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1. Interactive Visualizations for Crime Data Analysis by Mixed Reality

   Sharma, S ; Dronavalli, S ; Chellatore, M ; Pesaladinne, R ( June 2024 , Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. HCII 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

   Chen, JYC ; Fragomeni, G eds (Ed.)

   Crime data visualization plays a key role in understanding and dealing with criminal activities. This paper focuses on the integration of mixed reality (MR) and crime data analysis. There are many barriers and challenges when developing MR three-dimensional (3D) environments for visualization and inspection. The main problem is the lack of commonly shared data structures and interfaces between them. The rise in crime rates over the past few years is a huge source of issue for police departments and law enforcement organizations. As the crime rates significantly changed throughout time, both upward and downward, these changes are then compared to external factors, such as population, unemployment, and poverty. There is a need for visualizing the multiple crime datasets in multiple states with external factors. This work proposes a novel interactive approach for loading crime datasets into the HoloLens 2 device and displaying them in a mixed-reality setting for data analysis. By allowing people to engage and analyze datasets in a 3D space, the suggested system seeks to close the gap between data analysis and machine learning. Users can import many datasets, such as spatial, category, and numerical data, into the HoloLens 2 device and interactively visualize crime data for different states simultaneously. The system offers user-friendly capabilities for interactive data visualization in mixed reality once the data has been imported. The dataset is manipulated and transformed by users, who can also rotate, scale, and position it in 3D. To depict various characteristics and dimensions of the data, the system also supports a variety of visual encoding techniques, such as color mapping, size scaling, and spatial layout with the use of the imported datasets and the HoloLens 2’s visualization capabilities, users can discover new insights and intricate linkages within the data. Natural movements and voice instructions allow users to engage with the visible data, enabling a hands-free and immersive data exploration experience. This paper also visualizes the crime data for four different cities: Chicago, Baltimore, Dallas, and Denton. Analyzing crime against factors such as population, employment, unemployment rate, and poverty rates provides information about the complex relationship between social factors and criminal behavior. The results and outcomes of this work will help the police department and law enforcement organizations better understand crime issues and supply insight into factors affecting crime that will help them deploy resources and help their decision-making process. 

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2. The ties that bribe: Corruption's embeddedness in Chicago organized crime*

   https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12287  

   Joseph, Jared ; Smith, Chris M. ( August 2021 , Criminology)

   The crime of corruption ranges from politicians involved in high‐profile scandals to low‐level bureaucrats granting contracts and police officers demanding bribes. Corruption occurs when state actors criminally leverage their positions of power for financial gain. Our study examines how corruption varies by political power position and within criminal contexts by measuring the embeddedness of corruption within Chicago historical organized crime. We analyze Chicago's organized crime network before and during Prohibition (1900–1919 and 1920–1933) to compare differences across embedded network positions between political, law enforcement, and nonstate actors. Our findings show that more police were in organized crime than politicians before Prohibition, but the small group of politicians had higher embeddedness in organized crime. During Prohibition, when organized crime grew and centralized, law enforcement decreased in proportion and became less embedded in organized crime. Politicians, however, maintained their proportion and high level of embeddedness. We argue that everyday corruption is more frequent but less embedded when criminal contexts are moderately profitable. As criminal contexts increase in profitability, however, corruption moves up the political ladder to include fewer people who are more highly embedded. This work has theoretical implications for the symbiotic relationship between corruption and criminal organizations.

    

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3. The geography of (un)reasonable suspicion: Rethinking causes of racial disparities in police stops

   https://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12230  

   Lautenschlager, Rachel ( September 2023 , Law & Policy)

   InIllinoisvs.Wardlow(2000), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that presence in a “high‐crime” area is one factor that police can consider when establishing reasonable suspicion to justify a Terry stop. Some legal scholars argue that through this decision the Court propagated inequity in police stops by setting a lower evidentiary standard for establishing reasonable suspicion in neighborhoods with greater numbers Black residents, which are more likely than White neighborhoods to be considered crime hot spots. To assess these claims, I analyze pedestrian stop data from the Chicago Police Department for the years 2016 and 2017. Using spatial regression techniques, I evaluate relationships between neighborhood measures of Black disadvantage, police stop justifications, and “hit rates” of stops. The results suggest that reasonable suspicion is uniquely constructed in disadvantaged Black neighborhoods but that this does not result in significantly different enforcement rates. Based on these results, I argue that policing scholars must reconsider sources of inequity in policing and, in particular, consider the role of the law in shaping these outcomes.

    

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4. Trojan Horse Technologies: Smuggling Criminal-Legal Logics into Healthcare Practice

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224231209445  

   Chiarello, Elizabeth ( November 2023 , American Sociological Review)

   In the throes of an intractable overdose crisis, U.S. pharmacists have begun to engage in an unexpected practice—policing patients. Contemporary sociological theory does not explain why. Theories of professions and frontline work suggest professions closely guard jurisdictions and make decisions based on the logics of their own fields. Theories of criminal-legal expansion show that non-enforcement fields have become reoriented around crime over the past several decades, but past work largely focuses on macro-level consequences. This article uses the case of pharmacists and opioids to develop a micro-level theory of professional field reorientation around crime, the Trojan Horse Framework. Drawing on 118 longitudinal and cross-sectional interviews with pharmacists in six states, I reveal how the use of prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs)—surveillance technology designed for law enforcement but implemented in healthcare—in conjunction with a set of field conditions motivates pharmacists to police patients. PDMPs serve as Trojan horse technologies as their use shifts pharmacists’ routines, relationships with other professionals, and constructions of their professional roles. As a result, pharmacists route patients out of the healthcare system and leave them vulnerable to the criminal-legal system. The article concludes with policy recommendations and a discussion of future applications of the Trojan Horse Framework.

    

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5. Urban Revitalization and the Policing of Racial Territoriality

   https://doi.org/10.1177/21533687221107807  

   Lautenschlager, Rachel ( June 2022 , Race and Justice)

   The results from several recent studies suggest that police stop rates are elevated in neighborhoods that are gentrified or undergoing gentrification. However, it remains unclear how these findings fit into the well-documented pattern of racialized proactive policing practices, often interpreted through a racial-threat lens. To further our understanding of how of law enforcement relates to gentrification as a racialized institution, I utilize pedestrian stop data from eight cities to analyze the interconnected relationships between neighborhood-level police stops, temporal changes in racial and ethnic composition, and gentrification processes. Results from negative binomial spatial-durbin models reveal that, controlling for local crime levels and other covariates, police stops are more prevalent in neighborhoods that have experienced decreases in black and Latinx populations and in those surrounding gentrified areas. However, because gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods have experienced relatively larger losses of these minority residents, this relationship appears to be intertwined with processes of urban revitalization. Based on these results, I argue that the geographic concentration of proactive police stops operates as an instrument of urban social transformation, shaped by racial territoriality – the implicit and explicit claims of whites to urban spaces.

    

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