U.S. citizens ages 18 and older who are registered to vote can cast ballots in local, state and federal elections. But states, which conduct and administer many elections, including federal elections, can also take away individuals’ right to vote for certain reasons.

A felony conviction, either in state or federal court, is one common way people lose the right to vote in the U.S. This process is commonly referred to as felony disenfranchisement. Because laws on felony disenfranchisement vary by state, there are a range of outcomes when it comes to the voting rights of those convicted of felonies. While nearly every state curtails voting for people convicted of felonies while they are incarcerated, not every felony conviction results in prison time.

Convictions can result from jury trials or plea deals, and the vast majority of criminal convictions in the U.S. are obtained by guilty plea, according to a 2023 report from the American Bar Association. Most people in jail for misdemeanor offenses or while awaiting court hearings can vote, but they face challenges, such as a lack of opportunities to register, according to reporting from Matt Vasilogambros of Stateline, a nonprofit news organization.

Felony disenfranchisement laws by state

“In 11 states, felons lose their voting rights indefinitely for some crimes, or require a governor’s pardon for voting rights to be restored, face an additional waiting period after completion of sentence (including parole and probation) or require additional action before voting rights can be restored,” according to research from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

• Those 11 strictest states are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming, according to the NCSL. Florida “disenfranchises more returning citizens than any other state,” write the authors of a January 2023 paper in the Vanderbilt Law Review.
• There are 14 states where people convicted of felonies lose the right to vote while incarcerated, as well as while completing probation or parole, according to the NCSL. These states are Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
• There are 23 states where people convicted of felonies lose the right to vote only while incarcerated, according to the NCSL, with the right automatically reinstated after time served. These states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington.       
• People convicted of felonies in the District of Columbia, Maine and Vermont do not lose their voting rights and can vote while incarcerated.
• In some states, people convicted of a felony can vote in the state where they live even if they wouldn’t be eligible in the state where they were convicted. Journalists covering this topic should consult legislation and reach out to legal experts to understand their state rules for restoring voting rights. For a quick look at restoring voting rights for people with criminal convictions, check this U.S. Department of Justice state-by-state guide.

Brief historical context of felony disenfranchisement

More than 4 million people in the U.S. are barred from voting because of a felony conviction, according to estimates from The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for “effective and humane responses to crime.” News outlets commonly cite reports and policy briefs from The Sentencing Project, and their data is used in academic research, including in one of the papers featured below.

Over the past quarter century, about half of state legislatures have moved to restore voting rights to those disenfranchised due to a felony conviction.

“Since 1997, 26 states and the District of Columbia have expanded voting rights to people living with felony convictions,” according to an October 2023 report from The Sentencing Project. “As a result, over 2 million Americans have regained the right to vote.”

State felony disenfranchisement laws arose during the post-Civil War era, when the Reconstruction Act of 1867 affirmed universal suffrage for all men.

“At that point, two interconnected trends combined to make disenfranchisement a major obstacle for newly enfranchised Black voters,” according to a 2017 report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “First, lawmakers — especially in the South — implemented a slew of criminal laws designed to target Black citizens. And nearly simultaneously, many states enacted broad disenfranchisement laws that revoked voting rights from anyone convicted of any felony.”

Mississippi is something of an outlier among the strictest states in that people convicted of felonies in federal court do not lose voting rights there, but people convicted of felonies in state courts for a range of crimes do lose the right to vote, according to the U.S. Department of Justice guide on voting rights for people with criminal convictions. The right to vote in Mississippi can only be restored by pardon or legislative action, according to the guide.

Rules for restoring voting rights in states that allow it can also vary. Even if the right is “automatically” reinstated, often individuals must still proactively re-register to vote, according to the NCSL.

Below, we have gathered and summarized six studies that explore demographic trends in felony disenfranchisement as well as how felony disenfranchisement affects political engagement and electoral democracy in U.S. states. The research roundup is followed by story ideas and interview questions for journalists.

The findings show …

• Public health outcomes tend to be worse in states where democratic processes are affected by policies such as felony disenfranchisement.
• People are more likely to support felony disenfranchisement when they express attitudes aligned with xenophobia and when they support policies that would restrict immigration and reduce government funding for public programs.
• Felony disenfranchisement is relatively higher where Black populations also exhibit higher rates of depressive symptoms.
• Restoring voting rights to people convicted of felonies is unlikely to meaningfully affect election results — but those who have their voting rights restored tend to feel they personally have more of a say in how their state governments operate.

Research roundup

Electoral Democracy and Working-Age Mortality
Jennifer Karas Montez, Kent Jason Cheng and Jacob Grumbach. The Milbank Quarterly, May 2023.

The study: The authors explore the relationship between the democratic health of a state and the physical health of people aged 25 to 64 in that state. They use the State Democracy Index, which measures the health of each state’s democratic processes based on 51 indicators, such as felony disenfranchisement, the availability of absentee voting and voter registration requirements. (The index was developed by Jacob Grumbach, an associate professor public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.) The authors of the paper also use mortality rates for working-age people from the National Center for Health Statistics.

The findings: Working-age mortality and electoral democratic health are strongly associated, the authors find. States that improve their electoral democracy rating from “moderate” to “high” could see their working-age mortality rates fall 3.2% for men and 2.7% for women, according to estimates from statistical models the authors developed. The authors further estimate that state improvements to electoral democracy are associated with lower drug poisoning deaths for men and women, along with deaths from infectious diseases and homicides.

In the authors’ words: “According to historians … real improvements in population health in the mid- to late 1800s in industrializing countries such as England came about largely because of increased voting power of the public and, partly as a consequence, the rise of government interventions such as sanitation and clean water systems to improve social conditions for everyone. The historical association between rising democratic functioning and declining mortality is the flip side of today’s association between declining democratic functioning and rising mortality.”

Exclusionary Citizenship: Public Punitiveness and Support for Voting Restrictions
Cecilia Chouhy, Peter Lehmann and Alexa Singer. Justice Quarterly, August 2022.

The study: The authors explore links between individual support for “anti-welfarism, anti-immigrant attitudes and symbolic racism,” and support for disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies. Symbolic racism refers to “an apathy toward racial inequalities and a rejection of efforts to mitigate them,” the authors write. Specifically, the authors analyze results from 7,453 adults who took the 2020 American National Election Survey, a public opinion poll conducted during the weeks before and after presidential elections, operated by collaboration of several major universities.

The findings: People are more likely to support felony disenfranchisement when they express attitudes aligned with xenophobia or symbolic racism. They also tend to support policies that would restrict immigration and reduce government funding for public programs such as social security, education and aid to people with low incomes.

Support for the death penalty, likewise, is associated with support for felony disenfranchisement, the authors find. This association is strongest among Republicans, compared with Democrats. Among Democrats, attitudes aligned with symbolic racism are more likely to lead to support for felony disenfranchisement, compared with Republicans and independents.

In the authors’ words: “Our findings suggest that racial animosities, as well as xenophobia and support for immigration restrictions, not only are correlated with attitudes favoring punitive criminal justice policies but also explain differences in public support for punitive and non-punitive forms of voting restrictions.”

Sick And Tired of Being Excluded: Structural Racism in Disenfranchisement As A Threat To Population Health Equity
Patricia Homan and Tyson Brown. Health Affairs, February 2022.

The study: Does felony disenfranchisement affect health during middle and later life? The authors seek to shed light on this question. They use data from The Sentencing Project and the U.S. Census Bureau to assess whether Black people in each state are over- or under-represented among those disenfranchised due to felony convictions. Then, they compare that information with results from the Health and Retirement Study from the University of Michigan, a nationally representative survey of adults over age 51 that is “the most widely used dataset for studying health and well-being in later life,” the authors write. The datasets are from 2016, the most recent available.

“This study focused on Black and White people because they have the highest and lowest rates of disenfranchisement, respectively,” the authors explain in the paper. The final analysis excludes 15 states that have relatively small populations of Black people. The 35 states included account for 92% of the U.S. white population and 99% of the Black population, the authors write.

The findings: During the year studied, Black people were proportionally disenfranchised at a higher rate than white people in all 35 states, but particularly in states in the North, Mountain West and West. States in the South tended to have lower rates of proportional Black disenfranchisement. The authors find that felony disenfranchisement is relatively higher in states where older Black populations also exhibit higher rates of depressive symptoms and difficulty performing everyday tasks, such as using a telephone, shopping, bathing, dressing and getting in and out of bed. There was no association found between disenfranchisement among Black people and these health outcomes among white people.

In the authors’ words: “Consistent with the growing recognition that social policies are health policies, enacting laws to dismantle racialized felony disenfranchisement would likely improve the health of Black people and make progress toward achieving health equity.”

How Often do People Vote While Incarcerated? Evidence from Maine and Vermont
Ariel White and Avery Nguyen. The Journal of Politics, January 2022.

The study: The authors begin with data from the 2018 elections across 17 states that disenfranchise people while they are incarcerated for felony offenses and explore what the turnout rates would have to have been for those individuals to swing elections if they were granted the right to vote while incarcerated. The highest was Massachusetts, where the closest race in 2018 was decided by 654,161 votes — if the 8,870 people in that state who were disenfranchised due to felony incarcerations had been able to vote, they would have had to vote at a rate of 8,090%, an impossibility, and all would have had to have voted against the winning candidate. The lowest was Nevada, where those incarcerated for felonies would have had to vote at a rate of 36%, and all against the winning candidate, to swing the closest election held there that year.

The authors note that “studies of people who have regained their right to vote after incarceration find that they participate at much lower rates than other votes,” and then turn to whether the question of whether people incarcerated for felonies vote in the two states, Maine and Vermont, where they are never disenfranchised. They use prison records and state voter files to explore this question.

The findings: About one-in-three people serving time in Vermont for felony crimes were registered to vote during the 2018 election, while 8% of all people incarcerated for felonies voted. Similarly, in Maine, about one-third of those incarcerated for felony crimes were registered in 2018, while around 6% of people incarcerated for felonies cast ballots.

In the authors’ words: “This conclusion — that from-prison voter turnout is low even in Vermont and Maine and would be unlikely to affect state elections elsewhere — does not imply that we think states should avoid such policies. Rather, we suggest that policy makers should consider moral arguments rather than casual predictions about how these laws might change elections. People have made moral claims both for and against re-enfranchising people with felony convictions, highlighting ideas about paying one’s debt to society, the racist history of disfranchisement laws, and the meaning of citizenship. Our findings suggest that such normative debates are at least as relevant as the possibility of imprisoned voters changing election outcomes.”

Neighborhoods and Felony Disenfranchisement: The Case of New York City
Kevin Morris. Urban Affairs Review, September 2021.

The study: Morris explores whether voter turnout rates by neighborhood during the 2017 New York City mayoral election are linked to the proportion of people disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, by neighborhood. In particular, Morris identifies “lost voters,” which he defines as people with a history of voting before their disenfranchisement due to felony conviction. The data Morris analyzes includes felony incarceration and parole records since 1990, which he obtained via public records request from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. Morris also uses a snapshot of publicly available, statewide voter data from April 2018, which includes whether individuals voted in the past as well as those who lost eligibility and were removed from the active voter file. He identifies 2,518 “lost voters” during the 2017 election.

The findings: Neighborhoods with lost voters also had lower average turnout rates in the 2017 election than the overall average neighborhood. In addition, neighborhoods without a lost voter during the 2016 general election that then lost at least one voter by 2017 also had lower turnout rates.

Morris identifies clear demographic differences between neighborhoods with lost voters and those without. The median income for a neighborhood with lost voters was $47,806, on average, compared with $65,495 in the overall average neighborhood. The percentage of Black people in neighborhoods with lost voters was 41%, on average, compared with the overall average of 22%. The percentage of Latino people in neighborhoods with lost voters was also higher than the overall average — 36% to 29%. Registered Democrats made up 77% of the electorate in neighborhoods with lost voters, on average, compared with an overall average of 68%.

In the author’s words: “Individuals who live in neighborhoods where police activity is relatively limited may interpret the incarceration of a neighbor as a largely individual phenomenon … In the neighborhoods where policing is most prevalent — often, lower-income Black communities — the incarceration of a neighbor might not be interpreted so individualistically. It may, rather, be interpreted as another reminder of the government’s unfairness. If a would-be voter finds herself soured on political participation because of her neighbor’s incarceration, she may be less likely to cast a ballot.”

Restoring Voting Rights: Evidence that Reversing Felony Disenfranchisement Increases Political Efficacy
Victoria Shineman. Policy Studies, December 2019.

The study: Shineman explores what happens to the political efficacy of people who have been convicted of felonies and disenfranchised after their right to vote is then restored or made eligible to be restored. Political efficacy refers to “the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process,” according to foundational political science research from the mid-1950s.

Shineman conducted a survey of people with felony convictions eligible to have their voting rights restored, before and after the 2017 statewide elections in Virginia. In 2016, an executive gubernatorial order and subsequent court ruling allowed people convicted of felonies in Virginia to have their voting rights restored, one at a time, by executive order. By the 2017 election, more than 150,000 people had their right to vote restored, according to the paper.

Those who had their voting rights restored were notified by mail at their last known residence. But people convicted of felonies are “a particularly transient population,” Shineman writes, meaning many of those now able to vote did not know it.

Shineman convened a panel of 98 people convicted of felonies, divided into three groups, to assess their political efficacy before and after the 2017 election cycle. The first group was told the state sought to restore voting rights to those convicted of felonies, and Shineman offered to look up their registration status. The second group received the same treatment, plus they were told about the upcoming election, how to register and where to vote. The third was a placebo group that was encouraged to engage in civic activity by volunteering in their neighborhoods, but not told that they could potentially register to vote, or about the election. Participants were surveyed about their feelings of political efficacy before and after the 2017 election cycle.

The findings: Among participants in the first two groups, about 21% learned from Shineman that their right to vote had been restored. Shineman notes that the sample size is small, which somewhat limits the strength of the results. With that caveat in mind, the treatment groups exhibited higher rates of political efficacy than the placebo group. For example, about 90% of people in those groups agreed with the statement “my vote makes a difference,” compared with 73% in the placebo group. Some 81% of participants in the treatment groups said they felt qualified to serve in a jury, compared with 76% of those in the placebo group. And 68% of the treatment participants said they “feel politically empowered,” compared with 57% of the placebo group.

In the author’s words: “Regardless as to whether citizens choose to exercise their voting rights, the act of restoring rights alone causes citizens to feel more empowered, more capable, and to be more likely to seek out opportunities for participatory engagement in the future.”

Suggested story ideas and interview questions

• When telling the stories of people affected by felony disenfranchisement, including family members and community members, delve into the consequences of losing the right to vote. Try to move from abstract (“losing the right to vote”) to concrete effects, such as financial, physical health and mental health outcomes.
• If there are local conflicts between people advocating for and against felony disenfranchisement, use research to inform or question each side’s arguments.
• Use census data and information from organizations like The Sentencing Project to report local or statewide demographic differences in felony disenfranchisement. Who is the practice disproportionately affecting?

The post Felony disenfranchisement in the US: An explainer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Last June, video of white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd, a Black man, went viral on social media. Uprisings took hold across hundreds of U.S. cities, and activist calls to “defund the police” went mainstream.

For some, “defund the police” is a movement, a stepping stone toward abolishing police departments entirely.

For others, the idea of defunding the police is limited to simply restricting money for military-style equipment.

For many, the definition lies in the middle — there should be police, but their role in communities should be limited to crime prevention. The idea goes that service agencies other than police could and should respond to non-violent calls related to mental health, housing and other issues. Berkeley, California has even moved to create a separate department to handle routine traffic violations.

Here, we explore what “defund the police” means to leading criminologists, community organizers and legal scholars; recent academic research on whether more police presence reduces crime; and what the future of policing in America might look like.

The national conversation on ‘defund’ is ongoing

CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell asked Joe Biden whether he supported defunding the police on June 9, 2020.

“No, I don’t support defunding the police,” the then-presidential candidate said. “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness and, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”

Nearly two dozen cities have since taken steps to reduce police funding or redirect funds toward other services — though the 50 largest U.S. cities slightly increased their law enforcement spending as a percentage of their combined 2021 budgets.

As some cities recalibrate police spending, “defund the police” remains relevant, and contentious, in the national conversation.

Earlier this week on “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace asked U.S. Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana why he and other Republicans voted against a COVID-19 relief package that directed billions toward community programs and policing, including hiring more officers.

Wallace asked, “Can’t you make the argument that it’s you and Republicans who are defunding the police?”

Banks replied, “Not at all, Chris.” After some back-and-forth with Wallace, Banks pivoted to political rivals:

“When Rep. [Ilhan] Omar says that policing is rooted in evil and [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi compares police officers to Nazi storm troopers, it makes it very difficult for police departments around the country to recruit people to become police officers.”

In July 2020, in response to President Donald Trump sending camouflaged and heavily armed federal law enforcement to Portland, Oregon, to arrest protesters and protect federal property, Pelosi tweeted, “Unidentified storm troopers. Unmarked cars. Kidnapping protesters and causing severe injuries in response to graffiti.”

It’s unclear whether Omar has described a specific law enforcement department or police generally as “evil.”

But she has called the Minneapolis Police Department a “cancer” and “rotten to the root.”

Different interpretations of ‘defund’

“Defund the police” is something of a Rorschach inkblot test — people bring their own interpretations to the phrase.

“‘Defund the police’ means reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality,” writes University of Maryland sociologist Rashawn Ray in a June 2020 Brookings Institution blog post. “That’s it. It’s that simple.”

Around the same time as Ray’s writing, activist and educator Mariame Kaba wrote a New York Times opinion essay titled, “Yes, we mean literally abolish the police.”

“We are not abandoning our communities to violence,” Kaba writes. “We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.”

Criminologist Brooklynn Hitchens, an incoming assistant professor at the University of Maryland, put it like this: “I do feel police are deeply corrupt and troubled and I don’t know how to work within a system that is that corrupt,” she says. “But, at its core, ‘defund’ the police is about reallocation of funds to more social service-based agencies, whether it’s housing or mental health.”

Peter Moskos, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, questions why money for expanding social services should come from police coffers.

“I’m all for funding mental health issues and homeless issues, but the idea that it has to come from the 5% of city budgets that goes to law enforcement is absurd,” he says.

Seth Stoughton, an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina, sees “defund” as shorthand for more social service investment, as well as reexamining what law enforcement means in America.

“Homelessness, poverty, substance abuse — we’ve criminalized a range of human behaviors and we’ve relied on the police to be the social service agency not just of first resort, but sometimes our only social service agency that deals with these issues,” he says. “So what I think when I hear ‘defund the police’ tends to be, ‘Reduce the need for police to respond to some of these social issues by investing in a more robust overarching social service infrastructure.’”

Violent crime is rising

As an array of American voices rose around “defund the police,” so did violent crime. Homicide rates increased 30% in 2020 in 34 large U.S. cities, according to the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice, a non-governmental coalition of 14 current and former police chiefs, elected leaders and community advocates.

Criminologists hesitate to point to a single factor to explain rising homicide rates. 2020 was a unique year, considering the pandemic, racial justice protests, more gun purchases, widespread layoffs, school and office closures, and a hotly contested presidential election.

Last week, the White House announced a new strategy to address violent crime. At a news conference, Biden struck a holistic tone, with more, not less, federal funding directed toward policing. Biden stressed the $350 billion pool, part of the American Rescue Plan, available to state and local governments to hire more police.

The White House will also work with 16 cities, including Minneapolis and St. Paul, on community violence intervention programs. Violence intervention programs usually rely on trusted community members to mediate conflicts before they become physical and to connect people to social services. State and local governments can also use the federal money to help young people find summer jobs. Studies published in Science have linked community engagement and summer jobs to reduced violence.

Cities don’t usually bust their budgets on police

Despite calls to defund the police, policing does not usually comprise a huge portion of municipal spending. Since the 1970s, state and local governments combined have spent about 4% of their annual budgets on policing, while overall crime rates have fallen since the 1990s.

Most police funding in big cities goes to compensate officers and other personnel. Local governments spend about 6% of their budgets on police, compared with about 1% of state budgets, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank.

“I’m a tax-and-spend Democrat,” says Moskos, a former Baltimore city police officer. “I want other programs to be funded more. But what does that have to do with policing?”

He notes that city spending on police can vary widely. Typically, according to Moskos, whether a city spends a large percentage of its budget on police is related to whether the city also pays for education. Cities direct a bigger percentage of their budgets to policing if the county or some other entity pays for schools. By far the largest share — 40% — of local spending goes toward education, according to the Urban Institute analysis.

Still, Moskos says, the point remains that police spending often represents a small portion of city budgets and money for social services could be found elsewhere.

“Law enforcement is 3% to 5% of the spending that happens in a city — that’s not including federal money,” he says. “So why not fund those things from the other 95%? Or raise taxes. ‘Defund’ is inherently anti-policing at its core. I don’t understand how that is going to make policing better.”

A range of policing futures

Law professors Stephen Rushin and Roger Michalski, writing in the Florida Law Review in 2020, suggest that widespread defunding of police departments “could increase crime rates, hamper efforts to control officer misconduct, and reduce officer safety.”

Rushin and Michalski take “defund” at face value, meaning police budget cuts. Instead of defunding police departments, they propose states redistribute policing funds equitably to localities, including money for officer training and accountability efforts.

“Just as some state legislatures have passed revenue-sharing initiatives designed to equalize the availability of public goods such as education, so, too, should states act to equalize the funding of local police departments according to need,” they write.

In contrast to a redistributive funding framework, Ohio State University law professor Amna Akbar argues in a December 2020 California Law Review article that scholars need to take seriously activist calls for abolishing the police. Akbar writes:

“Abolitionist demands like ‘defund the police’ remind us that if we are interested in building a more just world, we cannot wage our battles simply on the terrain of rights, litigation, rule of law, or administrative innovation. We must consider the historical, material, and ideological dimensions of our demands and our strategies. We must examine where we invest money and what kind of infrastructure we build for collective life. We must investigate the ideas that motivate and justify things as they are. We must appraise who has what resources, for what end, and why. We have to understand how such profound inequity came to be, why it persists, and what needs to be redressed to create the equitable society we aspire to but have not yet realized. We have to ask: If police and prisons are the stuff of structural violence, what are the elements of structural flourishing, and what are the strategies to build them?”

Some prominent law enforcement professionals have indicated an openness for shifting police responsibilities away from non-criminal situations.

“The police would be very happy to get rid of responsibilities which were forced upon them in the first place,” former New York City police commissioner and former Los Angeles police chief Bill Bratton told The Crime Report earlier this month. “We created the homeless problem when we closed down mental institutions back in the 1970s. But there was no [follow-up] funding for the homeless.”

Bratton added: “If you take that responsibility entirely away from the police — who work 24 hours a day — you’re going to have to create a huge budget in other agencies needed to staff these functions 24 hours a day. I would suggest, you know, as we go forward with these efforts, we’re going to find the police are like weaving a garment, that we are going to be a central thread in that garment, no matter who they give the responsibility to.”

University of Arkansas criminologist Jordan Blair Woods, in a forthcoming Stanford Law Review article, suggests redirecting another core function away from police: traffic enforcement.

“A major obstacle to achieving structural police reform in this important moment for policing is the conventional wisdom that a robust police force is needed to enforce traffic laws,” Woods writes. “This obstacle is especially problematic given that traffic policing is a persistent source of race- and class-based injustice.”

A handful of cities in recent years have proposed divesting traffic stops from policing. Last July, lawmakers in Berkeley approved a new traffic enforcement department separate from the police department.

Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey in a June 2020 Washington Post essay recalled traveling to Western Australia in 2017 to observe the work of the Nyoongar Patrol, a government-funded patrol made up of community members:

“I watched them break up a fight between two young people before the police were called. At the end of the night, I saw them make calls to find a safe place to sleep for a woman who was worried that she would be at risk if she went home. I observed from the periphery, and I was still exhausted by the end of the shift. It is hard, stressful work to spend time in public spaces, making sure everyone feels safe. But it works better if those taking on this task are motivated by genuine concern for their neighbors.”

Police presence and crime reduction

No matter what policing looks like in America’s cities and counties in the coming years, there is evidence that more police presence can reduce crime.

A March 2021 paper in The Review of Economics and Statistics examines what happened when patrol cars in Dallas were called away from their usual beats during 2009. The author, Tel Aviv University economist Sarit Weisburd, associates a 10% decrease in Dallas police car patrols away from their beats with a 7% increase in crime.

“While the allocation of officers to beats may be driven by the demands of providing fast response times, in reality, the presence of these cars reduces the probability of crime,” Weisburd writes.

A 2019 meta-analysis published in Campbell Systematic Reviews associates hot-spot policing with lower crime rates. Hot spot policing can take several forms, but generally it means assigning more police to high-crime areas, more community engagement and more traffic enforcement.

The authors did not generally observe results indicating crime spilled into areas around hot spots. There were instances, such as a hot spot program in Mesa, Arizona from August 2008 to March 2009, where crime displacement happened.

Meanwhile, research published in September 2017 in Nature Human Behaviour found that a certain type of proactive policing could increase crime. Specifically, aggressive policing of low-level offenses — the “broken windows” method Bratton helped popularize in New York City in the 1990s. “Broken windows” supposes that having police focus on eradicating visible disorder, like panhandling, loitering and broken windows, can reduce major crime.

Amid a labor dispute in 2014 between New York City police unions and Mayor Bill de Blasio, officers held a work slowdown for nearly two months. During the slowdown, “broken-window” policing declined — and so did complaints of major crimes, like burglary, assault and grand larceny, the authors find.

Hitchens, the University of Maryland criminologist, thinks spillover is likely when police flood a neighborhood experiencing high crime.

“The people selling drugs will move to a different block,” she says. “Sometimes [police] will be hyper-focused on getting people off the street corner. But all of those are Band-Aids. It can have a temporary reduction in violent crime but it doesn’t reduce it long term, probably for a lot of reasons. A lot of those efforts are short lived. There’s no stability or long-term plan, and they’re not addressing the root causes.”

Her view is based on her research experience, including interviewing street-identified Black men and women in Wilmington, Delaware on their encounters with law enforcement. Hitchens and her co-authors explain what “street-identified” means in their 2017 Sociological Forum paper drawn from those interviews:

“Criminal involvement as a way of life is a ‘site of resilience’ and form of coping with extreme economic poverty. ‘Street life,’ ‘the streets,’ or a ‘street’ identity is phenomenological language used by persons active in crime as an ideology centered on personal, social, and economic survival.”

Hitchens adds that Black Americans “do want police generally.” One-third of Black respondents from a nationally representative YouGov poll taken in mid-June 2020 expressed no trust in the police as an institution. Black respondents were split on whether there should be “more cops on the street,” while two-thirds indicated racial bias in policing should be addressed “by reforming the existing system.”

A nationally representative USA Today/Ipsos poll of 1,165 adults conducted online in March 2021 found 28% of Black respondents supported “defunding the police” while 37% were against the idea. When asked whether police should be abolished, 51% of Black respondents said no, compared with 22% in support.

“Just like your average middle-class white family, they want their families to be protected and sit out on their porch and drink a cup of coffee without experiencing harassment from police or having someone come up and ask for drugs,” Hitchens says. “They want to feel safe. What they do not want is the abrasive and abusive treatment.”

For Hitchens, who is currently conducting a study of how Black residents in Baltimore view police and the “defund” movement, there is at least one group of people consistently left out of the “defund” conversation: street-identified, formerly incarcerated individuals.

She says, “Any time you bring those people to the table — I have seen time and time again — when they’ve had a chance to voice their thoughts, they not only have fresh ideas, but who is better-versed to work on a problem than those who are most affected?”

The case of Camden, New Jersey

Police budgets sometimes shrink after recessions, as jobs disappear, tax dollars dwindle and federal funding is redirected. The Marshall Project reported in June 2020 that community trust eroded and there were more complaints about officer use of force when police budgets were cut in Memphis and Chicago after the Great Recession.

But, as The Marshall Project notes, there is at least one fundamental difference between recessionary reductions and the “defund” discussion. Local police budget cuts due to waning financial resources seek the survival of the force. Calls to defund the police over the past year are aimed at rethinking policing entirely.

Camden, New Jersey, often comes up as an example of a city that reframed its approach to policing and reduced crime. It also spent more to do so.

Camden disbanded its police force in 2013 after one of the city’s most violent years on record. Camden County took over and in May 2013 formed a new department, the Camden County Police Department, to patrol the city.

CCPD instituted community-based policing tactics along with new technology, such as a video observation platform covering a six-block radius.

Overall crime per 100,000 Camdenites decreased by more than half from 2012 to 2020, according to CCPD data, while the number of shooting homicides fell by 68%.

“Camden got more money,” Moskos says. “More money is not a panacea, but you’re not going to get better for less money. That’s my issue with ‘defund.’ It makes policing worse. It is that simple. The people who generally want to abolish police think police don’t prevent crime.”

Research published in late 2019 in Preventive Medicine Reports also associates the new policing tactics in Camden with lower rates of gunshot patients at a major regional trauma center. On average, there were 34 gunshot patients treated every three months before the policing changes, and 26 quarterly gunshot patients afterward.

“The ways in which police there actively engaged with the community worked,” says Hitchens. “Crime did go down in the city. But Camden is still a very poor and distressed community. So the root causes that increase crime are still there.”

She adds: “As a country, we are very punitive. But if you get at the root causes of crime — poverty, poor schools, poor housing — attacking it from that angle has been demonstrated time and time again as an effective way to reduce crime.”

Warrior or guardian?

One way for communities and police departments to rethink policing in America is to pursue a cultural shift of what it means to be an officer on patrol.

Stoughton, the University of South Carolina law professor, has for years advocated that police should think of themselves first as guardians, not as warriors. He wrote “Principled Policing: Warrior Cops and Guardian Officers,” published in October 2016 in the Wake Forest Law Review.

This philosophical shift is perhaps most critical for beat cops, says Stoughton, because beat cops often represent the primary interaction community members have with law enforcement.

Stoughton himself served as a beat cop in Tallahassee for five years in the early 2000s.

It’s about an individual officer’s default mindset, Stoughton explains. Are they a warrior? Or a guardian?

Here’s how he puts it:

“What is their job supposed to be — are they primarily there to kick ass and take names? Or to pull people over and get a bunch of citations written? Or, are they there to improve quality of life? Are they there to advance public safety? In other words, are they there to identify and deal with an enemy, or are they there in service to the community?”

There are two key elements to Stoughton’s questions. The first is that an officer being a warrior or a guardian is not an either-or proposition — it’s not a dichotomy. An officer will have to be a warrior sometimes — in an active shooter situation, for example — while reverting to a guardian mindset day-to-day. Many officers spend the bulk of their time responding to non-criminal calls and traffic violations.

“The point is that officers need to be more than just warriors,” Stoughton says. “If that’s all an officer is capable of, they aren’t going to be a very good officer. Being a warrior is a small part of what officers need to bring to the job. The overarching part of what they need to bring to the job is this approach of guardianship — a service-oriented mentality.”

Recent preliminary research suggests the race and ethnicity of patrol officers could make a difference as to whether they are open to thinking of themselves first as guardians. An online, non-representative pilot survey of 882 patrol officers from around the country, published in January 2021 in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, finds officers overall receptive to both the guardian and warrior mindset, with Hispanic officers “more supportive of this hybrid style of policing than White officers.”

(Response rates were too low for officers of other races and ethnicities to draw insight on whether they would be open to a guardian-first policing framework.)

The metaphor of guardian versus warrior isn’t just academic — it’s practical too, Stoughton says. Day-to-day policing can be mundane, but situations can change quickly.

“We use metaphor to communicate values,” Stoughton says. “When you don’t have clear guidance as to how to make a decision in a particular circumstance, you fall back on your values and principles.”

Stoughton learned the guardian mentality firsthand while patrolling Tallahassee, even if the word “guardian” wasn’t used at the time, and even if he didn’t yet understand it.

He particularly recalls an arrest warrant issued one evening around 11 p.m. Stoughton’s lieutenant told officers to wait to execute the warrant — it wouldn’t be a good look for the department to arrest a community member in the middle of the night.

“I remember thinking at the time, ‘That’s bullshit. This is a legal process. We should be allowed to do it,’” Stoughton says. “In retrospect, I think the lieutenant was exactly right. We don’t want to give the impression that we exist to knock down people’s doors late at night and tear them away from their families.”

He adds: “When and how we execute an arrest is as important as the fact of doing it.”

Further reading

Traffic without the Police
Jordan Blair Woods. Stanford Law Review, forthcoming.

Police Presence, Rapid Response Rates, and Crime Prevention
Sarit Weisburd. The Review of Economics and Statistics, March 2021.

Police Reform through a Power Lens
Jocelyn Simonson. The Yale Law Journal, March 2021.

A Model for Defunding: An Evidence-Based Statute for Behavioral Health Crisis Response
Taleed El-Sabawi and Jennifer Carroll. Elon University Law Legal Studies Research Paper, February 2021.

Examining Guardian and Warrior Orientations across Racial and Ethnic Lines
Stacey Clifton, Jose Torres and James Hawdon. Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, January 2021.

An Abolitionist Horizon for (Police) Reform
Amna Akbar. California Law Review, December 2020.

Novel Policing Techniques Decrease Gun Violence and the Cost to the Healthcare System
Justin Frisby, et. al. Preventive Medicine Reports, December 2019.

“Why I Can’t Stand Out in Front of My House?” Street-Identified Black Youth and Young Adult’s Negative Encounters with Police
Yasser Arafat Payne, Brooklynn Hitchens and Darryl Chambers. Sociological Forum, December 2017.

Evidence that Curtailing Proactive Policing Can Reduce Major Crime
Christopher Sullivan and Zachary O’Keeffe. Nature Human Behaviour, September 2017.

Organizational Decline and Fiscal Distress in Municipal Police Agencies
Matthew Giblin and Jeffrey Nowacki. Police Quarterly, November 2017.

Principled Policing: Warrior Cops and Guardian Officers
Seth Stoughton. Wake Forest Law Review, October 2016.

The post ‘Defund the police’: What it means and what the research says on whether more police presence reduces crime appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Annually, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy awards the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting to a stellar investigative report that has had a direct impact on government, politics and policy at the national, state or local levels. Six reporting teams were chosen as finalists for the 2021 prize, which carries a $10,000 award for finalists and $25,000 for the winner. The Journalist’s Resource is interviewing many of the finalists and offering a behind-the-scenes look at the processes, tools and legwork it takes to create an important piece of investigative journalism. The main article discussed here, “For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection,” was the first in a four-part Reuters investigation on a complex legal doctrine called qualified immunity, which often protects police from civil lawsuits. The Journalist’s Resource is a project of the Shorenstein Center, but was not involved in judging the Goldsmith Prize. The winner of the $25,000 will be announced on April 13.

For two years, a team of Reuters reporters built and analyzed a first-of-its kind database that showed appellate courts increasingly granting police immunity from civil rights lawsuits. The cases hinged on a legal doctrine called qualified immunity, which can shield police from those lawsuits.

But the reporters didn’t solely rely on the hard numbers, painstakingly compiled to show the consequences the legal doctrine was having on regular people’s lives — they used video, too. In fact, video doesn’t just bolster the investigation. Video helps lead the report, “For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection,” by Andrew Chung, Lawrence Hurley, Jackie Botts, Andrea Januta and Guillermo Gomez.

The story opens:

“The U.S. high court’s continual refinement of an obscure legal doctrine has made it harder to hold police accountable when accused of using excessive force.”

Behind those words, a static image of a man standing in a hallway. Keep scrolling:

“Sick with pneumonia, agitated and confused, Johnny Leija refused to return to his hospital room.”

The static image of Leija begins to move. He’s wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, walking down a corridor in a hospital in Madill, Oklahoma. A few police officers follow close behind. A nurse had called them to help give Leija an injection to calm down.

“Moments later, with three police officers pinning him on the floor, Leija was dead at age 34.”

We see three officers bring Leija down. With that, the lead — and video — end.

The Leija video and others throughout the article are unsparing. In another clip, an officer shoots Laszlo Latits dead in a car in Ferndale, Michigan, as Latits tries to back away. In yet another, officers shoot and kill Gerrit Vos as he leaves a store in Newport Beach, California. Vos was experiencing a mental health crisis.

Their deaths came after police used what federal courts found was excessive force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure by government authorities. A fourth video shows an officer slamming David Becker to the ground in Heber City, Utah. Becker suffered brain damage, according to Reuters. Aside from the videos, the Reuters story provides minimal detail on the Latits, Vos and Becker cases.

In those cases and hundreds others, qualified immunity protected police from lawsuits filed by individuals, or their relatives, alleging excessive force.

“Qualified immunity balances two important interests — the need to hold public officials accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly and the need to shield officials from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably,” U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority in Pearson v. Callahan, an important qualified immunity case the high court decided in 2009. The database the reporters compiled spans 529 federal appellate court opinions from 2005 to 2019, in which officers accused of excessive force raised a qualified immunity defense.

“As we were coding the cases we were looking to see if the court ruling cited any video or audio because we knew those cases would be good for a multimedia package,” says Hurley, a Reuters Supreme Court reporter.

Tip: Keep an eye out for information, such as audio and video files, that could be used in a multimedia presentation.

The reporters found appellate courts increasingly inclined to grant police immunity from civil rights lawsuits. From 2005 to 2007, those courts favored police in 44% of excessive force cases in which officers raised a qualified immunity defense. Yet from 2017 to 2019, that rate had increased to 57%. Here’s how the reporters explain the two-part test courts use to assess a qualified immunity defense:

“In part one, the court considers whether police used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. If yes, the court moves to part two of the test. If no, qualified immunity is immediately granted. Since 2009, the Supreme Court has allowed appellate courts to skip part one. Courts have increasingly chosen this option. In part two, the court determines whether police should have known their actions violated the Constitution because court precedent clearly established their conduct as unlawful. If yes, the case goes to trial. If no, qualified immunity is granted.”

The Pearson decision allows courts to skip the first part of the test. The reporters recall laboring over the language they used to explain the doctrine. The qualified immunity explanation was “probably the most heavily edited” section of the story, says Januta, a Reuters investigative and data reporter.

“We wanted this to be a story lawyers and judges would read, but also a story people who aren’t lawyers could read and understand,” Hurley says. “I think getting that balance right was important.”

Found in a dusty box: ‘It was just luck’

Leija died in 2011 after police pinned him to the hospital floor in Madill. The officers were not criminally charged. Leija’s mother, Erma Aldaba, filed a lawsuit alleging the officers had violated her son’s Fourth Amendment rights. The officers claimed qualified immunity. The 10^th Circuit court denied that claim.

But the suit hit a terminal roadblock in November 2015 when the Supreme Court told the lower court to reconsider its ruling. The high court, in a separate qualified immunity case, had narrowly defined part two of the two-part test: “clearly established precedent.” This meant that for a qualified immunity defense to fail, the actions between officer and civilian needed to be very similar to those from some prior case in which courts found police acted unlawfully.

The lower court reversed itself. Aldaba’s suit was over. Her lawyer told Reuters that Aldaba “had to live with the fact that at every stage, every judge that reviewed the case determined that there were constitutional violations that had occurred. Despite that, she still couldn’t have a trial.”

All that remained was the video evidence. The reporters obtained some videos they used in the article from courts. The videos, a mix of security footage and police dashcams, had been submitted as evidence.

But Chung got the Leija video in a slightly different way. In 2019, Aldaba’s lawyer mailed Chung a DVD with Leija’s video, which ultimately helped carry the story’s lead. The lawyer had found the DVD in a dusty box in the storage area of his office. Chung later went to the lawyer’s office in Oklahoma and gathered hundreds of pages of documents from the box.

“It was just luck that he still had that box,” recalls Chung, a Reuters Supreme Court reporter.

Tip: Remember that the internet doesn’t contain all information, and on-the-ground reporting will always be an important source for evidence, especially as pandemic restrictions lift.

From story genesis to data analysis

The Supreme Court in April 2017 declined to hear a qualified immunity appeal from Ricardo Salazar-Limon. He had been unarmed, shot in the back by a Houston police officer, and paralyzed in October 2010.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor favored taking up the case. She observed that the high court was much more likely to take up appeals from officers denied qualified immunity protection than from plaintiffs appealing qualified immunity rulings favoring police. Justice Alito countered with a narrower view based on the ambiguous facts of the case — namely, that the court had to decline the case because details of what happened that early October morning were unclear. He further stated that the Supreme Court might take up a case if a lower court didn’t apply a legal rule or concept at all, but that the high court almost never reviews cases alleging a lower court incorrectly applied settled law.

Chung, Hurley and editor Janet Roberts, for their part, wondered if they might be able to test Sotomayor’s assertion. After months of trial and error, with a small fraction of their time to devote to the story, they settled on building a database of cases that met three criteria:

1. Plaintiffs alleged police excessive force
2. Police mounted a qualified immunity defense
3. A federal appellate court judge offered a written opinion

While the database of federal appellate court qualified immunity cases served as the main source of analysis for their story, the reporters later expanded their data to include federal district courts in Texas, where police won qualified immunity appeals at a high rate, and California, where such appeals were less successful. That database of Texas and California qualified immunity cases — 435 in total — served as the backbone for the second story in the series, “Shot by cops, thwarted by judges and geography,” by Chung, Hurley, Januta, Botts and Jaimi Dowdell.

The reporters manually reviewed nearly 1,000 opinions for their final database of 529 appellate court opinions. For the Texas and California district court database, they used manual and computer analysis to winnow roughly 2,000 cases. Not every case made it to the final databases, for a variety of reasons. Some cases mentioned qualified immunity, but didn’t hinge on a qualified immunity defense. Others centered on qualified immunity claims from civil servants other than police officers.

In their spare time, when there wasn’t pressing news to cover, the reporters would read cases and fill in a spreadsheet with rulings and whether they fit their three-part criteria. They asked key questions: Did the court decide police had committed a civil rights violation? Did the force used against a civilian fall under clearly established precedent?

“We had a hunch, we had a hypothesis, that there was something to say here, something that no one else had ever looked at, something that is extraordinarily consequential on the ground,” Chung says. “That supplied the motivation to keep doing it.”

Tip: Actively record characteristics of your data. The Reuters reporters asked dozens of questions as they read each case, in order to accurately characterize and analyze them later.

An additional analysis of qualified immunity cases the Supreme Court did and did not accept ultimately supported Sotomayor’s assertion: “Over the past 15 years, the high court took up 12 appeals of qualified immunity decisions from police, but only three from plaintiffs, even though plaintiffs asked the court to review nearly as many cases as police did,” the reporters concluded.

Januta had to learn a programming language new to her, called R, to analyze the data extracted from the court cases. She knew a different programming language, but Botts, now an income inequality reporter with CalMatters, had started the Reuters analysis using R. Januta’s takeaway from the experience: Learning a new programming language might not be as daunting as it seems at first glance.

“If you have some programming skills, don’t be intimidated by learning a new programming language,” Januta says. “Once you have the foundation the best way to learn is to have a goal and a project and a task to work on.”

She adds: “Keep your eyes and ears open for when you hear anyone in government saying, ‘Well, we just don’t know, we don’t have that data.’ That’s an opportunity for you to go out and find it and create it yourself — that’s a real way to have a public service.”

Tip: Looking for a database that doesn’t exist? Build it yourself.

Two flavors of trust building

The first story in the series — “For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection” — opens with the moments before Leija died. It ends with the lawsuit brought by Aldaba, his mother, slipping away without the anchor of “clearly established precedent.”

While Aldaba’s lawyer was helpful in providing Chung the Leija video, the lawyer had lost touch with Aldaba herself. Chung finally tracked down Aldaba’s daughter, who worked at a bakery in a grocery store.

He called the bakery and left a message, and she called back. Chung recalls Aldaba’s daughter being reticent — but not Aldaba.

“Her mom was very eager to talk,” Chung says. “She thought it was a grave injustice that happened to her son, and she wanted the world to know about it.”

Tip: In addition to court opinions, depositions are a valuable source of detail, Hurley says. Depositions are sworn testimonies, often involving confrontational questioning of police officers and other witnesses.

Trust building with a key source took a different turn for the second story in the series, about regional disparities in qualified immunity defense outcomes, including between Texas and California. That story is carried by the journey of David Collie, shot in the back by a Fort Worth, Texas police officer in July 2016, in a case of mistaken identity.

It wasn’t easy for the reporters to persuade Collie to share his experience — after all, he had been traumatized. Collie, who was in his early-30s when the officer shot him, found himself paralyzed from the waist down, living in nursing homes since the shooting, and burdened with infections and depression.

Chung recalls roughly a dozen conversations with Collie, some late into the night, including two in-person visits before the story was published in August 2020. The goal was not to get Collie to go on the record, per se, but to reassure him that the reporters would tell his story in a fair and truthful way, with the public interest at heart.

“We wanted to makes sure we left the power in David’s hands, so that he was comfortable talking to us and trusting us,” Chung says, adding that once Collie decided he was ready to participate he “dove headlong into the project.”

Tip: Meet sources where they are, mentally and emotionally. Show potential on-the-record sources patience, empathy and honesty, particularly those who have experienced trauma.

The reporters were conscious of being fair to the police officers’ perspectives, too.

“Everyone understands police have difficult jobs,” Chung says.

During a trip to interview Aldaba, Chung stopped by the Marshall County sheriff’s office in Madill. An officer who had twice shocked Leija with a stun gun during the 2011 encounter happened to be working.

“Without any hesitation he sat down with me,” Chung says.

The officer, Steve Beebe, had regrets — he thought the encounter could have resolved differently if he and the other officers had known about Leija’s medical condition. He acknowledged that police need to be held accountable, but also said they shouldn’t be worried about being sued for doing their jobs.

“The last thing you want to do is end up with somebody dying,” the officer told Chung. Beebe, also a local Southern Baptist pastor, added he was “sad for the family. We all live in the same community.”

‘Sweat and tears’

The first story in the Reuters series was published May 8, 2020. George Floyd was killed May 25 while in Minneapolis police custody, sparking uprisings against police violence in dozens of cities and directing national media attention to the March 13 police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.

As Hurley points out, high-profile cases like Floyd’s and Taylor’s typically don’t get to the qualified immunity stage. Cases that attract national media attention are more likely to settle out of court.

On March 12, the city of Minneapolis agreed to pay George Floyd’s family $27 million to settle their civil lawsuit. Breonna Taylor’s family agreed to a $12 million settlement from the city of Louisville, announced September 15, 2020. Meanwhile, each year dozens of qualified immunity cases like Leija’s and Collie’s fail in court and fail to garner national coverage.

The Reuters series provided in-depth examination of a complex legal doctrine, and some of the lives affected by it, at the moment the Floyd and Taylor cases made many aware of qualified immunity for the first time. The reporters say their findings have been cited by dozens of other media outlets, in law review articles and by law professors teaching qualified immunity.

In the end, the success of the series came down to persistence.

“You do have to be committed to it,” Hurley says. “There’s a lot of sweat and tears that go into it before you come out the other side.”

Want learn more about qualified immunity? Check out our roundup of 4 data-driven analyses of thousands of qualified immunity lawsuits.

The post How they did it: Reuters reporters investigate qualified immunity in America appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

As we wind down the year, we’re counting down the most-read Journalist’s Resource posts of 2019 — articles and research roundups we published (or significantly updated and republished) in the past year.

After you revisit the year’s most popular posts, please think about the subjects you’d like us to cover in the future. You can reach out to us on Facebook, Twitter or via e-mail at Journalists_Resource@hks.harvard.edu. We’re looking forward to working with, informing and supporting you. We have a hunch 2020 is going to be a big news year.

Here are JR’s most-read posts of 2019:

#10. Should states ban religious exemptions for student vaccinations? Researchers weigh in

Denise-Marie Ordway highlighted three recent academic studies that suggest banning religious exemptions might not be the most effective way to improve childhood vaccination rates. In fact, the research indicates banning these exemptions could backfire.

#9. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour: What the research says

In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, the Journalist’s Resource team is combing through the Democratic presidential candidates’ platforms and reporting what the research says about their policy proposals. Clark Merrefield kicked off this series with this piece about the federal minimum wage.

#8. New economic research resurfaces debate about the link between legalized abortion and crime reduction

Merrefield highlighted new research by economists John Donohue and Steve Levitt, who find that legalized abortion following Roe v. Wade accounts for 45% of the decline in U.S. crime rates over the past three decades. (Some other economists are not convinced.)

#7. What Game of Thrones tells us about ourselves: A GoT research roundup

“Game of Thrones” isn’t just a cultural phenomenon — it’s an academic one too. Academics have analyzed GoT from many angles — race, history, politics, gender and power, and linguistics — to find out what a fictional show based on past events can tell us about our real present. Merrefield dug into recent GoT research.

#6. Black men 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police, new research estimates

A black man in the U.S. has an estimated 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police during his lifetime, according to a study published in August by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Merrefield explained the findings.

#5. Prince Harry in Afghanistan: Miguel Head shares the story of a historic media blackout

For 10 weeks in late 2007 and early 2008, hundreds of news organizations agreed to embargo a big story:  Prince Harry had been deployed to Helmand, Afghanistan, serving with the British Army. Miguel Head sat down with Carmen Nobel to share the inside story of how and why a cutthroat press kept a major secret about a beloved public figure.

#4: The health effects of screen time on children

Chloe Reichel’s research roundup looked at the effects of screen time on children’s health. The studies she included range from childhood to adolescence and focus on topics including sleep, developmental progress, depression and successful interventions to reduce screen time.

#3. What the research says about border walls

Border security remains a newsy topic. Ordway’s roundup of research focused on what border barriers are, why they have become popular, whether they actually help countries control their borders and how they affect the environment and local communities.

#2. Cutting through the clutter: What research says about tidying up

Early in 2019, thrift stores across the United States were inundated with donations in the wake of Netflix’s January 2019 release of “Tidying Up,” a series starring Marie Kondo, professional organizer. Is tidying really that beneficial to well-being? Reichel looked into the research on the benefits of decluttering.

#1. The four-day school week: Research behind the trend

To save money and help with teacher recruitment, a growing number of public schools across the United States are taking Fridays off. Ordway gathered research on the benefits and consequences of four-day school weeks.

The post Here are our 10 most-read posts of 2019 appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Editor’s note: On March 12, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy will award the 2019 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting to a stellar investigative report that has had a direct impact on government, politics and policy at the national, state or local levels. Seven reporting teams have been chosen as finalists for the 2019 prize, which carries a $10,000 award for finalists and $25,000 for the winner. This year, for the first time, Journalist’s Resource is publishing a series of interviews with the finalists, in the interest of giving a behind-the-scenes explanation of the process, tools, and legwork it takes to create an important piece of investigative journalism. Journalist’s Resource is a project of the Shorenstein Center, but had no involvement with or influence on the judging process for the Goldsmith Prize finalists or winner.

———-

In the investigative series, “Criminal Justice in Elkhart, Indiana,” two journalists uncovered serious abuses of power in the city’s police department — showing, for example, how the police chief promoted 18 supervisors with disciplinary records and bringing to light the fact that two officers who repeatedly punched a handcuffed man in the face received only a written reprimand.

The series demonstrates how the skillful use of public records — knowing which kinds of records exist, how to get them and what to do when government officials block or delay access — can help reporters spotlight problems and initiate change in a community. The yearlong investigation by Christian Sheckler, a public safety reporter at the South Bend Tribune, and Ken Armstrong, a senior reporter at ProPublica, led to the police chief’s resignation and prompted the mayor to seek an independent review of the department’s policies and practices.

Almost a year after the two Elkhart policemen were captured on video beating a handcuffed man in the face more than 10 times — a video that became public only after Sheckler and Armstrong began investigating — authorities charged the two officers with battery.

In early 2018, the two journalists already had begun looking into problems with the Indiana police department’s handling of criminal investigations when Sheckler heard that two officers were disciplined for excessive use of force during a separate incident. He decided to check it out. He asked to see the officers’ personnel files and for other records, including the police department’s video of the incident, which took place in a police station detention center.

As is often the case when requesting records, Sheckler said he was not sure what they would show. He knew, though, that reviewing different kinds of records connected to the same incident would help him get a fuller understanding of what happened and how it was handled by the city.

What Sheckler and Armstrong discovered in those records helped them demonstrate that some Elkhart officers were not being appropriately disciplined.

“If we hadn’t asked for that video, first of all, these two officers wouldn’t have been charged with battery for punching this handcuffed person because decisionmakers probably wouldn’t have been aware this happened,” Sheckler told Journalist’s Resource. “The public wouldn’t have been able to see exactly what had happened. There was a very, very strong reaction in the community about what the video showed.”

The investigative series was chosen recently as a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded annually by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which is where Journalist’s Resource is housed.

Armstrong and Sheckler were able to team up for this project thanks to a new program offered by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on investigative journalism. The South Bend Tribune applied for a spot in ProPublica’s inaugural Local Reporting Network. Of the 239 news organizations that applied, seven were selected in late 2017. The program provides newsrooms with significant assistance. Not only does ProPublica reimburse news organizations for a year of salary and benefits for each reporter who participates, ProPublica also volunteers its own people and resources to help out.

Sheckler, a journalist for about eight years, reported out stories from Elkhart while Armstrong, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has covered criminal justice issues for three decades, assisted from his home in Seattle.

The power of public records

The series was built largely on public records, allowing Sheckler and Armstrong to tell stories even when some of the people involved refused to be interviewed or speak on certain subjects. For this kind of journalism, Armstrong said it’s critical that reporters know the public records laws governing the various government agencies in their state, including how records requests must be written.

“In Indiana, you can’t just ask for a public official’s emails and say ‘Give me all emails that mention this or that term,’” Armstrong explained. “They set parameters in terms of how far back [you can acquire records] and what the question has to bore in on. They have a public access counselor in Indiana to appeal to if you feel you’ve been wrongly denied records. He [Sheckler] understood that and used it well.”

Not only did Sheckler seek help from Indiana’s public access counselor — a governor-appointed attorney who provides the public with advice and assistance accessing public information — but he and Armstrong also decided to report on the challenges they faced getting records. They encountered so many challenges that they wrote a whole article focusing on public officials’ attempts to delay, discourage and bar their access.

At one point, a judge issued orders blocking access to all police reports in three court files as well as exhibits shown to jurors and legal briefs that had been filed on appeal. Sheckler and Armstrong wrote in an article published in August 2018 that the orders “in effect, prevented reporters and the public from seeing evidence used to convict the defendants, as well as the arguments raised afterward about whether the trials had been just.”

Indiana’s public access counselor issued an opinion stating that the judge should have released the police reports and appellate briefs, the journalists reported. An administrator for the Indiana Supreme Court advised the judge that the exhibits used at trial should be public. Afterward, the judge released some, but not all of the documents the reporters sought.

The judge did not respond to a separate request to hear a taped recording of a trial held in 1997, which, under state law, is a public record. Sheckler and Armstrong were forced to find another way to get that information. They tracked down a court reporter and ordered a transcript made, for which the South Bend Tribune and ProPublica had to pay $1,000.

Armstrong said reporting about these challenges is a way to hold government agencies accountable while also making the public aware that records they should be able to easily obtain are sometimes withheld.

“I am a huge advocate of letting readers know about the difficulties getting records that the public is allowed to see,” he said. “I think that’s important. It speaks to an agency’s culture. It speaks to an agency’s practices. It is also important to let the public know why records are important to them.”

Tips for journalists

Sheckler and Armstrong offered these five tips to help journalists interested in developing or improving their investigative reporting skills:

1. Remember that the most useful public records might be audio and video recordings.

“Think of different types of records, different steps along the way where there might be a record made that is relevant,” Sheckler advised. As part of his investigation, he obtained the minutes of meetings held by the city’s civilian oversight board because he wanted to know more about how police officer misconduct is handled in Elkhart. During meetings of the board, the police chief typically explains what disciplinary action he intends to pursue for an officer and why.

Sheckler said the meeting minutes did not contain enough detail so he requested audio recordings. Surprisingly, he learned that the city kept recordings of this board’s meetings going back more than a decade. By listening to recordings of the meetings, Sheckler learned that the police chief had mischaracterized some officers’ behavior and left out key information when he sought the board’s approval for certain disciplinary actions.

2. If someone refuses an interview, look for records that tell his or her side of the story.

If a person will not or cannot give an interview, seek out records that show what they have said about a topic in their words — for example, complaint affidavits and transcripts of court depositions. Audio and video recordings can offer details about how people presented information that cannot be captured in writing.

“Our stories were very record-heavy and document-heavy,” Sheckler said. “There were instances where we were able to tell a pretty thorough story relying largely on various types of records and documents, even when some of the key characters didn’t want to talk to us and do interviews.”

3. Get experience covering multiple beats.

By covering different government agencies, a journalist can learn more about how different agencies work as well as how they maintain records and handle records requests. “I think it’s important to cover as many beats as you can when you’re a young reporter because you learn so much by covering a school board, by covering the department of health, by covering the police department and the courts,” Armstrong said. “The more you get grounded in process and how government works, that’s an invaluable education.”

4. Establish a relationship with public information officers.

Many government agencies have a dedicated person or office of people who handle requests for public records. Armstrong said it helps to speak to a public information officer on the phone to explain your request and then follow up with a written request that cites relevant laws and provisions and documents the date that you spoke to the public information officer by phone. When public information officers are helpful, thank them because you likely will need their help again in the future.

5. Keep an entitled state of mind.
   

Never apologize for asking for public records. “It’s a real mistake to assume you won’t get public records and apologize,” Armstrong said. “Assuming the record exists and assuming you’re entitled to it is an important approach in the beginning.”

Interested in the other Goldsmith Prize finalists? Read about how two journalists’ tenacity, language skills and cultural competency helped them investigate a teen labor trafficking scheme in Ohio. Looking for more reporting tips? Check out our list of 26 ways to find information on people on deadline.

The post How they did it: Public records helped reporters investigate police abuse of power appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

After the passage of California’s Proposition 47, which reduced criminal penalties for drug possession, felony drug arrest rates declined and racial disparities among these arrests decreased, according to new research in the American Journal of Public Health.

The study, led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, looked at all drug arrest data for the state between 2011 and 2016, totaling over 1 million arrests.

In 2014, voters approved Proposition 47, reclassifying the criminal offenses for possession of narcotics, controlled substances and concentrated cannabis from felonies to misdemeanors. A few other crimes, including petty theft and receiving stolen property, also received reclassifications as a result of the new law.

The change aimed to reduce excessive punishment and overcrowding in prisons. More broadly, reducing excessive punishment has spillover effects for those convicted of drug offenses, considering the repercussions associated with felony convictions. “The collateral consequences of felony drug convictions are severe,” the researchers add. “Impacts on immigration status and access to jobs, health benefits, housing, and financial support for higher education may exacerbate racial/ethnic disparities in health and social outcomes.”

Previously, as a result of the mid-1980s crackdown on the drug trade (commonly known as the “War on Drugs”), drug arrests skyrocketed, and people of color — and especially black people — were disproportionately affected, according to a study published in Justice Quarterly in 2015. The authors report that in 1980, drug arrests among black people compared with white people stood at a ratio of about 3 to 1. This increased to about 5.5 to 1 less than 10 years later.

A 2017 study in Demography adds further context: between 1980 and 2010, the percentage of black men who received a felony conviction rose from 13.3 to 33 percent. For the entire adult male population over the same date range, felony conviction rates also increased, albeit less dramatically, jumping from 5.3 percent to 12.8 percent.

In the American Journal of Public Health study, the researchers found that following the adoption of Proposition 47:

• Overall, the disparity in felony drug arrests between black and white populations decreased. In the first month after the proposition’s adoption, the disparity between the number of black and white felony drug arrests made per month decreased from 81 to 44 per 100,000.
• For all racial and ethnic groups, felony drug arrest rates continually decreased. In the first month after adoption, arrest rates among black people declined by 60 percent and arrest rates among white and Latino people declined by 69 percent. Over a year, the researchers estimate reductions of 66 percent, 76 percent and 74 percent among black, white and Latino people, respectively.
• Despite absolute declines in racial disparities, proportionally, black people experienced the smallest decline in felony drug arrest rates, so relative disparities persisted. The authors suggest this might be because Proposition 47 did not reclassify all felony drug offenses (e.g., sale) as misdemeanors. They explain that white people more commonly were arrested for possession, resulting in a large benefit for the group following the reclassification. On the other hand, black people had larger proportions of offenses that were not reclassified, such as selling drugs, and so they didn’t benefit as much from the change.

“Our findings suggest that reclassifying drug offenses to misdemeanors is an effective approach to decreasing felony arrests across racial/ethnic groups and absolute differences between Blacks and Whites,” the authors conclude.

According to an Urban Institute report, between 2010 and 2016, 24 states enacted policy reforms to reduce their prison populations, including Georgia, Kentucky and Arkansas.

The post California’s Prop 47 reduced felony drug arrest rates, racial disparities appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Opioid users referred for treatment by the criminal justice system were 10 times less likely to receive evidence-based treatments such as methadone than those referred by other sources.

The issue: Drug use and dependence are particularly common in populations involved with the criminal justice system. A 2017 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that between 2007 and 2009, approximately 58 percent of state prisoners depended on or abused drugs in the year prior to incarceration. In fact, many are in prison because of drug crimes, including possession.

Some entering the criminal justice system with drug dependencies will be referred to treatment. For opioid users, agonist therapies including methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone are evidence-based treatments for addiction. These medications activate opioid receptors in the brain, lessening symptoms of craving and withdrawal. But not all receive this treatment. A new study examines how often the criminal justice system refers adults to different types of drug-abuse treatments.

An academic study worth reading: “Only One in Twenty Justice-Referred Adults in Specialty Treatment for Opioid Use Receive Methadone or Buprenorphine,” published in Health Affairs, December 2017.

About the study: Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health analyzed data from the 2014 Treatment Episode Data Set-Admissions (TEDS-A). This data set offers details on admissions to state-regulated treatment facilities nationwide. The researchers focused on adults entering treatment for opioid use disorder, analyzing just over 72,000 records. They looked at these records to determine who made the referral and whether clients were directed to agonist treatment. In particular the researchers focused on the relationship between referrals from the criminal justice system and agonist treatment. Sources of referrals within the criminal justice system include: prisons; state, federal, or local courts; parole or probation offices; diversionary programs; programs for individuals charged with driving under the influence (DUI) or driving while intoxicated (DWI); and other legal entities, including corrections agencies and youth services.

Key findings:

• Nearly one-quarter of the clients in the sample were referred to treatment by criminal justice sources.
• 41 percent of those referred by sources outside the criminal justice system received opioid agonist treatment compared with less than 5 percent of those referred by criminal justice sources.
• Adults involved with the criminal justice system were most likely to be referred for agonist treatment by a DUI or DWI program. People were least likely to receive opioid agonist treatment if they were referred by courts. Nearly 10 percent of those referred by DUI or DWI programs were recommended agonist treatment, compared with 3.4 percent of people referred by courts.
• The researchers suggest a number of factors might explain these discrepancies. They write that treatment facilities affiliated with the criminal justice system might avoid opioid agonist treatment because of ideological or operational concerns. They suggest corrections staff and judges might have stigma against agonist treatment, and that criminal justice-referred clients might also harbor similar biases.

Other resources:

• The National Institute on Drug Abuse offers information on drug addiction treatments and how the criminal justice system treats opioid use disorder.
• The World Health Organization has resources for the management of substance abuse.
• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offer data on drug and opioid overdose deaths.
• The Bureau of Justice Statistics provides a vast assortment of data related to courts, criminal justice and more.
• We have a tip sheet on writing about fentanyl and synthetic opioids.

Related research:

• A 2014 study published in Addictive Behaviors, “Methadone Maintenance Treatment May Improve Completion Rates and Delay Opioid Relapse for Opioid Dependent Individuals Under Community Corrections Supervision,” finds that one-third of drug-treatment clients who received agonist therapy relapsed compared to 56 percent of clients who did not.
• A 2014 study published in European Addiction Research, “Impact of Methadone Maintenance Treatment on Women Offenders’ Post-Release Recidivism,” indicates that those who received agonist therapy had a 65 percent lower risk of recidivism than a control group that did not receive methadone.
• A 2010 study published in Addiction, “Meta-Analysis of Drug-Related Deaths Soon After Release from Prison,” finds an increased risk of drug-related death in the month following release from prison.
• A 2015 study published in Addiction Science and Clinical Practice, “Release from Incarceration, Relapse to Opioid Use, and the Potential for Buprenorphine Maintenance Treatment: A Qualitative Study of the Perceptions of Former Inmates with Opioid Use Disorder,” explores some of the stigma around agonist therapy, including fear of dependency and belief in willpower over the use of medication.

The post Opioid treatment and the criminal justice system appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

When the president mulls filling a Supreme Court seat, the whole country watches. When he appoints a federal judge, few take notice. There are, after all, hundreds of federal judges. Yet these appointments, too, are for life. And because the judges wield significant power, they are at the core of a president’s legacy. In this explainer, we discuss how the federal courts work, their mandates, and how judges are appointed.

Federal courts have jurisdiction over a wide variety of crimes and civil disputes outlined in the Constitution and other federal statutes, including election fraud, weapons trafficking and terrorism. They hear cases that cross state and international borders and bankruptcy claims. The federal criminal code is vast and often overlaps with state codes, sometimes allowing both to try a case. For the sake of clarity, here’s an example: If you hijack an airliner, you will be arraigned in a federal court. If you hold up a 7-Eleven, your case will be heard by a state court.

In 2016, federal courts processed approximately 354,000 criminal and civil filings, 55,000 appeals and 834,000 bankruptcy petitions, according to UScourts.gov, an educational website run by the Federal Judiciary.

The third branch

Under the Constitution, the Federal Judiciary is a branch of government equal in power to the legislative (Congress) and executive (the president and cabinet) branches. The Federal Judiciary operates 94 district courts, each with a roster of judges who hear cases before a jury. The districts are organized into 12 regions (sometimes known as circuits), each of which has an appeals court. Appeals courts (also known as appellate courts or circuit courts) do not try cases, but determine whether the law was correctly applied at the district level. These cases are heard without a jury before a panel of three judges.

There is one other federal appeals court: The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in Washington D.C. Sometimes known as Federal Circuit Court, it has nationwide jurisdiction but only hears specialized cases, such as those involving patents and trade.

If the plaintiffs or defendants are unsatisfied with the decision of an appeals court, they can request their case be heard by the Supreme Court, which has nine justices and is the final arbiter. If the Supreme Court declines to hear a case, as it must do thousands of times a year simply because of its limited resources, the appeals court’s decision is upheld.

Who are the judges?

There is no fixed number of federal judges. Instead, the body has grown since the Constitution was adopted in 1787 to reflect America’s growing population and caseload.

Judges serving in district and appellate courts and the Supreme Court are known as Article III judges. Under rules established by Article III of the Constitution, they are appointed for life, until they retire or die. In 2016, there were 860 permanent Article III judgeships, according to official tallies. There were another 20 “Article I” judgeships – judges who are assigned to fixed terms and preside over other federal courts, including the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, the U.S. Tax Court and courts in territories such as Guam and the Virgin Islands.

Appointment process

With so many federal judges, there are almost always vacancies. Judges retire. It can take months or longer for replacements to be appointed. Sometimes Congress, nodding to the expanding population, creates new positions.

To fill a seat, the president starts with a nomination, often of a judge from a lower court. The Constitution instructs him to do this “with the advice and consent” of the Senate, which votes on the appointments.

The Senate approved 334 of Barack Obama’s court appointments, according to an official count, and 340 for George W. Bush. Many more never received a vote, according to this list of unsuccessful nominations compiled by the Federal Judicial Center, a nonpartisan research organization at the Federal Judiciary. As of August 2017, five of President Trump’s appointees had been confirmed, including Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

Judges, says the Constitution, “shall hold their offices during good behavior” and can be removed by Congress. In practice, Congress has impeached only 15 federal judges over the years for charges like abuse of power, corruption, practicing law while sitting on the bench, and drunkenness.

UScourts.gov lists federal judicial vacancies here (including nominees awaiting confirmation), how much they are paid here, and who has been confirmed by the current Congress here. A list of all federal courts, with links to biographies of each sitting judge, is available here.

U.S. attorneys

A U.S. attorney is a prosecutor representing the Justice Department’s interests — the interests of the Executive Branch — in federal court. He or she is appointed by the president to one of the 94 judicial districts for a term of four years and is confirmed by the Senate. (Guam and Northern Mariana are served by a single U.S. attorney.) A president can remove a U.S. attorney at any time. In mid-2017, a large number were working in an acting capacity as they were either holdovers from the Obama administration or had not yet been confirmed by the Senate. A list of U.S. attorneys with contact information is available here.

An official manual describes how U.S. attorneys — who, by the way, may have staffs of hundreds — should perform their jobs.

Other courts

Each state has its own judicial system, usually consisting of trial courts, appellate courts and a supreme court. In Florida, for example, some trial judges are elected by popular vote; some are appointed by the governor from a pool selected by a nominating commission. In Illinois, they are chosen by popular vote for fixed terms. The National Center for State Courts (NCSC), a non-partisan research and education organization, has data to help you navigate and compare the different systems. NCSC also has a guide to judges’ salaries and many other aspects of the states’ legal systems.

Other resources

• Resources available for researching individual cases include case records at UScourts.gov and its specialized database, PACER. The Federal Judicial Center keeps a record of every federal case and publishes related research. Courtstatistics.org, from the NCSC and the Conference of State Court Administrators, is an interactive database of state case data. The Bureau of Justice Statistics also has an online database of state court data.
• Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute hosts the federal legal code and other legal documents. Its Oyez project publishes Supreme Court rulings.
• The Federal Judiciary also publishes a glossary of relevant legal terms.
• USA.gov, an interagency federal project run by the U.S. General Services Administration, publishes federal laws and regulations.
• Journalist’s Resource has a literature review on politicized federal courts, a research brief on the changing relationship of Congress and the Federal Judiciary, and a syllabus on covering the judiciary.

The post Appointing federal judges and U.S. attorneys: An explainer appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

The Issue: In July 2016, El Salvador’s highest court overturned the amnesty laws that the nation’s previous governments had upheld, paving the way for the legal prosecution of individuals suspected of committing crimes during the country’s 1980-1992 Civil War. For decades, government and military officials throughout Latin America were not prosecuted for the crimes or human rights violations they had committed. But over the past 10 years, a general consensus has emerged that amnesty laws should be abolished and individuals who committed or participated in violent crimes such as murder and torture should be held accountable — whether those crimes took place decades ago, as in the case of El Salvador, or more recently.

An academic study worth reading: “After Amnesties are Gone: Latin American National Courts and the Contours of the Fight Against Impunity,” published in 2015 by Human Rights Quarterly.

Study summary: This article, authored by law professor Naomi Roht-Arriaza of the University of California Hastings, takes a close look at how nations seek justice for crime victims and their families after amnesty laws expire or are overturned. Roht-Arriaza examines Latin American countries’ efforts to conduct manageable and fair trials and the lessons learned from those efforts.

Key findings:

• Getting criminal cases accepted by the courts is difficult because the amnesty laws, which differed in some respects from country to country, forbade opening an investigation into crimes related to human rights. Early challenges to amnesty laws were entirely unsuccessful. Eventually, many countries began to employ legal strategies designed to go around the amnesty laws and find loopholes.
• A minority of Latin American courts still uphold past amnesty laws. They argue that while amnesty laws are deemed unacceptable now, they were not at the time they were enacted, and judges should not simply overturn laws through “retrospective lawmaking.”
• Once a case is accepted by a judge, authorities need to determine who is liable. Argentina opted for mega-trials, in which “each and every person involved in the crime” was prosecuted. The goal was to consolidate every case that involved a single massacre or detention facility into a single trial that involved all the victims and all of the alleged perpetrators. These trials did not begin until the 2000s, however. By then, many offenders were dead or sickly, others were in hiding, and many were simply unknown because they had killed their victims and left no witnesses.
• Because the violations perpetrated in Southern Cone countries of Latin America were relatively limited in terms of time frames and numbers of defendants, investigations and trials were more feasible than in Central America. In Central America, conflicts lasted much longer and the numbers of defendants and victims are much higher.
• While it is important to focus on the top leaders who ordered or carried out such crimes, focusing on just those at the top of a bureaucratic structure can exclude informal leaders who committed particularly egregious crimes. This is especially important in large, diverse countries such as Colombia, where the nature of the conflict may have varied across regions.
• Prosecutions are not quick or easy. Most undergo many appeals processes and many defendants claim medical or other excuses to delay trials. In addition, in contrast to the International Criminal Court — which sees the duty of the state to prosecute such crimes under international criminal law independently of the victims, thereby setting the precedent that prosecution is only effective if it is followed by “swift, sure, and harsh punishment” — national courts allow “creative amnesties so long as the rights of victims are respected.”

Helpful resources for reporters writing about this issue:

• The International Criminal Court investigates “the gravest crimes of concern to the international community,” including genocide and war crimes.
• The Geneva Conventions of 1949 outline rules for protecting various groups of people, including prisoners of war and civilians, during times of war.

Related research:

• A 2013 article published in the Law & Society Review, “Human Rights Prosecutions and the Participation Rights of Victims in Latin America,” considers how private prosecution has helped non-governmental organizations (NGOs)  pursue the criminal prosecution of human rights violations.

• A 2005 article in The American Historical Review, “The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala,” explores the limitations of truth commissions. While they provide a means to reflect on the divisiveness within a country, they are not “instruments of justice.”

• A 2002 article published in Latin American Perspectives, titled “Tracking the Origins of a State Terror Network: Operation Condor,” offers journalists some historical context on state-sanctioned violence, including murder and torture.

Keywords: Latin America, impunity, amnesty, dirty war, human rights, Central America, Mexico, state-sanctioned violence, reconciliation, truth commissions

The post Human rights prosecutions in Latin America: National courts and the fight against amnesty laws appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Mass shootings have increased significantly in the United States, according to the most recent data available from the FBI. Statistics show that from 2000 to 2007, mass shooting incidents averaged 6.4 incidents annually, while from 2008 to 2013, they increased to 16.4.

As a result of this increase, several studies have looked at the individual motivations and psychological “micro-foundations” that drive targeted violence–everything from video games to religious beliefs–in an effort to help law enforcement officials understand mass shooting, hate crimes, terrorism, and violence not only in the United States but also abroad.

A 2015 study published in Behavioral Sciences and the Law, “The Concept of Identification in Threat Assessment,” examines the relationship between psychological “identification”–or the process by which an unstable person subsumes his or her own identity and models themselves after a violent aggressor–and acts of targeted violence. The researchers are based at the University of California-San Diego and the State University of New York Upstate Medical University as well as the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center, the firm Operational Consulting International and the Institute of Psychology and Threat Management in Germany.

The authors drew on information from reviews and indirect assessment of evidence of criminal cases, as well as consultation with psychiatrists, psychologists and judicial officials who had direct access to primary investigative evidence on the cases. They also examined four detailed case studies on perpetrators of targeted violence: Antares Wong, Seung-Hui Cho, Joseph Paul Franklin and Anders Breivik. In analyzing the psychology of the four “active shooters,” the study authors drew on the work of psychiatrists Sigmund and Anna Freud and Erik Erikson on psychosocial development.

The study’s findings include:

• The four perpetrators committed different acts of targeted violence, at different points in time, killing and injuring innocent people in the United States and abroad. Despite their differences, they all evidenced common expressions of “identification.”
• “In the context of threat assessment, identity becomes embedded in aggressive identifications, if not extremely violent images of the self in action, most often apparent in the fantasies of the young adult as a perpetrator of homicide against another.”
• Identification is characterized by one or more of five characteristics: pseudo-commando, warrior mentality, close association with weapons or other law-enforcement/military paraphernalia, identification with other attackers/assassins, and becoming an agent to advance a particular cause or belief system.
• Authors identified eight warning behaviors, including:
  • Pathway warning behavior: research, planning, preparation, or implementation of an attack
  • Fixation warning behavior: an increasingly pathological preoccupation with a person or a cause
  • Identification warning behavior: a psychological desire to be a “pseudo-commando,” have a “warrior mentality,” closely associate with weapons or other military or law enforcement paraphernalia
  • Novel aggression warning behavior: an act of violence that appears unrelated to any targeted violence pathway behavior which is committed for the first time
  • Energy burst warning behavior: an increase in the frequency or variety of any noted activities related to the target
  • Leakage warning behavior: the communication to a third party of intent to do harm to a target through an attack
  • Last resort warning behavior: evidence of a violent “action/time imperative”
  • Directly communicated threat warning behavior: the communication of a direct threat to the target or to law enforcement before at attack.

Study authors, J. Reid Meloy, Kris Mohandie, James L. Knoll, and Jens Hoffmann, contend that “identification, and its observable correlates, has emerged as one important warning behavior in threat assessment for targeted or intended violence.” Therefore, the relevance of the study is not only theoretical, but also operational. For example, as police agencies adopt a stronger predictive approach to prevent violence, the role of social psychology may be of particular importance in designing more accurate and rigorous predictive models. The challenges of making a timely identification of these psychological patterns are considerable. Particularly because these characteristics are often intertwined and dynamic in nature. For example, the identification with other attackers or assassins by perpetrators may be both historical or contemporary, fictional or nonfictional, and even involve a deity. Despite the differences and contexts in the way in which these acts of violence are committed, finding shared psychological patterns may be of help to policymakers, first responders and law-enforcement agencies.

Related research: A 2013 study, “Identification Matters: A Moderated Mediation Model of Media Interactivity, Character Identification and Video Game Violence on Aggression,” found that test subjects associated more with a video game’s aggressive characters traits when they played a game versus when they passively observed a game being played, thus confirming the hypothesis that interaction is key to fostering aggression in subjects.

Keywords: crime, policing, terrorism

The post New psychological study finds traits common to ‘active shooters’ appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.