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Predator policy is a controversial area that includes problems with hunting and handling of wild animals. This is the reason why the government decentralized some of the work to the regions in 1998. During 2008, the Swedish government produced a proposal regarding the conduct of wildlife management delegations. The purpose of this essay is to study the relationship between politicians and officials in the wildlife management delegation with a specific focus on a polarized issue, the wolf question. We do this by studying roles and politicization. Based on the purpose, the following questions have been formulated: What is the role of officials and politicians in wildlife management delegations? How are these roles affected by how politicized the wolf issue is in the region? These delegations include politicians and officials. Based on the theory of the dichotomy between politicians and officials, politicians have a stance and biased role, while officials have a role that is about being impartial and working on the basis of the regulations. This essay consists of a comparative case essay with a content analysis and thematic analysis as a method. The material used has been collected through semi-structured interviews and printed material. This essay shows that the politicization of the wolf question to some extent affects the representatives in the wildlife management delegation.

Several questionable officer involved shootings and perceived abuses of authority disproportionately involving minority citizens have resulted in public outcry, protests, and nationwide scrutiny of police in recent years. The resulting police legitimacy crisis has prompted agencies to rapidly equip officers with body-worn video cameras (BWCs). BWC advocates lauded the findings of an early study that attributed significant reductions in use of force incidents and citizen complaints to the devices and it is this and a handful of other short-term studies upon which the claims of these benefits are predicated. However, subsequent research has produced mixed findings and the sustainability of any reductions remains questionable. The limited knowledge concerning the impact of BWCs on the aforementioned outcomes is problematic considering the potential negative impact of unrealistic expectations and the expense of BWC program maintenance. The objective of this dissertation is to address gaps in the extant research by exploring the impact of an incremental deployment of the devices on the frequency and severity of use of force incidents and the frequency and outcome of citizen complaints while controlling for staffing, volume of officer-initiated enforcement contacts, and the Ferguson incident. Utilizing 86-months of secondary data collected from the Newport News, Virginia Police Department (NNPD) a vector autoregressive multivariate time series analysis indicates that BWCs were a significant factor in a substantial sustained reduction in use of force and a substantial sustained increase in exonerated complaint dispositions at the NNPD.

Law enforcement administrators are concerned about the levels of public satisfaction with the police as a key to successful policing. Citizens who are satisfied with the police are more willing to provide cooperation with the police that is essential for the organization to reduce crime and serve the community effectively. Existing empirical studies have shown that citizen demographic characteristics and police performance are predictors of satisfaction with the police. The limitation of the previous studies, however, is that they did not consider what police agencies can do, specifically how they change or determine police performance. Without the organizational-level consideration, we may falsely blame individual police officers and their policing activities for the current elevated tension between the public and the police. This research attempts to address the void in the existing literature by introducing an extended theoretical framework that is structured with organizational-level predictors built upon already identified individual-level relationships with public satisfaction with the police.Using the Law Enforcement Organizations (LEO) survey A and Police-Community Interaction (PCI) survey of the National Police Research Platform Phase II, 2013–2015, at the organizational level, the current research examines the indirect associations between organizational characteristics (i.e., transformational leadership and organizational justice) of police agencies and public satisfaction with the police. Police job satisfaction and the proxy measures of police job performance (i.e., satisfaction with the specific police contact and perception of neighborhood safety) are the intervening variables in the relationship. In the current research, the merged data, including 16,547 citizens from 52 police agencies, are used for the analyses. The primary statistical approaches for the examination include factor analyses for the measurement model, bivariate analyses, and Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling (MSEM). The major finding of this research is that organizational justice, which is about the fairness of organizational behaviors, has an indirect association with public satisfaction with the police through police job satisfaction and citizen perceptions of neighborhood safety. This finding indicates that not only are individual police officers who encounter citizens and provide services able to shape citizen perceptions of the police, but police agencies and their administrators are able to actively improve the levels of satisfaction with the police overall.

During the Great Migration (1916-1970) of African Americans to the North, Philadelphia’s police department, journalists, and city officials used news media to disseminate crime narratives laced with statistics and racial stereotypes of “black invasions,” “urban neighborhood jungles,” “roving black gangs,” and the “culture of poverty” to convince the white middle-class to resist desegregation and support tough on crime policing in the inner city from 1958 to the present-day. However, African Americans experienced double victimization from the proliferation of these crime narratives. Police and journalists used crime narratives to justify the racially-biased policing tactics of hyper-surveillance, daily patrols, excessive force, and incarceration against black and poor residents. Over time, city officials developed a system of racial capitalism in which City Council financially divested from social welfare programs, invested in the police department, and promoted a tough on crime policing program that generated wealth for Philadelphia’s tax base and attempted to halt white flight from the city. My evidence consists of newspapers, archived news reel, municipal court dockets, census records, oral histories, interviews, police investigation reports, housing project pamphlets, and maps to demonstrate that a consequence of tough on crime policing was hyper-surveillance, the use of excessive force, and neglect by officers in the most disadvantaged areas of the city: poor, segregated, and black-inhabited housing projects and neighborhoods. Nevertheless, by looking through the lens of Philadelphia specifically, I emphasize that the budgetary strategy of a city government spending more money on policing and corrections than social welfare programs is ineffective and a form of racial capitalism which relies on criminal scapegoating, continues the cycle of poverty-induced crime, inflates rates of incarceration and police brutality, and marginalizes poor people of color. / History

In the latest years, European governments have increasingly criminalized providing support to displaced people. Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGO) carrying out life-saving search and rescue (SAR) activities in the Mediterranean Sea have been facing wide obstacles in aiding newcomers, and in many instances have been subject to criminal proceedings. This research attempts to analyse the reasons why maritime sea rescue is equated with illegality. In doing so, it seeks to answer the question, “what are the challenges to reaching legal protection for humanitarian aid workers carrying out search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean when faced with criminalization?” The study argues that humanitarian aid workers (HAW) who have been criminalized as a result of their involvement in maritime sea rescue activities, have to endure many systemic deficiencies. Three layers of interrelated challenges are identified: legal, socio-political, and personal challenges. The study concludes that an independent, quality legal defence; a revisitation of the voluntary nature of the humanitarian exemption clause in the 2002 Facilitation Package; and a larger engagement of civil society actors in changing the narrative and improving the public’s practical knowledge of migration would ensure better protection for humanitarian practitioners involved in search and rescue activities. / <p>It was online.</p>

Hosting 22 percent of the world’s prison population, the United States is the number one country in the world regarding incarceration rates where 1 in 109 adults are locked up behinds bars and about two-thirds of offenders will recidivate within three years of their release (Durose, Coope, & Snyder, 2014; Kaeble, Glaze, Tsoutis, & Minton, 2016; U.S. Census Bureau, 2015; Walmsley, 2013). Sweden has one of the lowest recidivism and incarceration rates in the world where only 29 percent reoffend and 1 in 2,278 of their total population is behind bars (Kriminalvården, 2017; The World Bank, 2016). The purpose of this study is to understand the underlying reasons to these differences by comparing the U.S. and Swedish criminal justice systems and to find possible solutions of improvement to diminish the incarceration, recidivism, and crime rates in the U.S. Specifically, the policing, court, and correctional systems will be further compared.

Providing a nation’s citizens with timely and effective police services is a complex task, particularly in rural areas where limited resources must be allocated across vast, sparsely populated areas—to date, little research has sought to understand this process. The aim of this thesis is to assess the accessibility of police services in Sweden. Central place theory (CPT) serves as a theoretical framework for understanding how police services are spatially arranged. Differences in accessibility are evaluated with respect to two low-mobility groups—older adults, and women. This thesis employs open data provided by the Swedish police, Statistics Sweden (SCB), and Eurostat. Geographic information systems (GIS) are used to perform network analyses by which drive-times to police stations are calculated. Group differences in accessibility are examined by comparing average drive-times between areas where standardized population ratios (SPR) reveal differences in group representation. Results show that the spatial structure of police services resembles CPT’s prediction in that important services are widely distributed, whereas specialized services are found in more central cities. However, the observations do not perfectly adhere to the theoretical structure, implying that factors exogenous to CPT have some role in determining service point locations. Regarding accessibility, older adults tend to be overrepresented in areas far from police stations, suggesting lower levels of access to the services they offer. Sex was not found to be a significant factor influencing access, except in that men tend to be overrepresented in remote parts of northern Sweden. / Att tillhandahålla effektiva och lägliga polistjänster är en komplex uppgift för ett lands medborgare, särskilt på landsbygden där begränsade resurser måste tilldelas över omfattande och glesbefolkade områden— hittills har lite forskning eftersträvat att förstå denna process. Målet av denna avhandling är att bedöma den rumsliga strukturen och tillgängligheten av polistjänster i Sverige. Teorin känd som "Central place theory (CPT)" fungerar som en teoretisk ram för att förstå hur polistjänster är rumsligt anordnade. Skillnader i tillgänglighet bedöms med avseende på två grupper med låg rörlighet- äldre vuxna och kvinnor. Denna avhandling använder öppna data tillhandahållna av svensk polis, Statistiska Centralbyrån (SCB), och Eurostat. Geografiska informationssystem (GIS) används för att utföra nätverksanalyser genom vilka körtider till polisstationer beräknas. Gruppskillnader i tillgänglighet utvärderas genom att jämföra genomsnittliga körtider mellan områden där standardiserade befolkningsförhållanden, eller "standardized population ratios", (SPR), avslöjar skillnader i grupprepresentation. Resultat visar att den rumsliga strukturen av polistjänster liknar CPTs förutsägelse att viktiga tjänster är allmänt fördelade, medan specialiserade tjänster kan hittas i mer centrala städer. Däremot håller inte observationerna helt fast vid den teoretiska strukturen, vilket innebär att faktorer som är exogena till CPT har en viss roll i att bestämma tjänstlägen. När det gäller tillgänglighet, brukar äldre vuxna vara överrepresenterade i områden långt från polisstationer, vilket tyder på lägre nivåer av tillgänglighet till tjänsterna de erbjuder. Kön befanns inte vara en betydande faktor som påverkar tillgänglighet, förutom att män tenderar att vara överrepresenterade i avlägsna norra områden.

Genom en systematisk litteraturöversikt i kombination med en intervju är syftet med denna uppsats att försöka beskriva varför den sociala nätverksanalysen är lämplig i brottsutredningssammanhang samt hur den sociala nätverksanalysen används i brottsutredningar. Tanken är också att översikten ska kunna bidra till att se vilka möjligheter det finns att praktiskt utveckla metoden. Det finns en hel del forskning kring både social nätverksanalys (SNA) som metod och som teori och det används idag inom en mängd olika områden. Som teori handlar SNA om hur vi människor är sociala varelser som påverkar varandra i de tankar vi har och i de val som vi gör. Som metod är SNA istället olika matematiska uträkningar som kan användas för att beskriva mänskliga relationer. Inom kriminologin är SNA relativt nytt trots att brott i sig ofta är ett ”nätverksfenomen”. Flera kriminologiska teorier trycker också på betydelsen av att den egna brottsligheten har ett samband med de personer som vi umgås med. Resultatet visar att det finns klara fördelar med att använda sig av SNA i en brottsutredning, strukturer och nyckelpersoner kan identifieras, något som inte alltid hade kunnat ske utan teknikens hjälp. Den data som i utredningssammanhang används till nätverksanalyser är vanligtvis kvantitativa data, exempelvis telefontrafik. Olika typer av data kan ge väldigt olika resultat och blir det fel i datainsamling kan det sabotera för hela analysen. Det behövs mer teoretisk forskning kring SNA för att den som metod ska kunna appliceras på kriminologisk teori och på sikt även kunna användas bättre i utredningssammanhang. Ett stort problem med att forska om metoden är att den kvantitativa datan kan vara svår att få tag på, det finns därför väldigt lite litteratur om hur social nätverksanalys kan användas i brottsutredningar. / With a systematic literature review and an interview, the aim of this essay is to try to describe how the social network analysis (SNA) is used in criminal investigations. Hopefully, the essay can also help in pointing out why future research is needed and in what direction that research should go. As a theory, SNA focuses on man as a social being and how we affect each other in the way we think and act. As a method SNA is a number of mathematical computations that aims to explain relationships. There is a large amount of research about social network analysis, both as a theory and as a method but in the criminological field SNA is still relatively new. That is surprising as many criminological theories focuses on the importance of the people we engage with and our own delinquency. The result in this essay shows that there are many advantages with using SNA in a criminal investigation, structures and key-persons becomes more visible which sometimes is hard without technology. Different types of data can generate very different results and if something goes wrong in the collection of data it can sabotage the entire analysis. There is a need for more theoretical research on SNA so that it, as a method, can be applied to criminological theory and later to criminal investigations. There is a big problem when doing research about social networks, the access to network-data. It is very hard to collect and is usually only available to police-officers or other qualified groups. Therefore the amount of literature in the subject is limited.