Citizen complaints about inappropriate use of force indicate negative police-public relations, unresponsive police services, and the unresponsiveness of police management to citizens' concerns. However, the effective delivery of key policing services depends on the performance of individual police officers. Surveillance technology can monitor and control the behavior of officers, ensuring that police officers provide high quality policing services that meet the needs of citizens. Examples of surveillance technology such as in-car cameras and CCTV can be used as an administrative tool to respond to citizen complaints by police chief executives. This research examines the effect of surveillance technology on the behavior of municipal police departments that is operationalized as the number of citizen complaints that were filed against municipal police departments. This research also examines the impact of surveillance technology on dismissed and sustained complaints by using 511 large municipal police departments in the U.S. from Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) 2003 dataset. Three different models are developed to evaluate the impact of in-car cameras and CCTV on the citizen complaints and their dispositions. Two ordinary least square regression (OLS) models and a Heckman selection model are used to analyze the data. The Heckman selection model is utilized …

One key to reducing terrorism may be to understand why individuals join terror groups, and to find ways to meet their needs through alternatives to discourage membership in terrorist organizations. The study introduces the hierarchy of needs framework to capture all previous pieces of explanations on why individuals join terror groups under one big umbrella, in order to see the big picture. It does not do a meta-analysis, but rather tests the framework. This study is designed to find out what perceived needs commonly motivate individuals to join terror groups in general and specific terror groups in particular. The research uses Turkey's terrorism experience as a case study which is supported with data from real terrorist in Turkey. Findings of the descriptive analyses show that majority joined a terror group due to social and affiliative needs. The remaining analyses (bivariate, cross-tabulation and binary logistic regression) show that confitents who perceived esteem and recognition were more likely to become members of other/leftist terror groups, and that rightist terror group members in Turkey tend to have higher education. Education mainly affects a confitent's perception of two needs: social and affiliation and self-actualization. Other demographic variables (age group, region of birth, marital status) …

Although governments try to create strict policies and regulations to prevent abuses, use of excessive force is still a problem for almost every country including Turkey. This study is intended to help Turkish National Police administrators to understand and prevent police use of excessive force. Studies on police brutality categorize three factors that explain why police officers use excessive force; these are individual, situational and organizational. In addition to brutality theories, job satisfaction literature is examined in this study to understand the use of excessive force. Job satisfaction is found to be related with burnout, turnover, stress, commitment, and performance. The impact of officers' attitude toward the criminal justice system and/or laws has not been tested widely. Police officers attitudes toward human rights laws are examined in this study to measure its impact on attitude toward use of excessive force. A secondary data collected in Turkey are analyzed by structural equation modeling which provides confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, and causal relationships between variables. It is found that police officers' attitude toward human rights laws is a significant predictor of their attitudes toward use of excessive force. Job satisfaction and education level are the other significant variables affecting attitude toward …

Citizen involvement in the production and delivery of public service has been a long time topic of interest and controversial debate among scholars. Essentially, the belief has been that if citizens are actively involved in the process, public organizations and communities benefit in numerous ways that will ultimately lead to increased citizen satisfaction. The purpose of this research is to explore the relationship between citizen involvement in the production of public safety and security and its effects on organizational efficiency and effectiveness of law enforcement agencies. To test the assumption that citizen involvement is positively correlated to organizational success and organizational efficiency of law enforcement agencies, a citizen involvement index was developed and used as the independent variable in ordinary least square regression (OLS) analysis. Three separate models are developed to measure the impact of citizen involvement on law enforcement. Findings obtained through bivariate and multivariate analyses indicate mixed results. Bivariate analysis revealed that citizen involvement was negatively correlated to organizational efficiency while no statistically significant correlation was found in multiple regressions. In addition, through bivariate analyses, citizen involvement was positively correlated with crime rates reported to city police departments, whereas multivariate regression analyses indicated that citizen involvement does not …

This study examines the variations in the practice of implementation in different implementation structures using the case of police education reforms that were undertaken by the Turkish National Police (TNP) in 2001 and 2003. Differentiations and similarities in the top-down and bottom-up structures while practicing the process of implementation were investigated in this study. First, the study provides a comprehensive understanding of the process of implementation and structure of implementation. Second, the study introduces TNP education reforms and explains the reasons for the reform. Third, a quantitative approach is used to measure the success of the TNP educational reforms. Specifically, multiple regression analysis, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and post hoc tests are used to clarify if police performance in the TNP has improved since the reforms. Fourth, the study uses a qualitative approach to find out how features associated with top-down or bottom up approaches were involved in the process of implementation of the educational reforms. Finally, based upon the views of the participants in the qualitative analysis, the study examines the variations in the practice of implementation between decision makers and the street level bureaucrats.