Police chiefs

Lieutenant Piotrowski, New Jersey State Police, discusses drug monitoring programs. With this program, his agency collects multiple drug-related data sets to ultimately have an impact on mitigating the impact of drugs in his community. Topics include the benefits of implementing a drug monitoring program, some of the outcomes of the program, and how federal funding can help an agency start such a program.

Lieutenant Piotrowski participated in an NIJ Day panel at the 2019 International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference and Expo.

Captain Baughman of the Kansas City (MO) Police Department answers the question “What is risk terrain modeling?” and explains how it differs from crime mapping, what resources his agency deploys at high risk areas, and the results he has seen form using risk terrain models.

Sergeant Jeffery Egge of the Minneapolis Police Department, and NIJ LEADS Scholar alum, discusses his experience with leads including how the program benefited his agency and his use of date to address gun violence and the opioid epidemic and the city's sentinel events review of overdose fatalities. Sergeant Egge also discusses his current work looking at investigative closures.

At this Research for the Real World seminar, NIJ brought together law enforcement practitioners and leading researchers in the field of stress to discuss the current research evidence and practical benefits of targeted stress-management interventions and how they can promote officer mental wellness.

This video, produced for IACPTV, provides an overview of the NIJ Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS) program. NIJ LEADS Scholars from Dayton and Newark police departments provide an overview of the LEADS program as they describe their projects and experiences working in the program.

Hear from LEADS scholars Major Wendy Stiver, Dayton Police Department, and Captain Ivonne Roman, Newark Police Department.

Researchers have devoted considerable attention to mass incarceration, specifically its magnitude, costs, and collateral consequences. In the face of economic constraints, strategies to reduce correctional populations while maintaining public safety are becoming a fiscal necessity. This panel will present strategies that states have undertaken to reduce incarceration rates while balancing taxpayer costs with ensuring public safety.

What does science tell us about case factors that can lead to a wrongful conviction? Dr. Jon Gould of American University will discuss the findings of the first large-scale empirical study that has identified ten statistically significant factors that distinguish a wrongful conviction from a "near miss." (A "near miss" is a case in which an innocent defendant was acquitted or had charges dismissed before trial). Following Dr. Gould's presentation, Mr. John R.

Change doesn't come easy, particularly within an institution as large and complex as the criminal justice system. Greg Berman, Director of the Center for Court Innovation, offered lessons from several efforts to make reform stick in criminal justice settings. In particular, he focused on the development of community courts — experimental court projects that are attempting to reduce both crime and incarceration in dozens of cities across the U.S. and around the world.

Law enforcement agencies can use research-based practices to manage protests and civil disturbances more effectively. In this video, Dr. Tamara Herold, Associate Professor, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Ryan Lee, Assistant Chief, Portland Police Bureau, discuss some of those methods, some of the misconceptions about how law enforcement should respond to civil disturbances, and where agencies should begin when developing civil disturbance response plans. 

Professor Christopher Stone recently completed a study of police-on-police shootings as part of a task force he chaired in New York State. He reported on his findings and recommendations, exploring the role of race in policing decisions, methods to improve training and tactics to defuse police-on-police confrontations before they become fatal, and methods to improve the investigations of such shootings.

Bill King discusses the operations of the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN), a program through which firearms examiners at state and local crime laboratories compare tool marks on fired bullets or cartridges found at a crime scene to digitized images of ballistic evidence in a nationwide database.