Search

Inorganic gunshot residue (iGSR) analysis, crucial for linking suspects to firearm use, faces challenges from potential environmental contamination, notably in police vehicles. The present study aimed to explore the level of iGSR contamination in police vehicles from the Zagreb County Police Administration (Croatia), considering particle types and their position in vehicles, and to identify associated risk factors. From December 2021 to April 2022, 65 of 86 police vehicles (margin of error: ±6% at a 95% confidence level) were sampled with GSR stubs on the drivers' seats, back seats, and backrests and analyzed using scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive x‐ray analysis (SEM/EDX). Characteristic particles were found in 63.1% of vehicles, 33.8% on the driver's seat, and 24.6% on the back seat/backrest. Indicative particles were found in 70.77% of vehicles, with a fairly even distribution. McNemar's chi‐square analysis showed no significant disparities in positive sample ratios across vehicle parts or particle types (p > 0.05). In total, 228 characteristic and 166 indicative GSR particles were identified, with no notable correlation among them (p = 0.346). Logistic regression analysis identified the transportation of individuals involved in firearms incidents as a statistically significant factor influencing the presence of characteristic particles (p = 0.030). The findings suggest a considerable prevalence of iGSR in the analyzed Police Administration unit, highlighting the need for careful contamination management in police operations to preserve evidence integrity, particularly in cases when individuals who used firearms had been transported in the vehicle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of gunshot residue (GSR) in a sample can provide valuable information in forensic investigations by associating a suspect with a shooting incident. However, in order to have confidence in the integrity of the results' interpretation, the possibility of contamination by secondary transfer of GSR occurring during the transportation of a person under custody in a police vehicle should be evaluated. In order to investigate police vehicles as a source for secondary transfer of GSR particles, a total of 51 samples were collected from the rear seats of random police vehicles and used to transport arrested individuals. Results indicated that the type of upholstery of the seats plays a main role in determining the potential for secondary GSR contamination. The potential chance of coming into contact with GSR particles in police vehicles is low. GSR contamination from police vehicles is, maybe, not of a major concern but should be taken into consideration mainly when very few characteristic GSR particles are found on an analyzed sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study developed multivariate law enforcement officer (LEO) body models for digital simulation of LEO accommodation in police cruiser cabs. Background: Anthropometrically accurate digital LEO body models, representing the United States LEOs, for computerized LEO cruiser interface simulations are lacking. Methods: Twenty body dimensions (with and without gear combined) of 756 male and 218 female LEOs were collected through a stratified national survey using a data collection trailer that traveled across the US. A multivariate Principal Component Analysis (PCA) approach was used to develop digital LEO body models. Results: Fifteen men and 15 women representing unique body size and shape composition of the LEO population were identified. A combined set of 24 male and female models (removal of 6 redundant models for which female and male models overlapped) is suggested. Conclusions: A set of 24 digital LEO body models in 3-dimensional form, along with their anthropometric measurements, were developed to facilitate LEO cruiser cab design. Application: Digital modeling software developers can use the models and their anthropometric data to build digital avatars for simulated evaluation of LEO cruiser cab configuration, console communication-equipment fitting, and cruiser ingress/egress access arrangement. LEO vehicle and equipment designers also can use eight key body dimensions (i.e., stature, buttock-popliteal length, eye height sitting, knee height sitting, shoulder-grip length, popliteal height, sitting height, and body weight) of the body models to recruit 24 human subjects to physically evaluate their vehicle prototypes for improved vehicle and equipment design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has observed how private security actors often draw upon the cultural and symbolic capital of the police in their everyday operations. This practice can range from issuing frontline private security officers with police-like uniforms and patrol cars to recruiting former senior police officers into highly visible corporate positions. Geographical variations in this dynamic are little understood, however. In this article, we identify and shed light upon one emergent pattern. In those countries where the police enjoy high levels of public trust and confidence, private security actors can be found openly and directly borrowing from the cultural and symbolic capital of this key state institution to enhance their status. By contrast, in those countries where the police are plagued by a poor reputation, these actors commonly display a far more ambiguous relationship with these forms of capital, working both through and against them, often at the same time. Focusing on the UK and Mexican cases, and drawing upon a combination of Bourdieusian frameworks, we argue that the key to understanding this pattern is the distinction between the objectified (non-human) cultural capital of the police (uniforms, vehicles, etc) and the embodied (human) cultural capital of the police (police officers themselves). While the former enjoys a symbolic value in the market for security which transcends variations in public trust and confidence in the police, the latter is far more intimtately connected to localised police traditions and practices, good or bad. This in turn leads to novel patterns in the global plural policing landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study investigated anthropometric changes of national law enforcement officers (LEOs) in 46 years, compared the differences between LEO data and civilian anthropometry, and identified the magnitude of differences in dimensions measured with gear versus semi-nude measurements. Background: The best available 46-year-old anthropometric dataset of LEOs has largely become outdated due to demographic changes. Additionally, anthropometric data of female LEOs and LEO measurements with gear are lacking. Method: Thirty-four traditional body dimensions and 15 with gear measurements of 756 male and 218 female LEOs were collected through a stratified national survey using a data collection trailer that traveled across the U.S. and the data were compared to the LEO anthropometric data from 1975 and existing civilian anthropometric databases. Results: LEO body size and shape have evolved over the past 46 years - an increase of 12.2 kg in body weight, 90 mm in chest circumference, and 120 mm in waist circumference for men. No previous data was available for comparison for females. Compared to civilians, both male and female LEOs have a larger upper body build. LEO gear added 91 mm in waist breadth for men and 120 mm for women, and 11 kg in weight for men and 9 kg for women. Conclusion: The study reveals that equipment design based on the existing civilian datasets or 46-year-old LEO dataset would not accommodate the current LEO population. The new data fill this gap. Application: The differences reported above are important for LEO body gear, vehicle console, and vehicle ingress/egress design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a real‐world multi‐period orienteering problem arising in a large Italian company that needs to patrol an area in order to provide security services to a set of customers. Each customer requires different services on a weekly basis. Some services are mandatory, while others are optional. It might be impossible to perform all optional services, and each of them is assigned a score when performed. The challenge is to determine a set of routes, one per day, that maximizes a weighted sum of the total collected score and total working time, while meeting several operational constraints, including hard time windows, maximum riding time, minimum number of services performed, and minimum time between two consecutive visits for the same service at the same customer. To solve the problem, we propose an iterated local search that invokes at each iteration an inner variable neighborhood descent procedure. Computational tests performed on a large number of real‐world instances prove that the developed algorithm is very efficient, and finds in a short time solutions that are consistently better than those produced by a mathematical model, and those in use at the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When designing a patrol route, it is often necessary to pay more attention to locations with high crime rates. In this paper, we study a patrol routing problem for a fleet of patrol cars patrolling a region with a high-crime neighborhood (HCN) consisting of multiple hot spots. Considering the disorder and chaos in the HCN, at least one patrol car is required in the HCN at any given time during the patrol. We call this routing problem the hot spot coverage patrol problem (HSCPP). In the HSCPP, the importance of a patrol location is quantified by a prize, and the prize is collected if a patrol car visits the location. Our objective is to maximize the sum of prizes collected by the patrol cars, obeying all operational requirements. We propose mathematical formulations and develop several solution approaches for the HSCPP. The global approach consists of finding the routing solution for all patrol cars with a single integer programming (IP) formulation. The partition approach involves first partitioning the region geographically and solving the routing problem in each subregion with two IP formulations. Next, we strengthen the partition approach by developing a column generation (CG) approach in which the initial columns of the CG approach are the solutions generated from the partition approach. We conduct a detailed computational case study using instances based on real crime data from Montgomery County, Maryland. To further understand the computational tractability of our solution approaches, we also perform a sensitivity analysis using synthetic instances under various scenarios. History: Accepted by Erwin Pesch, Area Editor for Heuristic Search & Approximation Algorithms. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information (https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0192) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository (https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2022.0192). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]