The Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model has been implemented in over 3,000 communities across the USA. Research to date has shown beneficial results in terms of officers' knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy, stigma, and force preferences. This study aimed to broaden the lens on the implementation context of CIT to examine whether factors in the environment and response process affect how calls are resolved. This study focused on several factors-CIT response, call location, and upstream decisions to pre-identify calls as mental health-related-that may impact call outcomes. Our findings suggest that CIT response, dispatch coding, and the places where calls originate play a role in shaping outcomes. More research is needed to unpack the effects of this wider CIT implementation environment.

Police organizations-like many other social institutions-were forced to make changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This exploratory study uses data from 28 countries to examine how the strength of the pandemic (e.g. infection rates and death rates) and governmental restrictions are related to these changes. The analyses of the data suggest the way in which police organizations responded to the pandemic was complicated. Infection rates are generally not as strongly related to changes as are death rates. Governmental restrictiveness is strongly related to some changes. Additional research is needed to tease out additional factors that potentially explain these changes as well as multivariate effects of these factors.

Policing is a high-stress occupation requiring emotional management when facing job-related violence, threats to safety and well-being, work-life disruption, and unpredictable hours. A national health pandemic coupled with public order and restraint imperatives has compounded the levels of stress in policing. In the UK, new working patterns have been negotiated to manage the constraints of a different working environment during COVID-19. Using a self-administered survey, this article explores the experiences of 473 female police officers working during the first lockdown in 2020. The article shows that the COVID-19 preventative measures forced police services to navigate new and varied working patterns for their employees. Previous resistance to flexible working practices in policing was put aside as police services sought to manage the virus in its own ranks as well as policing the public. Preliminary findings suggest that officers working from home were more likely to feel satisfied with management responses compared with those working on the front line, although negative attitudes from colleagues and management towards those working from home were present. Those not working from home reported higher levels of stress related to their Force's lack of communication with them about their welfare.

Police service calls have been studied widely in the Western context, but they are rarely discussed in the Chinese context. For the context of this study, it is important to note that the Chinese authorities implemented the strictest lockdown after the COVID-19 pandemic began. Drawing on the data from a county-level city in Hubei province, this study examines changes in the quantity and nature of 110 service calls before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. The results indicate that the average weekly call numbers before and after the lockdown were higher than during the lockdown. Meanwhile, different call types produced different patterns, though the weekly call totals decreased during the lockdown. There was a significant decrease in crime, traffic, and dispute calls, but a substantial increase in calls related to domestic violence, public security, and other issues. Changes in the frequency of different call types pose challenges to police departments. These findings will have implications for deploying police forces and allocating resources within the pandemic crisis in particular.

This article provides an overview of frontier issues of policing in China by examining the roles of police during the pandemic. It starts with a short introduction to the challenges and overall performance of China in keeping social order in the context of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Then, it outlines four major missions the Chinese police have pursued, each with a sketch of what has been done and how law enforcement officials have managed to achieve their goals. It follows with a further insight into their strategies in social control in connection with the latest reforms on policing. Finally, it concludes briefly with features of Chinese policing.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected the work of police agencies worldwide. Within a short period of time, the police were assigned new responsibilities and were required to change their priorities and focus on enforcing unusual emergency orders. These new tasks, as well as the emergency atmosphere and its socio-psychological implications, raise a series of questions about public expectations from and trust in the police during the pandemic period. In this article, we report the views of majority communities in Israel (non-Orthodox Jews), as expressed in a survey carried out in the midst of the pandemic. We find that this population supports police enforcement of the new orders and trusts them to do so with integrity, believes the police have been successful in this arena, and is willing to report violations of emergency regulations. Overall, responses indicate more favourable attitudes towards the police, echoing previous findings on policing emergencies.

The purpose of this study was to explore the rate and geographic distribution of 911 calls for service related to mental health issues during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in the City of Detroit, MI, USA. The results suggest that the total number of calls for mental health issues was at the lowest level when compared with the same time period for the previous 3 years. Furthermore, as both the daily reported COVID-19 cases and related deaths increased over time, there was a significant decline in both suicide threats and suicides in progress. Significant hot spots were found for the total calls as well as for threats of suicide. These hot spots did not coincide with the spatial distribution of reported cases of COVID-19 by ZIP code. While higher and lower areas of reported cases were found, these differences by ZIP code were not found to be significant. When compared with the previous 3 years of data, the hot spot area was much smaller in 2020, implying that the mental health-related calls for service were more evenly spread throughout the city.

Drawing on motivational posturing theory (MPT) and procedural justice theory (PJT), this article makes recommendations for how best to secure compliance with social distancing regulations. Applying those theories to-mostly observational-data from a study on the use and impact of penalty notices for disorder, the influences on cooperation during police-citizen encounters are explored. Whilst focusing on the English data/regulations, as both MPT and PJT have been tested internationally, the conclusions have relevance beyond these shores. The article proposes a sixth posture-compulsion, a form of resistant compliance-to the five set out by MPT. Focusing attention not just on whether compliance is achieved but how recognizes the risk to future legitimacy posed by only achieving compliance through coercion or the threat thereof. Lessons from the research are applied to policing social distancing, with regards to: securing compliance during interactions, self-regulation and enforcement action, and how to preserve police legitimacy.

The current COVID-19 pandemic brings about dramatic challenges for frontline police officers and their organizations. This will, we argue, likely have two implications for frontline learning and innovation. First, the pandemic will surely occasion a surge of frontline improvisation and innovation in police organizations responding to the crisis as the experienced needs for new solutions dramatically increase. Secondly, but equally importantly, this wave of frontline innovation is likely to be more transparent than is typically the case for innovations developed in frontline police work, because of changes in formal mandates and informal tolerance for procedural deviance. At this moment of unusually widespread and transparent frontline innovation, we propose an approach to capturing and diffusing this frontline innovation. By taking seriously the unique dynamics of frontline innovation, such an approach is likely to capture valuable innovations that might otherwise rapidly dissipate and be lost.

One of the biggest challenges facing modern policing in recent years has been the lack of police legitimacy. The tipping point of this phenomenon is often attributed to the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles in 1991, where Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers were videoed assaulting a lone black male. They were arrested and charged but eventually all were acquitted, thereby etching deep distrust between communities and police. Now the Rodney King example is an extreme and criminal act by police but it was the beginning of communities and media focusing on what the police were doing and how they were doing it. This lack of legitimacy coupled with what is referred to as the militarization of policing have lasting consequences and impacts on police-community relations and how interactions between police and community shape society today. In the wake of pandemic policing due to COVID-19, there are tales of two eventualities for police legitimacy that will be explored in this article: (1) The police response to the pandemic results in further militarization and draws deeper divides between police and communities or (2) the police response is compassionate and build on procedurally just operations resulting in the rebuilding of police legitimacy post-pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic poses multiple challenges for policing, including the need to continue responding to calls from the public. Several contingency plans warned police to expect a large and potentially overwhelming increase in demand from the public during a pandemic, but (to the author's knowledge) there is no empirical work on police demand during a major public health emergency. This study used calls-for-service data from 10 large cities in the USA to analyse how calls for service changed during the early months of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, compared to forecasts of call volume based on data from previous years. Contrary to previous warnings, overall the number of calls went down during the early weeks of the pandemic. There were substantial reductions in specific call types, such as traffic collisions, and significant increases in others, such as calls to dead bodies. Other types of calls, particularly those relating to crime and order maintenance, continued largely as before. Changes in the frequency of different call types present challenges to law enforcement agencies, particularly since many will themselves be suffering from reduced staffing due to the pandemic. Understanding changes to calls in detail will allow police leaders to put in place evidence-based plans to ensure they can continue to serve the public.

According to Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, India has the most stringent lockdown as compared to other nations and has scored 100% in the scale; nevertheless, there had been sporadic incidence of attacks on police personnel and medical workers in different parts of India. This article argues that such resistance comes from two broad factors: (i) a collective scepticism that has built up among certain section of people and (ii) a tool of defiance against the government. In order to quell such resistance, community leaders and the police can play a very crucial role. In order to establish the above hypotheses, a quantitative approach of the events that have occurred in India during the lockdown period of 21 days shall be considered.

Domestic violence is a commonplace and serious societal problem with vast public health and economic consequences. Childhood exposure to domestic violence can blight children's biological and social development. Often, local police departments are first responders to domestic violence. This is because danger is associated with these events, which requires police presence. Yet, children are often unseen victims of domestic violence. In general, law enforcement agencies (i) are ill-equipped to identify the risks experienced by children; (ii) struggle to find alternative outcomes for children at risk other than removal or criminalization; (iii) do not use scientifically informed assessment tools which might improve their interactions with children; and (iv) inconsistently share data with other agencies in a timely manner. Moreover, gaps in criminal legal, child welfare, and family court responses to violence in the family create circumstances where children may fall through the cracks. Positive interventions in relation to domestic violence and children who suffer as a result of it should be viewed as a public priority. Improving responses to these issues should be reframed as (i) a way to reduce the amount of future violent crimes committed, and (ii) reduce the resource burden felt by public services. This commentary discusses the scope and scale of children's exposure to domestic violence and child maltreatment and discusses international best practices that can serve as models to improve law enforcement's response to children.