Traffic incidents caused by vehicular crashes, roadway construction, disabled and abandoned vehicles, extreme weather conditions, and planned special events, comprise about half of all traffic congestion. As the duration of traffic incidents increases, it increases the probability of severe congestion, secondary crashes, traveler delay, travel…

Police trainings at museums have been a small but strong program within the museum field. Programs that provide youth and police the opportunity to engage one another in structured learning environments can enable those participants to share personal experiences, explore negative stereotypes, and discuss mutual perceptions of controversial topics…

This is a nationwide six-year data study of law enforcement training and professional development in relationship to workplace productivity. Why do we care about law enforcement training and professional development? Because the law enforcement environment is not standing still. Unlawful activity, and in particular drug trafficking strategies,…

Police agencies across the country are struggling to respond to significant number of persons with serious mental illness, who are landing on their doorsteps with sometimes tragic consequences. Arguably, the most widely adopted approach, the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model, is a specialized police-based program designed to improve officers'…

Background: Schools experience a wide range of crime and disorder, victimizing students and staff, and undermining attempts to create a safe and orderly environment for student learning. Police have long established programs with schools, but there has been no systematic review of evaluations of these programs, outside of police-led prevention…

The challenging context of social work interventions require that most intervention studies will be derived from nonexperimental research designs. Two evaluation studies in this special issue employed nonrandomized designs to examine the efficacy of two programs--a police crisis intervention team designed to enhance officers' responses to mental…

How effective are policy interventions to fight crime and how valid is the policy theory that underlies them? This is the twofold research question addressed in this article, which presents an evidence-based evaluation of Dutch social safety policy. By bridging the gap between actual effects and assumed effects, this study seeks to make fuller use…

Poisson and negative binomial regression methods are used to analyze the monthly time series data to determine the effects of introducing an integrated security management system including closed-circuit television (CCTV), door alarm monitoring, proximity card access, and emergency call boxes to a large privately-owned complex of apartment…

Zili Sloboda, Sc.D., and colleagues at the University of Akron, Ohio, designed and evaluated "Take Charge of Your Life", a substance abuse prevention curriculum for 7th- and 9th-grade students delivered by D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) police officers. They designed "Take Charge of Your Life" to impact students'…

This report, summarizing the results of a survey of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Bureau of Police, focuses on perceived opportunities for productivity improvements in the Bureau as viewed by police officers themselves. The study looks at definite change strategy suggestions and the attitudinal climate influencing any potential changes. A survey…

The study describes the experiences of 13 police departments where civilians were used in jobs normally performed by police officers. The findings are based on interviews with 158 people including police managers, officers in charge of civilian employees, and the civilians themselves. Two types of activities were surveyed: (1) the employment of…

Reports on survey of principals' and teachers' views of D.A.R.E. officers' effectiveness with students. Most predictive of the educator ratings was the perceived quality of teacher-officer interaction. Future research on the relationship between prevention education programs and various stakeholders is discussed. (Author/JDM)

There has been a growing interest in placing sworn law enforcement officers in schools as School Resource Officers (SROs) as a means of improving school safety and improving relations between police officers and youth. However, when this project began in May 2000, relatively little was known about SRO programs. The purpose of the National…

With the intent of developing plans for improving police training at all levels within the New York City Police Department, this project reviewed and evaluated the training and performance received at the municipal academy. Specific objectives of the project were to develop a model training program for staff at all levels, develop plans for…

Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) was designed to prevent students' use of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs by using trained, uniformed police officers in the classroom. This report examines the effectiveness of DARE in drug use prevention and how this program compares to other prevention programs. The report is organized into four sections…