February 2021

The Office of Community Oriented Policing (COPS) published a report based on a daylong forum held on December 10, 2019, to discuss the challenges of law enforcement recruitment and retention, specifically focused on these issues in relation to smaller, more rural law enforcement agencies. The 32 participants included police chiefs, captains, lieutenants, academic experts, researchers, and agency directors of state police standards. The forum’s small size allowed for a wide-ranging discussion which focused on the qualities which make an effective…

Hosted by the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), and funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), “Searching Without a Warrant” provides legal information on situations involving digital evidence in which the Fourth Amendment may not apply. Topics include the reasonable expectation of privacy in a digital context; private searches; “reasonable” government searches; and searches with consent. This is the third module in the training series, “Legal Concerns for Digital…

This report, Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2018 – Statistical Tables, examines the nature and frequency of US residents’ contact with police by residents’ demographic characteristics, types of contact, perceptions of police behaviors, and police threats or use of nonfatal force. It is the twelfth release in a series which began in 1996. The findings are based on data from the BJS’s 2018 Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS), a supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). To read the…

Sponsored by the Office of Community Oriented Policing, and in partnership with the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, “Targeted Violence Averted – College and University Case Studies” examines eight case studies of incidents in which planned violence targeting institutions of higher education was averted by the potential attackers’ peers, school administrators and other campus safety stakeholders including law enforcement. Each case includes a discussion of lessons learned by examining the potential attackers’ intentions and the actions of those…

This brief, published by the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the CNA Corporation, provides an accessible resource for law enforcement agencies and their stakeholders (e.g., crime analysts, policymakers and researchers) who are interested in learning more about the role of predictive analytics in police operations. Specifically, the brief summarizes the use of predictive analytics to inform policing operations; distinguishes between approaches to predictive analytics (person-based and place-based); highlights the emergence of machine learning algorithms as a preferred predictive analytics technique;…