International Journal of Law Crime and Justice最新文献

“Red flag” laws allow the government to remove firearms from someone if a judge is persuaded that the owner is a danger to self or others. We present the evolution of these laws and then develop and test a series of hypotheses using data from the Guns in American Life Survey (GALS), a nationwide online survey conducted in late 2018 to investigate public opinion. Findings show that adults who believe they know a “compromised” gun owner (e.g. dangerous, seriously mentally ill or suffering dementia) tend to be much more supportive of red flag laws, moderating the effects of immersion in gun culture. GALS reveals that political underpinnings are not determinative of the views of respondents. However, two sets of gun-related attitudes are strongly predictive of attitudes towards red flag laws–acceptance of scientific evidence that guns are “risky” and dangerous for civilians and principled rejection of gun control as a violation of the Second Amendment. Our results suggest that local circumstances (knowing someone who is a danger) can overwhelm macro-social attitude formation forces. We conclude by reviewing how firearm policy responses evolve, and how previously unpalatable options can become accepted by different groups such as legislators, law enforcement, registered voters and the general public.

This paper explores how social media discourses justify mob justice to fuel its perpetration in Africa. It asks, what discursive strategies and patterns rationalise mob justice in social media discussions? It relies on 319 mob-justice-related tweets between 2018 and 2022 across seven African countries to identify five main discursive strategies: normative discourses, exception discourses, discourses of slow or failed criminal justice system, culture of violence discourses and banter discourses. The findings contribute to our understanding of the form mob justice discourses take on social media to incite traditional mob justice on the continent. It recommends appropriate state-centred legal responses to inciting mob justice on social media while respecting citizens’ freedom of expression.

This study utilizes data on cyber-fraud crimes from the Public Security Bureau in Xiaoshan District for the year 2021 as its case study. It examines the spatiotemporal distribution of various types of cyber-fraud and investigates the influencing factors from social and built environments. Additionally, quantile regression models are employed to analyze the variation in the number of cases across different quantiles of the influencing factors. The study reveals significant differences in individual characteristics among victims of different types of fraud. Cyber-fraud occurrences exhibit distinct temporal patterns across various temporal scales, with significant differences in the duration of crimes among different fraud types. Cyber-fraud demonstrates significant spatial clustering, mainly concentrated in residential areas. The results of quantile regression indicate that cyber fraud is influenced by both the built environment and social environment, with noticeable variations in the coefficient of influence across different quantiles of the independent variables.

General purpose artificial intelligence (GPAI) is a form of advanced AI system that includes the recently introduced ChatGPT. GPAI is known for its capacity to understand and emulate human responses, and potentially offers an opportunity to reduce human error when conducting tasks that involve analysis, judgement, and reasoning. To support officers to do this, the police presently use a range of decision-making support tools, one of which is called THRIVE (Threat, Harm, Risk, Investigation, Vulnerability, and Engagement). THRIVE is designed to provide police practitioners with a model to improve their identification and response to vulnerability. Despite the existence of such decision models, a 2020 meta-analysis of police cases resulting in death or serious injury identified contributory failures that included poor risk identification, risk management, failure to adhere to evidentiary processes, poor criminal investigations, and inadequate police engagement with victims, including the level of care and assistance provided (Allnock, et al, 2020). Importantly, this report outlined human error as being a major underpinning factor of the failures.

Although GPAI offers an opportunity to improve analysis, judgement, and reasoning, such systems have not yet been tested in policing, a field where any reduction in human error, particularly in the assessment of threat, harm, risk, and vulnerability can potentially save lives. This study is the first attempt to do this by using the chain-of-thought prompt methodology to test the GPAI ChatGPT (3.5 vs 4) in a controlled environment using 30 life-like police scenarios, crafted, and analyzed by expert practitioners. In doing so, we identify that ChatGPT 4 significantly outperforms its 3.5 predecessor, indicating that GPAI presents considerable opportunity in policing. However, systems that use this technology require extensive directional prompting to ensure outputs that can be considered accurate, and therefore, potentially safe to utilize in an operational setting. The article concludes by discussing how practitioners and researchers can further refine police related chain-of-thought prompts or use application programming interfaces (APIs) to improve responses provided by such GPAI.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has caused catastrophic impacts on public health and shrunk economic activities that reshaped nearly every ordinary person's daily life. The objective of this manuscript is to compare the pandemic-caused lifestyle alterations, public health orders and enforcement, societal responses, and pandemic policing in two democracies - the U.S. and Taiwan. Both societies experienced rapid changes of daily routines among residents, and non-medical interventions like quarantine, social distancing, and shelter-in-place/lockdown were implemented. The police were used to enforce public health laws and orders, although the structures of the police were different. The pandemic-related tasks that the police have been assigned or chosen to enforce might have reshaped their images and redefined their roles in both societies that are similar in political system and urban-rural difference but different in socioeconomic status and social-historical context. Unfortunately, both Americans and Taiwanese scapegoated a small group of citizens for either bringing in the virus or failing to defend the homeland. Through comparing these two societies, this paper concludes that internal unity and collaboration is more important than democracy itself in determining public health success or failure. This paper also concludes with implications of police training and education in the post-COVID-19 era.

The initial hearings of the criminal justice system are a space where, when deciding on the legality of detention, the police power to arrest people can be evaluated. This study analyses the control of detention in the criminal justice system of Mexico City based on two dimensions that have an impact on the better or worse protection of the rights of detainees by the police. The first, an informative dimension about the reconstruction of the “facts”, the second, a political-normative dimension derived from the punitive context in which the justice system is questioned for releasing “criminals”. Based on the observation of 776 initial hearings in criminal courts in Mexico City and interviews with judicial officials, we analyze 1. the balance of the information entered regarding detention; and 2. the difference in the result of detention control between priority crimes of public security policy versus other crimes. The results indicate that: a) the facts of a detention are reconstructed with a clear bias towards the views of police and prosecutors; and b) when dealing with crimes that are a priority for the city's crime policies, a detention is less likely to be declared illegality.

The prevention of fraud against older adults and other age groups, has been the subject of limited research with very few systematic attempts to map different tools and strategies that are used. This paper using the UK and South Korea as a starting point, but other countries too, maps some of the most common tools and strategies used to prevent frauds that target older adults. It develops the first comprehensive typology of strategies built upon the degree to which they embrace modern technology. It shows much of the prevention used is low tech, but high-tech solutions rooted in the fourth industrial revolution technologies are emerging and growing. The paper draws these different strategies and tools together to offer a holistic model for the prevention of fraud against older adults for further debate and utilisation by professionals.