From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. ...Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time, that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home. In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance—and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A "smoking gun" book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, "law and order" politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.
Despite increasing evidence that addiction is a treatable disease of the brain, most individuals do not receive treatment. Involvement in the criminal justice system often results from illegal ...drug-seeking behavior and participation in illegal activities that reflect, in part, disrupted behavior ensuing from brain changes triggered by repeated drug use. Treating drug-involved offenders provides a unique opportunity to decrease substance abuse and reduce associated criminal behavior. Emerging neuroscience has the potential to transform traditional sanction-oriented public safety approaches by providing new therapeutic strategies against addiction that could be used in the criminal justice system. We summarize relevant neuroscientific findings and evidence-based principles of addiction treatment that, if implemented in the criminal justice system, could help improve public heath and reduce criminal behavior.
Failure of the cellular base station (BS), fully or partially, during natural or man-made disasters creates a communication gap in the disaster-affected areas. In such situations, public safety ...communication (PSC) providing mission-critical communication and empowered with video transmission capability from the affected area towards the first responders can significantly save the national infrastructure, property, and lives. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) working as flying base stations (UAV-BSs) are best suited for PSC in such scenarios as UAVs are flexible, mobile, and easily deployable. This manuscript considers a multi-UAV assisted PSC network with an observation UAV receiving videos from the affected area's ground users (AGUs) and transmitting them to the nearby functional ground BS (GBS) via a relay UAV. The objective is to maximize the average utility of the video streams generated by the AGUs upon reaching the ground GBS. This is achieved by optimizing the geographical positions of the observation and relay UAVs, as well as the distribution of communication resources, such as bandwidth, and transmit power, while satisfying the system-designed constraints, such as transmission rate, rate outage probability, transmit power budget, and available bandwidth. To this end, a joint UAVs placement and resource allocation problem is mathematically formulated. This problem is non-convex, which is very challenging to be solved. Considering the block coordinate descent and successive convex approximation techniques, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed for its solution. Comprehensive simulations affirm that the proposed optimization approach outperforms the results obtained from the previously published related works.
The increasingly visible presence of heavily armed police units in American communities has stoked widespread concern over the militarization of local law enforcement. Advocates claim militarized ...policing protects officers and deters violent crime, while critics allege these tactics are targeted at racial minorities and erode trust in law enforcement. Using a rare geocoded census of SWAT team deployments from Maryland, I show that militarized police units are more often deployed in communities with large shares of African American residents, even after controlling for local crime rates. Further, using nationwide panel data on local police militarization, I demonstrate that militarized policing fails to enhance officer safety or reduce local crime. Finally, using survey experiments—one of which includes a large oversample of African American respondents—I show that seeing militarized police in news reports may diminish police reputation in the mass public. In the case of militarized policing, the results suggest that the often-cited trade-off between public safety and civil liberties is a false choice.
Substantial media attention has focused on suicide among Canadian Public Safety Personnel (PSP; e.g., correctional workers, dispatchers, firefighters, paramedics, police). The attention has raised ...significant concerns about the mental health impact of public safety service, as well as interest in the correlates for risk of suicide. There have only been two published studies assessing lifetime suicidal behaviors among Canadian PSP. The current study was designed to assess past-year and lifetime suicidal ideation, plans, and attempts amongst a large diverse sample of Canadian PSP. Estimates of suicidal ideation, plans, and attempts were derived from self-reported data from a nationally administered online survey. Participants included 5,148 PSP (33.4% women) grouped into six categories (i.e., Call Centre Operators/Dispatchers, Correctional Workers, Firefighters, Municipal/Provincial Police, Paramedics, Royal Canadian Mounted Police). Substantial proportions of participants reported past-year and lifetime suicidal ideation (10.1%, 27.8%), planning (4.1%, 13.3%), or attempts (0.4%, 4.6%). Women reported significantly more lifetime suicidal behaviors than men (ORs = 1.15 to 2.62). Significant differences were identified across PSP categories in reports of past-year and lifetime suicidal behaviors. The proportion of Canadian PSP reporting past-year and lifetime suicidal behaviors was substantial. The estimates for lifetime suicidal behaviors appear consistent with or higher than previously published international PSP estimates, and higher than reports from the general population. Municipal/Provincial Police reported the lowest frequency for past-year and lifetime suicidal behaviors, whereas Correctional Workers and Paramedics reported the highest. The results provide initial evidence that substantial portions of diverse Canadian PSP experience suicidal behaviors, therein warranting additional resources and research.
Le nombre de suicides survenus parmi les membres du personnel de la sécurité publique (PSP) au Canada (PSP : les travailleurs de services correctionnels, répartiteurs, pompiers, ambulanciers et policiers) a fait l'objet d'une importante attention médiatique. Cette attention a suscité des préoccupations importantes concernant l'impact de la santé mentale du service de la sécurité publique, ainsi qu'un intérêt au niveau des corrélations avec les risques de suicide. Il n'y a eu que deux études publiées sur les comportements suicidaires au long d'une vie parmi les membres du personnel de la sécurité publique au Canada. L'étude actuelle a été conçue pour évaluer le nombre d'idées, de projets et de tentatives de suicide au cours de la dernière année et pendant toute une vie parmi un large échantillon diversifié de membres du personnel de sécurité publique canadien. Les estimations d'idées, de projets et de tentatives de suicide ont été calculées à partir de données autodéclarées provenant d'une enquête nationale effectuée en ligne. Les participants comprenaient 5 148 membres du PSP (dont 33,4% de femmes) regroupés en six catégories (c.-à-d. opérateurs/répartiteurs de centre d'appels, travailleurs de services correctionnels, pompiers, policiers municipaux et provinciaux, ambulanciers et agents de la Gendarmerie royale du Canada). D'importantes proportions de participants ont déclaré avoir été victimes d'idées suicidaires (10,1 %, 27,8 %), de projets suicidaires (4,1 %, 13,3 %) ou de tentatives suicidaires (0,4 %, 4,6 %). Les femmes ont signalé un nombre significativement plus élevé de comportements suicidaires au long de leur vie que les hommes (rapport des cotes = 1,15 à 2,62). Des différences significatives ont été relevées entre les différentes catégories de membres du PSP en ce qui a trait aux déclarations de comportements suicidaires au cours de la dernière année et tout au long d'une vie. La proportion de membres du PSP canadien ayant déclaré avoir été victime de comportements suicidaires au cours de la dernière année ou au long de leur vie était considérable. Les estimations de comportements suicidaires au long d'une vie semblent être cohérentes avec les estimations de PSP internationales publiées précédemment et plus élevées que les déclarations de la population générale. Les policier municipaux/provinciaux ont connu la plus basse fréquence de comportements suicidaires au cours de la dernière année et au long de leur vie alors que les travailleurs des services correctionnels et les ambulanciers ont connu la fréquence la plus haute. Ces résultats apportent des premières preuves à l'effet que des portions importantes de membres divers du PSP canadien affichent des comportements suicidaires, justifiant la nécessité de ressources et de recherches supplémentaires.
Requirements for preemployment psychological screening of police candidates are informed by professional practice guidelines and, in some U.S. states, laws regulating police officer certification or ...entry to the police academy. Knowledge of these laws, both individually and collectively, serves important purposes, including interjurisdictional practice, aiding legislative and regulatory staff when proposing new legislation or updating regulations, and identifying adherence to standards of practice in the field of police and public safety psychology. In this review, we first outline the current standard of practice for conducting preemployment psychological assessments of police candidates and then examine the extent to which they are represented in statewide mandates throughout the 50 U.S. states. We focus specifically on the extent to which statewide mandates articulate (a) the criterion standard for determining the psychological suitability of police candidates; (b) who is qualified to conduct these assessments; (c) whether written testing is required and, if so, what types of tests; (d) whether the use of collateral information is required and, if so, what type; and (e) whether a psychological interview is required and, if so, with what parameters. We conclude that there remains a remarkable lack of cross-jurisdictional uniformity in preemployment psychological evaluations of police candidates and that most jurisdictions fall well short of the standard for conducting such assessments, and we discuss the need for and ways to address this challenge.
Public Significance Statement
This article provides an analysis of how the statutory and regulatory requirements for preemployment psychological evaluations of police candidates in all 50 U.S. states compare to the standard of practice and provides important information for interjurisdictional practice and for consideration of new or revised mandates.
Crowd analysis via computer vision techniques is an important topic in the field of video surveillance, which has wide-spread applications including crowd monitoring, public safety, space design and ...so on. Pixel-wise crowd understanding is the most fundamental task in crowd analysis because of its finer results for video sequences or still images than other analysis tasks. Unfortunately, pixel-level understanding needs a large amount of labeled training data. Annotating them is an expensive work, which causes that current crowd datasets are small. As a result, most algorithms suffer from over-fitting to varying degrees. In this paper, take crowd counting and segmentation as examples from the pixel-wise crowd understanding, we attempt to remedy these problems from two aspects, namely data and methodology. Firstly, we develop a free data collector and labeler to generate synthetic and labeled crowd scenes in a computer game, Grand Theft Auto V. Then we use it to construct a large-scale, diverse synthetic crowd dataset, which is named as “GCC Dataset”. Secondly, we propose two simple methods to improve the performance of crowd understanding via exploiting the synthetic data. To be specific, (1) supervised crowd understanding: pre-train a crowd analysis model on the synthetic data, then fine-tune it using the real data and labels, which makes the model perform better on the real world; (2) crowd understanding via domain adaptation: translate the synthetic data to photo-realistic images, then train the model on translated data and labels. As a result, the trained model works well in real crowd scenes.Extensive experiments verify that the supervision algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art performance on four real datasets: UCF_CC_50, UCF-QNRF, and Shanghai Tech Part A/B Dataset. The above results show the effectiveness, values of synthetic GCC for the pixel-wise crowd understanding. The tools of collecting/labeling data, the proposed synthetic dataset and the source code for counting models are available at
https://gjy3035.github.io/GCC-CL/
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