year window period (ie, 12 months before and after the domestic violence event), less than 1% (3020/416,441, 0.73%) of events had a mental illness mention and also a corresponding hospital record. About 16% of domestic violence events for both POIs (382/2395, 15.95%) and victims (101/631, 16.01%) had an agreement between hospital records and police narrative mentions of mental illness. A total of 51,025/416,441 (12.25%) events for POIs and 14,802/416,441 (3.55%) events for victims had mental illness mentions in their narratives but no hospital record. Only 841 events for POIs and 919 events for victims had a documented hospital record within 48 hours of the domestic violence event. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that current surveillance systems used to report on domestic violence may be enhanced by accessing rich information (ie, mental illness) contained in police text narratives, made available for both POIs and victims through the application of text mining. Additional insights can be gained by linkage to other health and welfare data collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most states, histories of ojJicer misconduct are shielded from public scrutiny by restrictive open records laws. Advocates for transparency argue that greater public access to such records will lead to better policing by increasing the public's trust in and cooperation with police, making it easier to hold officers accountable, deterring misconduct, and providing scholars and officials the information needed to design more effective policy. Advocates jor confidentiality argue that restrictions on public access are needed to protect officer privacy and safety, and that greater transparency may lead to retrenchment instead of better policing. This Note examines the current legislative landscape and the arguments for competing transparency and confidentiality interests. This Note ultimately argues for a limited public access regime that ensures public access to records when doing so would garner substantial transparency benefits, and limits public access in situations where disclosure would implicate confidentiality interests without offering any significant transparency benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Prohistoria is the property of Prohistoria Ediciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Researchers often lack the necessary data to credibly estimate racial discrimination in policing. In particular, police administrative records lack information on civilians police observe but do not investigate. In this article, we show that if police racially discriminate when choosing whom to investigate, analyses using administrative records to estimate racial discrimination in police behavior are statistically biased, and many quantities of interest are unidentified—even among investigated individuals—absent strong and untestable assumptions. Using principal stratification in a causal mediation framework, we derive the exact form of the statistical bias that results from traditional estimation. We develop a bias-correction procedure and nonparametric sharp bounds for race effects, replicate published findings, and show the traditional estimator can severely underestimate levels of racially biased policing or mask discrimination entirely. We conclude by outlining a general and feasible design for future studies that is robust to this inferential snare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores both epidemiological and spatial characteristics of domestic and community interpersonal violence. We evaluated three years of violent trauma data in the medium-sized city of Campina Grande in North-Eastern Brazil. 3559 medical and police records were analysed and 2563 cases were included to identify socioeconomic and geographic patterns. The associations between sociodemographic, temporal, and incident characteristics and domestic violence were evaluated using logistic regression. Using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), we mapped victims’ household addresses to identify spatial patterns. We observed a higher incidence of domestic violence among female, divorced, or co-habitant persons when the violent event was perpetrated by males. There was only a minor chance of occurrence of domestic violence involving firearms. 8 out of 10 victims of domestic violence were women and the female/male ratio was 3.3 times greater than that of community violence (violence not occurring in the home). Unmarried couples were twice as likely to have a victim in the family unit (OR = 2.03), compared to married couples. Seven geographical hotspots were identified. The greatest density of hotspots was found in the East side of the study area and was spatially coincident with the lowest average family income. Aggressor sex, marital status, and mechanism of injury were most associated with domestic violence, and low-income neighbourhoods were coincident with both domestic and non-domestic violence hotspots. These results provide further evidence that economic poverty may play a significant role in interpersonal, and particularly domestic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Statistics about the level of crime continue to attract public and political attention but are often presented in conflicting ways. In England and Wales, police-recorded crimes are no longer considered "national statistics" and, instead, the crime survey of England and Wales (CSEW) is used. However, it is not clear why partial population data (e.g., police-recorded crime) are considered less reliable or valid for measuring temporal crime trends in society than inferential statistical estimation models that are based on samples such as CSEW. This is particularly the case for approximating rare events like high-harm violence and specific harmful modus operandi (e.g., knife crime and firearms). In this chapter, the authors cross-reference victim survey and police-recorded data to determine similarities and contradictions in trends. Methods - Using police data and CSEW estimates, the authors contrast variance and logarithmic trend lines since 1981 across a range of data categories and then triangulate the results with assault records from hospital consultations. Findings - Change in crime rates in recent years is neither as unique nor extreme as promulgated in media coverage of crime. Moreover, analyses show conflicting narratives with a host of plausible but inconclusive depictions of the "actual" amount of crime committed in the society. The authors also conclude that neither source of data can serve as the benchmark of the other. Thus, both data systems suffer from major methodological perils, and the estimated crime means in CSEW, inferred from samples, are not necessarily more valid or accurate than police-recorded data (particularly for low-frequency and high-harm crimes). On the other hand police-recorded data are susceptible to variations in recording practices. As such, the authors propose a number of areas for further research, and a revised taxonomy of crime classifications to assist with future public interpretations of crime statistics. Originality - There is much public and academic discourse about different sources of crime measurement yet infrequent analysis of the precise similarities and differences between the methods. This chapter offers a new perspective on long-term trends and highlights an issue of much contemporaneous concern: rising violent crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this research was to estimate the incidence of road traffic injuries in Yaounde, Cameroon. Police and hospital records of road traffic crashes for the period 1st November 2013 to 1st of November 2014 for the city of Yaounde were retrieved for analysis. Crash involved persons were matched by names, sex, and age within +/- 2 years. The incidence of road traffic injuries was then calculated from both hospital and police records using the capture-recapture methodology. The results were compared to the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study as well as to that officially reported by the Cameroon Government. In 2014, 4386 injury cases were estimated with 1288 severe injuries and 105 fatalities using two-sample capture-recapture method. This is higher than the number of crash involved persons obtained from the police or hospital records alone as well as their aggregate. Police captured only 5.1% of road traffic injuries (which are the official Cameroon Government statistics) while hospitals captured 4.5%. The aggregate non-overlapping police and hospitals records accounted for 44.3%. The number of road traffic injuries obtained using the capture-recapture method were lower than the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study of 6951 annual road traffic injuries in the same population. The findings suggests that police records should be considered in relation to factors and conditions leading to road traffic injuries but should not be used as the only source of data for the incidence of road traffic injuries. A more reliable estimate of the incidence would be obtained from the adoption of surveillance method that includes both police and hospital records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Very little is known regarding the epidemiology of suicides in Iraq, given the lack of a national surveillance system. Therefore, the government initiated this project "The Iraqi National Study of Suicide METHODS: The study covered 13 (out of 18) provinces in Iraq. A data collection form was designed by the researchers. The forms were completed by police stations in the 13 provinces. Data were extracted from the legal investigation (which include police investigation, family reports and postmortem reports) of cases of when there was no clear cause of death and where there was final verdict of suicide made by judge after examining these reports.Results: There were 647 cases of suicide. The crude rate of suicide per 100 000 population was 1.09 (1.21 for males, 0.97 for females) in 2015 and 1.31 (1.54 for males and 1.07 for females) in 2016. The majority of cases (67.9%) were aged 29 years or below. The most common method was hanging (41%) followed by firearms (31.4%) and self-burning (19.2%). 24.1% of cases were reported to have psychiatric disorders, of which the most common diagnosis was depression (53.9%). In the majority of cases (82.1%) there were no previous attempts. Only a small minority were reported to have had psychological trauma (15.5%), financial problems (12.4%) or childhood abuse (2.2%).Limitations: The study covered only 13 provinces in Iraq. We were able to calculate age-standardized rates for year 2016 only. Data are based on official police records and under-reporting and under-recognition of psychiatric disorders are possible.Conclusion: On the basis of data available to this study, the suicide rate in Iraq is lower than the global rate. Suicide is more common in young people, where the gender distribution is almost equal. Social and cultural factors might have played a role in these patterns. The findings underscore the need of a national registry with a comprehensive and multipronged surveillance approach to correctly identify suicide events. This study aims to be the first step in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The analysis of criminal career dimensions has generated a large knowledge base. Unfortunately, the lion's share of this work has been undertaken with males. Methods The current study seeks to build on the small (but growing) body of research on female offending patterns by examining offending trajectories in general, and chronic offending in particular, among 2450 participants from the Pittsburgh Girls Study (PGS). An important feature of our work is a comparison of both official and self-reported measures of offending. Results The results indicate that there is some degree of concordance between self-reported and official offending trajectories and there is evidence of an overlap among those identified as chronic offenders from a variety of operationalizations of chronic offending. Conclusions The study limitations and directions for future research are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the situational dynamics of the 2011 London Riots. The empirical contribution is to challenge the dominant explanation of the riots as an outbreak of ‘criminal opportunism’. I use the Metropolitan Police record of all riot-related crimes in London to test several hypotheses and show that this ‘criminal opportunism’ theory cannot account for the riots’ spatial patterning. This opens space for alternative explanatory mechanisms. I then use video footage and testimonies of events on the ground to examine the interactions which made up the London Riots. These suggest that the riots were, in part, a way for people to stake a claim to the public spaces in which they lived, toreclaim the everyday. Theoretically, this builds on Randall Collins’s ‘micro-situational’ approach to violence but extends it by embedding historical and structural factors into that micro-perspective. Specifically, the emotional dynamics of these riot interactions cannot be understood without acknowledging participants’ pre-existing expectations of the police and of the everyday places of the riot. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In an age of rapid technological advancement, third party requests for police record checks have proliferated. Police record disclosure practices present unique legal issues when such records fall under the jurisdiction of the Youth Criminal Justice Act ("YCJA"). This article critically evaluates the legitimacy of criminal record disclosure practices in the youth criminal justice context, and traces the impact of such practices on two critical areas of a young person's life: housing and employment. This paper suggests that in such contexts, police services should not facilitate third party youth record disclosure for several reasons: first, a young person's consent is arguably deficient; second, the uses to which these records will be put contravene the privacy provisions of the YCJA; and third, these practices undermine the YCJA's broader aims of privacy protection and rehabilitation of young persons. To conclude, this article highlights provincial legislation's pivotal role in implementing the overarching goals of the YCJA, and provides some suggestions for legislative reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past several decades the archival turn in contemporary art practice has produced a panoply of visual, performance and literary art works that activate the archives. Artists working within this turn often employ critical-aesthetic strategies to records in order to reconsider historical narratives, expose missing or silenced voices, interrogate modes of representation, or investigate relations between official and personal memory through art-making processes and works. Other artists combine these strategies with socially and community-engaged practices, as did poet Kaia Sand and interdisciplinary artist Garrick Imatani, who were artists-in-residence at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center in Portland, Oregon from 2013 to 2015. This paper explores how Sand and Imatani affectively engaged history and memory with a collection of police surveillance records, transforming records of control into works of art that commemorate the lives and work of activists. Employing interdisciplinary thinking about the nature, use and movement of records through time, space and circumstances, this paper argues that records are affectively charged objects able to evoke sensations and feelings, orient thought, and stimulate ideas about ways in which they can be used, which in turn generate new connections, relations and possibilities between the past, present and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the diverse roles played by archives in public history, community archives, and a collection of police surveillance archives dating from the 1960s to the 1980s in Portland, Oregon.

This paper investigates how the production of police records was linked to the policies of repression and violence during Guatemala's civil war. We provide empirical evidence from the Historical Archive of the Guatemalan National Police that the police used language, terminology and codes to record deaths in ways that produced silences about the level of violence during the height of repressive military rule. Using a dataset derived from a statistically valid sample of police records together with qualitative archival analysis, we find evidence of profound changes in the terminology used to record and report on deaths-changes that follow a pattern consistent with the policies of information control and concealment of the three different military regimes that ruled Guatemala between 1978 and 1985. We argue that researchers will need to consider the silences created through the selective use of terminology in documents when using archives to produce historical knowledge. Detecting and intercepting silence will be especially important as state records are increasingly sought in service of ongoing pursuits for truth and justice about past atrocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the local effects of internal armed conflict on postwar violent crime in Northern Ireland. It argues that exposure to wartime violence will lead to higher levels of violent crime in the aftermath of conflict. Particularly, it claims that exposure to violence committed by armed groups challenging the state (anti-government groups) will have this effect, as it erodes the legitimacy needed for local law enforcement agencies to function effectively. This, in turn, is expected to contribute to the emergence of a postwar public security gap that lowers opportunity costs to resort to violent crime for a range of local actors. To evaluate these propositions, spatial statistics on a subnational dataset covering war-related fatalities for the period 1969–98 and police crime records for the postwar period 2002–06 are employed. The results indicate that the more an area has been exposed to violence, and the larger the proportion of this violence committed by anti-government groups, the more violent crime on the local level. This study hence contributes both to the burgeoning literature on the legacies of civil war and to recent research emphasizing the need to disaggregate non-state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study aligns to the body of research dedicated to estimating the underreporting of road crash injuries and adds the perspective of understanding individual and crash factors contributing to the decision to report a crash to the police, the hospital, or both.Method: This study focuses on road crash injuries that occurred in the province of Funen, Denmark, between 2003 and 2007 and were registered in the police, the hospital, or both authorities. Underreporting rates are computed with the capture-recapture method, and the probability for road crash injuries in police records to appear in hospital records (and vice versa) is estimated with joint binary logit models.Results: The capture-recapture analysis shows high underreporting rates of road crash injuries in Denmark and the growth of underreporting not only with the decrease in injury severity but also with the involvement of cyclists (reporting rates of about 14% for serious injuries and 7% for slight injuries) and motorcyclists (reporting rates of about 35% for serious injuries and 10% for slight injuries). Model estimates show that the likelihood of appearing in both data sets is positively related to helmet and seat belt use, number of motor vehicles involved, alcohol involvement, higher speed limit, and females being injured.Conclusions: This study adds significantly to the literature about underreporting by recognizing that understanding the heterogeneity in the reporting rate of road crashes may lead to devising policy measures aimed at increasing the reporting rate by targeting specific road user groups (e.g., males, young road users) or specific situational factors (e.g., slight injuries, arm injuries, leg injuries, weekend). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of underreporting terrorism in developing countries is often acknowledged but poorly understood. Focusing on India, we triangulate terrorist attacks captured across three media-based datasets (Global Terrorism Database, South Asia Terrorism Portal, Worldwide Incident Terrorism System) against official police records from Andhra Pradesh. Results suggest that media-based datasets capture the geographic prevalence of terrorism yet severely underestimate the frequency of violence, biasing toward lethal bombings. Considerable variation is present for attacks targeting specific classes or types of actors. Similar to other crimes, the results suggest that existing terrorism databases represent a select version of violence in these countries, discounting the prevalence and regularity of non-lethal violent activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a challenge in the current terrorism literature, namely the methodological justification concerning the collection and analysis of empirical data. Lack of detailed methodological accounts of the collection and analysis of the data makes it difficult to evaluate presented findings, especially if these data are confidential or focused on specific aspects of the phenomenon. This article offers an extensive overview of the methodological procedures conducted in a large empirical research project on jihadist networks based on confidential police files (2000–2013), interviews, and trial observations. The article illustrates how grounded theory–based methods can be used to collect and analyze such data and to develop and test new theories in this research field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social disorganisation theory and economic theory posit relationships between crime and socio-economic conditions of an area. This article examines those relationships by analysing, for the first time, data for 322 local authorities in England. Significant determinants of property crime rates are found to be deprivation, the percentage of young people in the population, density of population/urbanisation, and movement in and out of the area. The variables found to be associated with violent crime are deprivation, density of population, population movements, and ethnic heterogeneity. Our results confirm much previous research but add fresh insights, especially regarding demographic distributions and population movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the example of metal theft in the United Kingdom, this study used mixed methods to evaluate the accuracy of police estimates of the involvement of organized crime groups (OCGs) in crime. Police estimate that 20–30 per cent of metal theft is committed by OCGs, but this study found that only 0.5 per cent of metal thieves had previous convictions for offences related to OCGs, that only 1.3 per cent were linked to OCGs by intelligence information, that metal thieves typically offended close to their homes and that almost no metal thefts involved sophisticated offence methods. It appears that police may over-estimate the involvement of OCGs in some types of crime. The reasons for and consequences of this over-estimation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

JuroAdlešič (1884-1968) was one of the leading politicians of Slovenian People`s Party in the period between the two world wars. The party entrusted to him those functions in which it was necessary to prove himself through practical work. That is probably why he became a Mayor of Ljubljana. Because of the death or departure abroad of some of the party leaders, the Second World War brought him to the top of the party. That is the reason his political opponents paid attention to him and followed his every move. Despite the very different and sometimes contradictory reports of their associates, the Yugoslav intelligence service concluded that he was not politically active in emigration and in the nineteen-sixties he was allowed to return to his homeland, where he died in almost complete anonymity. His personal dossier is preserved and provides an insight into the functioning of the Yugoslav political police, but in many aspects it is also the only source for the reconstruction of his life path after 1942, when he left Slovenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines why, and under what circumstances, young people illegally set fire to schools. Utilizing court and police records from cases of illegal firesetting in Swedish schools where offenders were aged 21 or younger, a number of crime scene and offender characteristics are compiled and analysed using correspondence analysis. First, four main clusters of such characteristics are identified. Next, offenders’ accounts of their motives are examined and factored in, with a total of six different types of school fires identified as a result: obstructing school activities, destroying evidence of school burglary, play vandalism, vindictive vandalism, psychiatric problems and school fire as a side effect. The types of school fires obtained are then classified into two main groups: school fires related to education and school fires unrelated to education. The findings show illegal firesetting in schools to be a much more complex phenomenon than previously recognized, and that accounts of motives can help us better understand this complexity and to develop apropriate preventive measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a substantial number of police corruption studies founded on Klockars and colleagues' scenario-based vignette survey (2004), little attention has been paid to record-discretion as a type of police misconduct. Goldstein (1977) notes that police corruption is sometimes manifested in insidious forms. Record-discretion is worth investigating because despite its low visibility it potentially affects public confidence in the entire criminal justice system. Using data from South Korean police officers with investigative assignments, we examine the etiology of record-discretion among detectives by focusing on both individual officer characteristics and his/her perceptions of organizational correlates. Significant predictors included investigators' levels of expertise and prior injury experience, prosecutor supervision, media attention, and rule effectiveness. These relationships, however, vary across types of assignment, supporting evidence for the existence of two cultures in policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issues related to lack of clarity in first amendment jurisprudence in terms of right to record police, freedom of speech and press; right to gather information.

This article examines police administration as a branch of urban government, based on a case study of Leeds between 1815 and 1900. Making extensive use of local government and police records, it takes a longer-term view of 'reform' than most existing studies, and privileges the more routine aspects of everyday governance. It thus provides an original exploration of central-local government relations, as well as conflict and negotiation between distinct bodies of self-government within the locality. Previous studies have rightly emphasized that urban police governance was primarily a local responsibility, yet this article also stresses the influence of central state oversight and an extra-local, provincial perspective, both of which modified the grip of localism on nineteenth-century government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The treatment of alcohol-impaired drivers injured in a motor vehicle collision (MVC) is a complex public health issue. We conducted a systematic review to describe the legal consequences for alcohol-impaired drivers injured in a MVC and taken to a hospital or trauma center. Methods We searched MEDLINE, Embase, and CINAHL databases from inception until August 2014. We included studies that reported legal consequences including charges or convictions of injured drivers taken to a hospital or trauma center after a MVC with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) exceeding the legal limit.Results Twenty-six studies met inclusion criteria; twenty studies were conducted in the USA, five in Canada, and one in Sweden. All were cohort studies (23 retrospective, 3 prospective) and included 11,409 patients overall. A total of 5,127 drivers had a BAC exceeding the legal limit, with legal consequences reported in 4937 cases. The median overall DUI/DWI conviction rate was 13% (range 0–85%). The median percentage of drivers with a previous conviction on their record for driving under the influence (DUI) or driving while intoxicated (DWI) was 15.5% (range 6–40%). The median percentage of drivers convicted again for DUI/DWI during the study period was 3.5% (range 2–10%). Heterogeneity between study designs, legal jurisdictions, institutional procedures and policies for obtaining a legally admissible BAC measurement precluded a meta-analysis. Conclusions The majority of intoxicated drivers injured in MVCs and seen in the emergency department are never charged or convicted. A substantial proportion of injured intoxicated drivers had more than one conviction for DUI/DWI on their police record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Supreme Court's Brady doctrine requires prosecutors to disclose favorable, material evidence to the defense, but in some jurisdictions, even well-meaning prosecutors cannot carry out this obligation when it comes to one critical area of evidence: police personnel files. These files contain valuable evidence of police misconduct that can be used to attack an officer's credibility on the witness stand and can make the difference between acquittal and conviction. But around the country, state statutes and local policies prevent prosecutors from accessing these files, much less disclosing the material they contain. And even where prosecutors can access the misconduct in these files, their ability to disclose this information, as required by the Constitution, is constrained by the efforts of police officers and unions who have used litigation, legislation, and informal political pressure to prevent Brady's application to these files. Suppression of this misconduct evidence can cost defendants their lives, but disclosure can also be costly. It can cost officers their livelihoods. Using interviews with prosecutors, police officials, and defense attorneys around the country, as well as unpublished and published sources, this Article provides the first account of the wide disparities in Brady's application to police personnel files. It argues that critical impeachment evidence is routinely and systematically suppressed as a result of state laws and local policies that limit access to the personnel files and as a result of the conflict within the prosecution team over Brady's application to these files. Further, the Article challenges Brady's assumption that prosecutors and police officers form a cohesive "prosecution team" and that, in the words of the Supreme Court, "the prosecutor has the means to discharge the government's Brady responsibility if he will" by putting in place "procedures and regulations" to bring forth information known only to the police. Finally, the Article contends that privacy protections for police misconduct are incompatible with core aspects of the Brady doctrine and that systems that attempt to balance Brady against police privacy wind up sacrificing the former to the latter. As both a doctrinal and a normative matter, police misconduct should receive no protections from Brady's search and disclosure obligation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a study on identifying first-time family violence perpetrators (FVPs) in Australia with the help of police records. Topics include FVPs identification based on police records to prevent them from long- term violent criminal career, treatment and rehabilitation of first-time FVPs as they have lesser chances to re-offend, and proper differentiation between first-time and repeat FVPs through proper research.

La numérotation des maisons est considérée comme une technique innovante et moderne introduite par l'administration militaire et les autorités urbaines dans les années 1760 en France, pour faciliter l'orientation et la circulation des étrangers, ainsi qu'un contrôle plus serré de l'espace urbain. Cet article analyse l'impact de la numérotation des maisons et son usage par les habitants de Paris, de 1780 à 1807, et comment elle a pu changer la manière dont ils expriment leur localisation, physique et sociale, dans la cité. Il est fondé sur le dépouillement des déclarations d'adresse dans les archives de police. Il montre que les Parisiens ont finalement adopté rapidement et massivement le système de numérotage révolutionnaire, inventé pour d'autres fins que permettre aux citadins de se repérer dans la ville. La Révolution a coïncidé avec une transformation majeure dans la manière dont les individus définissent leur position dans l'espace parisien. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the effects of target characteristics on non-residential burglary sighting risks, and evaluates a sighting model framed by criminal event theories. It is based on a random sample of individual UK burglary incidents for which data were collected from officer questionnaires, victim interviews, site surveys and police records. The study measures guardianship 'actively' during burglary incidence and extends it beyond occupancy to include neighbours, passers-by and security patrols. The key influence on sighting is guardianship, conditioned by degrees of exposure, partly contingent on means of access to the site and premises. Neighbour guardianship is of over-riding importance in shaping sighting risks, particularly after dark, when guardianship from passers-by may also play a role. Guardianship from the occupancy of premises played no significant part in the sighting of burglars. At least half the explanation of sighting risks appears to lie in differences in target characteristics. Distinctive neighbour guardianship measures are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News items reporting self-immolation by Tibetans have been on the increase in recent years. After examining the corpse of a Swiss man who had committed suicide by deliberate self-burning, we wondered how often this occurs in Switzerland. The Federal Statistics Office (FSO) does not register self-burning specifically so no official national data on this form of suicide are available. However, we had access to the data from a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) project Suicides in Switzerland between 2000 and 2010 , which collected information on all (4885) cases of suicide investigated by the various institutes of forensic medicine. From this data pool we extracted 50 cases (1.02%) of suicide by self-burning, in order to determine the details and to identify the possible reasons for choosing this method. To look at our results in the light of studies from other countries, we searched the literature for studies that had also retrospectively examined suicide by self-immolation based on forensic records. Our results showed that, on the whole, personal aspects of self-burning in Switzerland do not differ from those in other industrialised nations. Some data, including religious and sociocultural background, were unfortunately missing – not only from our study but also from the similar ones. In our opinion, the most important prevention strategy is to make healthcare professionals more aware of this rare method of suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to characterise the distribution and the urban landscape in which outdoor rapes happen in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) underlie the methodology of this research that combines crime police records, police protocols and information from fieldwork of a sample of rape places. Rapes are concentrated in the inner city areas but follow a patchy pattern in some parts of the periphery. Rapes happen in places with poor visibility but that offer an easy escape for the offender. A large share of them happen in the weekends, holidays and hot months of the year, which can be associated with unstructured leisure routine activities of individuals. Results show that the role of environment on the occurrence of rape varies over time and space – a fact with important implications for research and safety interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inquiries into allegations of human rights abuses require a reliable corpus of evidence to proceed and hold violators accountable for their actions. The following article analyzes the 2005 police shootings that occurred on New Orleans' Danziger Bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a case that illustrates the challenges confronting investigations into human rights violations in the USA. By examining an investigative police report, two survivors' civil complaints, and federal court filings, the article argues that the methodical nature in which several police officers in post-Katrina New Orleans conspired to document the use of deadly force against several unarmed citizens demonstrates that police records created in the context of officer-involved shootings inhibit accountability processes as much as they facilitate them. The deliberate creation of such records, the article concludes, impairs the ability of a democratic nation to ensure human rights and bring their violators to account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective:To compare the pattern of injuries to front and rear seat occupants and test the hypothesis that rear seat passengers of different ages sustain different patterns of injury. Method:Patients admitted to a hospital following involvement in a crash in New South Wales (NSW) Australia between 2005 and 2007 were identified usingInternational Classification of Diseases(10th edition [ICD10]) codes. Hospital admissions data were linked with NSW police crash data using probabilistic techniques. The profiles and patterns of injury of front and rear seat passengers were compared. Logistic regression was used to examine how age influenced the pattern of injury among rear seat passengers. Results:Sixty-three percent of hospital admissions were linked with police records. One in 5 passengers were rear seat passengers. There were more unrestrained occupants in the rear (7%) compared to drivers (3%) and front seat passengers (2%). Younger (9–15 years) injured passengers were seated in the rear more often than in the front passenger position and older injured passengers (>50 years) were seated more often in the front passenger position than in the rear (15% rear compared to 5% front aged 9–15 years; 22% rear compared to 37% front aged >50 years; χ2,P< .001). There were proportionally more fatal injuries among rear seat passengers (10%) than among drivers (5%) and front seat passengers (6%), and the pattern of injury between front and rear passengers also varied. Rear seat passengers had more head and abdominal injuries and fewer thoracic and knee/lower leg injuries than front seat passengers. After adjusting for vehicle age, restraint status, travel speed, and whether or not a fatality occurred in the crash, older (>50 years) rear passengers had 6.3 times the odds of sustaining thoracic injuries (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.6–15.0) and lower odds (odds ratio [OR] = 0.4, 95% CI, 0.2–0.9) of sustaining abdominal/lumbar injuries than the youngest occupants (9–15 years).The odds of sustaining a head injury did not vary with age, and the odds of sustaining thoracic, abdominal, or lower extremity injuries did not differ significantly between rear seat passengers aged 16–50 years and 9–15 years. Conclusions:The findings suggest that there is a need for enhanced protection for rear seat passengers, because they have proportionally more fatal injuries than front-seated occupants. The frequency of abdominal injury and the differences between injury patterns observed in front seat passengers suggests a potential benefit from adding abdominal injury risk assessment to rear seat occupant protection test protocols. There is also scope to improve chest protection for older rear seat passengers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Criminal trial hearings are communicative events that are densely intertextually structured. In the course of a trial hearing, written documents such as police records of statements made by suspects, witnesses and experts are extensively referred to, quoted, paraphrased, summarized and recontextualized. In fact, such drawing upon the (written documents in) the case file is inevitable, as demonstrating (or invalidating) the defendant’s criminal liability crucially depends on the transformation of discourses produced at previous stages of the trial into lawful evidence. Detailed analyses of the various discursive processes through which intertextual links with the case file are established are thus essential for understanding exactly how trial participants negotiate versions of events with specific legal implications. In this special issue we bring together a collection of papers that deal with such intertextual practices in different legal settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on 11 interrogations and police records, I examine how stories are elicited, told and written up during the police interrogation. In the process of transforming a spoken story to a written story, we see several transformations. The written story is a more factual, detailed, precise and intentional story on paper constructed according to the institutional perspective of the officer. Whether the stories are told freely by the suspect, supervised or imposed by the officer, police officers adhere to their own structure and chronology of how they make events understandable. This is accomplished through further questioning, interrupting or by telling the story themselves. This process of institutionalization already begins in the interaction and continues when transforming talk to text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on the idea that crime should be analyzed in terms of both volume and seriousness. Crime rates are the most usual measure of the volume of criminality at a given time or a given place. Statistics Canada recently developed a Crime Severity Index to account for variations in the seriousness of police-recorded criminal infractions. A close look at its construction reveals that the Index is a weighted rate influenced by both the volume and the seriousness of recorded infractions. This article introduces a new indicator designed to measure the seriousness of recorded infractions. The measure is based on simple calculations and easy to interpret. It suggests that serious crime has decreased since the 1980s. It also suggests that city and province rankings based solely on crime rates are misleading because high levels of crime do not necessarily indicate high levels of the more serious crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Appraisal has often been combined with some form of sampling. The purpose of this study was to shed light on the implementation and consequences of the method of selecting sample archives: while records from a few agencies of a certain type are almost totally preserved, in other archives all or nearly all records are discarded. A case study was carried out on an appraisal decision, including the selection of sample archives, issued in 1969 by the Swedish National Archives. The decision concerned the country district police force (1918-1964), and was to be implemented by the autonomous regional archives. The study first explored proposals and opinions preceding the decision. The next step was a quantitative examination of the country police archives, followed by a discussion of how the implementation of the decision affected research potentials. The results revealed that the regional archives followed the rules only to a certain extent and with large variations. As a consequence, the amount of preserved records is much larger than the decision-makers intended. Organizational inertia, and concepts related to this, may partly explain these divergences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to determine the socio-demographic characteristics of a sample of females (N = 200) who have belonged to organized crime groups (N = 67) that have operated in Spain between 1999 and 2010, along with what their roles and status have been. The information has been mined from police records provided by the Central Operational Unit of the Guardia Civil. The results enable us to conclude that most of the females are adults, and that many of them have family or partner ties to the organizations. Furthermore, they are actively involved in these criminal groups, mainly performing jobs that do not require the use of violence, and they are especially needed for internal security. In terms of status, the majority seem to be at the lowest level of the organizational structure, although we have managed to identify some women who have played leadership roles in criminal organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]