Police is Dead: On the Birth of Economism

Police is Dead is an historiographic analysis whose objective is to change the terms by which contemporary humanist scholarship assesses the phenomenon currently termed neoliberalism. It proceeds by building an archeology of legal thought in the United States that spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My approach assumes that the decline of certain paradigms of political consciousness set historical conditions that enable the emergence of what is to follow. The particular historical form of political consciousness I seek to reintroduce to the present is what I call “police:” a counter-liberal way of understanding social relations that I claim has particular visibility within a legal archive, but that has been largely ignored by humanist theory on account of two tendencies: first, an over-valuation of liberalism as Western history’s master signifier; and second, inconsistent and selective attention to law as a cultural artifact. The first part of my dissertation reconstructs an anatomy of police through close studies of court opinions, legal treatises, and legal scholarship. I focus in particular on juridical descriptions of intimate relationality—which police configured as a public phenomenon—and slave society apologetics, which projected the notion of community as an affective and embodied structure. The second part of this dissertation demonstrates that the dissolution of police was critical to emergence of a paradigm I call economism: an originally progressive economic framework for understanding social relations that I argue developed at the nexus of law and economics at the turn of the twentieth century. Economism is a way of understanding sociality that collapses ontological distinctions between formally distinct political subjects—i.e., the state, the individual, the collective—by reducing them to the perspective of economic force. Insofar as it was taken up and reoriented by neoliberal theory, this paradigm has become a hegemonic form of political consciousness. This project concludes by encouraging a disarticulation of economism—insofar as it is a form of knowledge—from neoliberalism as its contemporary doctrinal manifestation. I suggest that this is one way progressive scholarship can think about moving forward in the development of economic knowledge, rather than desiring to move backwards to a time before the rise of neoliberalism. Disciplinarily, I aim to show that understanding the legal historiography informing our present moment is crucial to this task.

Investigative Interviewing and Memory: How Accurate Are Interviewers’ Recollections of Investigative Interviews?

Contrary to interviewing guidelines, a considerable portion of witness interviews are not recorded. Investigators’ memory, their interview notes, and any subsequent interview reports therefore become important pieces of evidence; the accuracy of interviewers’ memory or such reports is therefore of crucial importance when interviewers testify in court regarding witness interviews. A detailed recollection of the actual exchange during such interviews and how information was elicited from the witness will allow for a better assessment of statement veracity in court. Two studies were designed to examine interviewers’ memory for a prior witness interview. Study One varied interviewer note-taking and type of subsequent interview report written by interviewers by including a sample of undergraduates and implementing a two-week delay between interview and recall. Study Two varied levels of interviewing experience in addition to report type and note-taking by comparing experienced police interviewers to a student sample. Participants interviewed a mock witness about a crime, while taking notes or not, and wrote an interview report two weeks later (Study One) or immediately after (Study Two). Interview reports were written either in a summarized format, which asked interviewers for a summary of everything that occurred during the interview, or verbatim format, which asked interviewers to record in transcript format the questions they asked and the witness’s responses. Interviews were videotaped and transcribed. Transcriptions were compared to interview reports to score for accuracy and omission of interview content. Results from both studies indicate that much interview information is lost between interview and report especially after a two-week delay. The majority of information reported by interviewers is accurate, although even interviewers who recalled information immediately after still reported a troubling amount of inaccurate information. Note-taking was found to increase accuracy and completeness of interviewer reports especially after a two week delay. Report type only influenced recall of interviewer questions. Experienced police interviewers were not any better at recalling a prior witness interview than student interviewers. Results emphasize the need to record witness interviews to allow for more accurate and complete interview reconstruction by interviewers, even if interview notes are available.

Sharing in the Rain: Secure and Efficient Data Sharing for the Cloud

Cloud storage has rapidly become a cornerstone of many businesses and has moved from an early adopters stage to an early majority, where we typically see explosive deployments. As companies rush to join the cloud revolution, it has become vital to create the necessary tools that will effectively protect users' data from unauthorized access. Nevertheless, sharing data between multiple users' under the same domain in a secure and efficient way is not trivial. In this paper, we propose Sharing in the Rain – a protocol that allows cloud users' to securely share their data based on predefined policies. The proposed protocol is based on Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) and allows users' to encrypt data based on certain policies and attributes. Moreover, we use a Key-Policy Attribute-Based technique through which access revocation is optimized. More precisely, we show how to securely and efficiently remove access to a file, for a certain user that is misbehaving or is no longer part of a user group, without having to decrypt and re-encrypt the original data with a new key or a new policy.

Digging up the frequency of phrasal verbs in English for the Police: the case of "up"

The present study focuses on the frequency of phrasal verbs with the particle up in the context of crime and police investigative work. This research emerges from the need to enlarge McCarthy and O’Dell’s (2004) scope from purely criminal behavior to police investigative actions. To do so, we relied on a corpus of 504,124 running words made up of spoken dialogues extracted from the script of the American TV series Castle shown on ABC since 2009. Based on Rudzka-Ostyn’s (2003) cognitive motivations for the particle up, we have identified five different meaning extensions for our phrasal verbs. Drawing from these findings, we have designed pedagogical activities for those L2 learners that study English at the Police Academy.

Invisible Victims: Recorded Crime and Children in the UK

While violence against children is a common occurrence only a minority of incidents come to the attention of the authorities. Low reporting rates notwithstanding, official data such as child protection referrals and recorded crime statistics provide valuable information on the numbers of children experiencing harm which come to the attention of professionals in any given year. In the UK, there has been a strong tendency to focus on child protection statistics while children as victims of crime remain largely invisible in annual crime reports and associated compendia. This is despite the implementation of a raft of policies aimed at improving the system response to victims and witnesses of crime across the UK. This paper demonstrates the utility of a more detailed analysis of crime statistics in providing information on the patterns of crime against children and examining case outcomes. Based on data made available by the Police Service for Northern Ireland, it highlights how violent crime differentially impacts on older children and how detection rates vary depending on case characteristics. It makes an argument for developing recorded crime practice to make child victims of crime more visible and to facilitate assessment of the effectiveness of current initiatives and policy developments. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Northern Ireland Neighbourhood Watch: Participatory Mapping and Socio Demographic Uptake

Northern Ireland Neighbourhood Watch (NINW) was formally introduced to Northern Ireland in 2004 by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Policing Board and Northern Ireland Office. However, there has been little research to data as to participation in, or success of, the schemes. This research report provides one of the few empirical examinations of NINW. Using GIS mapping and socio-demographic data from the Northern Ireland Neighbourhood Information Service (NINIS), the research explores participation in NINW schemes set against religion, deprivation and crime levels at the Census Output Area (COA) level across Northern Ireland. While the research largely confirms the limited impact of neighbourhood schemes as noted in international literature, at a local level in Northern Ireland the findings evidence a distinct pattern of uptake, with the vast majority of participants in the schemes residing in affluent, low-crime, mainly Protestant areas of the country

Diversifying From Within: Community Policing and the Governance of Security in Northern Ireland

The subtle and complex nature of Northern Ireland's transitional landscape presents acute difficulties for the community policing concept. As the core to the police reforms in the country, its implementation has faltered in the face of institutional inertia within the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). This has been further exacerbated by a failure of the police to adequately increase the co-production of security through improved engagement and utilization of Northern Ireland's diverse community infrastructures. This paper will assess the delivery of community policing by the PSNI, while exploring their engagement with Northern Ireland's grass-roots community organizations, and specifically those involved with the governance of security at the local level. Thus, through a framework of adaptation, engagement and delivery of community policing by the PSNI within the unique context of Northern Ireland's security ‘otherness’, the paper will explore the key issues to police–community interaction associated with the broader vision of the Independent Commission on Policing (ICP) on community policing.

Oceans Deep: Lesson E (Plankton Police)

Teacher resources for Lesson E in the Discover Oceanography 'Scheme of Work' for use in schools.

Treatment of phenanthrene and benzene using microbial fuel cells operated continuously for possible in situ and ex situ applications

Bioelectrochemical systems could have potential for bioremediation of contaminants either in situ or ex situ. The treatment of a mixture of phenanthrene and benzene using two different tubular microbial fuel cells (MFCs) designed for either in situ and ex situ applications in aqueous systems was investigated over long operational periods (up to 155 days). For in situ deployments, simultaneous removal of the petroleum hydrocarbons (>90% in term of degradation efficiency) and bromate, used as catholyte, (up to 79%) with concomitant biogenic electricity generation (peak power density up to 6.75 mWm−2) were obtained at a hydraulic retention time (HRT) of 10 days. The tubular MFC could be operated successfully at copiotrophic (100 ppm phenanthrene, 2000 ppm benzene at HRT 30 days) and oligotrophic (phenanthrene and benzene, 50 ppb each, HRT 10 days) substrate conditions suggesting its effectiveness and robustness at extreme substrate concentrations in anoxic environments. In the MFC designed for ex situ deployments, optimum MFC performance was obtained at HRT of 30 h giving COD removal and maximum power output of approximately 77% and 6.75 mWm−2 respectively. The MFC exhibited the ability to resist organic shock loadings and could maintain stable MFC performance. Results of this study suggest the potential use of MFC technology for possible in situ/ex situ hydrocarbon-contaminated groundwater treatment or refinery effluents clean-up, even at extreme contaminant level conditions.

Black and Blue: Exploring Racial Bias and Law Enforcement in the Killings of Unarmed Black Male Civilians

In late 2014, a series of highly publicized police killings of unarmed Black male civilians in the United States prompted large-scale social turmoil. In the current review, we dissect the psychological antecedents of these killings and explain how the nature of police work may attract officers with distinct characteristics that may make them especially well-primed for negative interactions with Black male civilians. We use media reports to contextualize the precipitating events of the social unrest as we ground our explanations in theory and empirical research from social psychology and industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology. To isolate some of the key mechanisms at play, we disentangle racial bias (e.g., stereotyping processes) from common characteristics of law enforcement agents (e.g., social dominance orientation), while also addressing the interaction between racial bias and policing. By separating the moving parts of the phenomenon, we provide a more fine-grained analysis of the factors that may have contributed to the killings. In doing so, we endeavor to more effectively identify and develop solutions to eradicate excessive use of force during interactions between “Black” (unarmed Black male civilians) and “Blue” (law enforcement).

SURVEILLANCE OF, AND THE IMPACT OF COMMUNITY POLICING ON ARREST-RELATED DEATHS (ARDS): Exploring the surveillance of ARDs and the opportunities to prevent them in the United States

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Older Adult Injury Risk Assessment in the Driving and Occupational Environments

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08