Law enforcement activities in Italy

This article examines the organization and function of Italy’s police forces. In contrast with other countries there have been very few recent studies on policing in Italy. This article starts from the origins of the modern police in Italy and tracks changes over time. Police activities that relate specifically to surveillance of territory and individuals, maintaining public order, controlling immigration and the coordination of police operations are reconstructed and documented, with a specific focus on crime prevention. The article attempts to assess to what extent this has been achieved in recent decades, and to what extent the efficiency of crime prevention has increased or decreased over the last thirty years. The article also examines the relations between the size of the police force and crime statistics to discover whether the increase in the former is directly linked to a decline in the latter.     

Private production,collective consumption,and regional population structure: the interactions between public and private good provision as determinants of community composition

"Theories of trade and migration explain the distribution of individuals among regions based on private good productivities. The theory of local public goods (LPG's) uses collective good consumption economies to explain the size and composition of communities. This essay combines the two theories, to explore regional population heterogeneity and stability. Assuming that individuals must consume and produce in the same jurisdiction, the paper examines the nature of efficient allocations, the tensions between the private and public incentives, the nature of the equilibrium (if any) which migration among jurisdictions will generate, and how such equilibrium will depend on tax rules for sharing the costs of the LPG."     

Police–public relations in transition in Antwerp, 1840s–1914

This article examines how police–public relations have evolved during the nineteenth-century expansion of formal policing. Following recent critiques of the ‘state monopolization thesis’, it dismisses the idea of a ‘policeman-state’ progressively assuming dominion over the governance of crime, generating vicious antagonism between police and public, and effectively coercing the latter into obedience. In order to chart changes in police–public relations across the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the analysis draws on Antwerp police statistics from 1842 until 1913. It assumes that movements in different types of offences reflect the initiative of different actors and also constitute a valuable index of conflicts between police and public. The article argues that although police activity in Antwerp did significantly increase towards the end of the nineteenth century, priorities in crime control were not merely dictated from ‘above’ (the police and authorities) but also delivered from ‘below’ (the people). It shows how police interventions were shaped by shifting policy concerns, by the interests of different urban interest groups, and by the practical constraints of police work. Finally, it counters the idea of a repressive police disciplining a hostile public with evidence of growing public use of the police and of complex popular attitudes towards the ‘blue locusts’.     

THE OPTIMAL PROVISION OF LOCAL PUBLIC GOODS IN A METROPOLITAN AREA WITH FLEXIBLE JURISDICTIONAL BOUNDARIES*

ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyze the optimal structure of a monocentric city that has multiple jurisdictions. The cost of providing a public good depends on both the area of the jurisdiction and the quality of the service, both of which are endogenous variables. We show that the optimal quality of the public good decreases as distance from the central business district (CBD) increases if the public good and the housing lot are substitutes, and may increase if they are complements. The optimal population density always decreases as distance from the CBD increases.     

城乡结合部的犯罪机会控制与空间综合治理

本文从犯罪机会对城市犯罪的影响机理出发,构建了犯罪机会的三角模型,并借此对城乡结合部犯罪机会的来源、构成及其组合状态的展开理性分析。进一步地,文章提出要建立"控制犯罪机会"的理念,梳理城乡结合部犯罪机会控制与犯罪防控的基本思路,强调把防控策略的构建与城乡结合部的空间综合治理措施相结合,通过"可防御空间"的营造,促进城乡结合部摆脱"城市犯罪高发区"阴霾笼罩,使其进入到全面建设、和谐发展的有序轨道上来。     

New mechanisms,old problems? Recent books on universal jurisdiction and mixed tribunals

This review article examines three recent books on two topics: universal jurisdiction and the mixed or hybrid tribunal. It reviews two volumes on universal jurisdiction that discuss the history of the concept and the rise in the exercise of universal jurisdiction, as well as some of the arguments for holding rights abusers responsible in venues far from the locus of the original crime and then turns to some of the possible pitfalls of such approaches. The article also examines some of the virtues, but also the shortcomings, of the hybrid tribunal and concludes that while these innovative tools have their uses, they cannot be viewed as a panacea, but rather as part of a continuing effort to prevent and respond to atrocities.     

LOCATION OF PUBLIC FACILITIES WITH SPILLOVER EFFECTS: VARIABLE LOCATION AND PARAMETRIC SCALE*

ABSTRACT This paper studies the location of public facilities of two neighboring local governments which consider not only the influence of the land market but also the spillover effects that each jurisdiction may have on the other. We obtain the following results: (1) in most cases, one of the cities behaves as an isolated city in choosing the facility location while the other enjoys the spillover effect as a free rider; (2) we also find that the equilibrium location in the two noncooperative city case is not socially optimal except for a special case.     

The end of the territorially-sovereign state? The case of crime control in the United States

Numerous commentators argue that the nation-state is an endangered species. External forces of globalization and internal forces of social differentiation, many suggest, are significantly weakening the state's capacity to regulate its subject population within its jurisdictionally-defined space. Such an argument is often made in the specific case of crime control. The spread of international communications networks and the growth of international policing suggest that single-state crime control efforts will increasingly be insufficient, the growth of private security and community-oriented crime reduction efforts suggest that the state is surrendering crime control to other domestic agencies. This paper examines the specific case of crime control in the United States to argue that the putative weakening of the state is not in fact occurring. When examined more closely, suggested evidence of decreased state power vis-a-vis crime turns out, if anything, to demonstrate the opposite. The analysis demonstrates that, in the American case especially, the state remains startlingly relevant when it comes to efforts to combat crime and maintain order. Because police agencies are bureaucratic institutions that must demonstrate their relevance to ensure their continued health, and because the state's broader legitimacy is linked to the provision of security, the public crime control apparatus promises to remain robust for the indefinite future.     

Violence and vigilance in Nahua communities of seventeenth-century central Mexico

While historians have long studied the institutional dimensions of crime and punishment, this article examines the informal, extra-legal efforts of Nahuas and other residents of central Mexican communities to contend with violence and resolve conflicts. Residents of Nahua communities could not rely entirely on the authorities for protection and justice; rather, by being vigilant and taking matters into their own hands, they played a vital but underappreciated role in policing their communities, dealing with disorder, and preserving the peace. As such, they shouldered some of the law enforcement functions of the state apparatus. At times, their contributions could prove indispensable to the administration of justice. Their efforts not only helped to maintain public order and protect one another but they also tell us much about perceptions of acceptable behavior as well as notions of civic responsibility and, by extension, community membership and social solidarity.     

The (un)lettered frontier: power and literacy in the eastern Andes of Charcas,seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

In colonial Latin America, notaries played a critical role in the generation of written, objective truth in an uncertain world. But were notaries indispensable? By the mid-seventeenth century, Spanish communities in the eastern Andean borderlands of the Audiencia of Charcas had not only begun to do without notaries, but even actively and sometimes violently kept them out of their jurisdictions. Borderland communities became spheres of legal activity where the ability to create law without notaries implied not only the transfer of writerly resources to new agents, but also a shift in the modalities of power and authority within the frontier. The impact of such a legal regime was not merely local. At times, frontier officials used their ability to create un-notarized documents as a tool to resist the spatial hierarchies of center and periphery, sometimes neutralizing the claims of officials in the Audiencia of Charcas to jurisdiction over local matters, while actively promoting local ties to the king.     

TAX COMPETITION IN THE PRESENCE OF INTERJURISDICTIONAL EXTERNALITIES: THE CASE OF CRIME PREVENTION*

ABSTRACT The paper analyzes the effect of fiscal competition when local governments choose the level of public goods that generate spillover effects elsewhere. For instance, law enforcement activities affect both the crime level in the jurisdiction providing the good and in neighboring communities. The model shows that when local governments rely on capital taxation to finance these expenditures the spillover effects may not lead to an inefficient provision of public goods as predicted by the tax competition literature. In the model, capital is costlessly mobile and offenders relocate responding to differential criminal opportunities and differential local law enforcement efforts.     

Culture, religion and curriculum: lessons from the 'three books' controversy in Surrey, BC

This article considers the spatial, cultural, and legal dimensions of the controversy surrounding the Surrey School Board's religiously motivated refusal to approve three books portraying families with same-sex parents. It examines the issue in terms of debates over the public/private distinction, and the notion of a 'culture war' between progressive and orthodox stakeholders. The polarized opinions advanced in such debates not only invoke and rely upon particular understandings of space, they also have ramifications for the organization of the public sphere, and services such as public education in particular. This article focuses on the three decisions handed down in the Surrey case, culminating in the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling that religious concerns have a place in public decision making, but not to the exclusion of other considerations. This decision signals that the religious opinions of some parents may shape the public school curriculum, and thus the instruction of all pupils. In this respect, it poses a serious challenge to liberal visions of secular public education, and to a secular public sphere more generally.     

'The third degree': press reporting, crime fiction and police powers in 1920s Britain

The late 1920s saw a dramatic upsurge in popular concern about the abuse of police powers in Britain, the end result of a longer-term trend. Various aspects of policing were seen as worrying, but the most important concerned illegitimate forms of questioning. The phrase 'the third degree'--imported from America--came to encapsulate this unease. Before the First World War, the terminology began to be used in British coverage of American crimes and their investigation, typically accompanied by disparaging commentary on American methods as well as the confident assertion of the superiority of British policing. The wartime growth in police powers and broader state regulation caused some to see an erosion in the 'liberty of the subject', and a series of scandals seemed to reveal serious problems with police procedure. The popularity of crime dramas featuring 'third-degree' interrogations also shaped public images of the police. Scandals in 1928 generated enough of an outcry to force the calling of the Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure (1928-29). Even though few concrete procedural changes were undertaken, it appears to have successfully calmed worries about the police, which receded and did not reach a similar level until the late 1950s.     

Moves and Countermoves: Countermovement Diffusion of State Constitutional Amendments

Policy diffusion literature generally studies the adoption of similar policies across jurisdictions, but often overlooks how opposing policies or legal constraints may influence the enactment of rigid state constitutional amendments. The current study models the spread of state constitutional amendments designed to prevent future policy change. Using conditional event history analysis on all states from 1999 to 2011 the empirical models analyze the spread of same‐sex marriage prohibitive amendments across the United States. Findings suggest that the nearby adoption of opposing policies encourage state legislatures to introduce prohibitive amendments. The regional diffusion effect suggests that policymakers “protect” their jurisdiction from nearby diffusion forces or seek electoral gains by symbolic protection by committing an already existing policy into the rigid state constitutional framework. Regional policy diffusion may, therefore, be explained by a countermovement mechanism unique to the state constitutional amendment process. This protective strategy among state legislatures and citizens may explain why many policy areas are frequently codified in state constitutions.     

Crime Risk Maps: A Multivariate Spatial Analysis of Crime Data

In crime analyses, maps showing the degree of risk help police departments to make decisions on operational matters, such as where to patrol or how to deploy police officers. This study statistically models spatial crime data for multiple crime types in order to produce joint crime risk maps. To effectively model and map the spatial crime data, we consider two important characteristics of crime occurrences: the spatial dependence between sites, and the dependence between multiple crime types. We reflect both characteristics in the model simultaneously using a generalized multivariate conditional autoregressive model. As a real‐data application, we examine the number of incidents of vehicle theft, larceny, and burglary in 83 census tracts of San Francisco in 2010. Then, we employ a Bayesian approach using a Markov chain Monte Carlo method to estimate the model parameters. Based on the results, we detect the crime hotspots, thus demonstrating the advantage of using a multivariate spatial analysis for crime data.     

Geopolicing Race,Gender, and Class: How the Police Immobilise Urban Allochthones

City landscapes are ever-changing stages for the protagonists that pass through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses to positively and negatively code subjects. As such, geography matters to the body. Rather than taking geographic locations, crime statistics, predictive maps and human bodies as objective truths, I focus on the work of police officers, not in terms of an instrumental-rational “meeting of policy targets” or attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make raced, gendered and classed geographical differentiations. This process culminates in geopolicing: the spatial imaginations and practices of police officers as to who, what and where to police and, of course, why. Geopolicing includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of urban “matter out of place”. Police officers perceive exclusionary territories in which landscapes racialised as white and identified as affluent are threatened by urban allochthones identified by class, race, gender, age and residential status. The findings are based on my ethnography among police officers in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, between 2007 and 2011.     

KEEPING THE PEACE

This paper locates the emerging professional police force in Copenhagen both in a European‐wide context and in the context of Danish absolute monarchy between 1660 and 1799. The surviving source material on the activities of the new police force itself (from 1683) is reviewed, but the notion of ‘good police’ is placed in a much broader early modern framework involving not only daily security in the city, and matters of criminal and civil law arising naturally in a growing urban environment, but also the relationship between the police master and the many other existing agents of domestic policy in early modern Denmark. The role of ‘good police’ in terms of begging, vagrancy and the workhouse conform largely to contemporary European patterns, but when the police was also (from 1773) given powers to control newspapers and the press, questions of civil rights and obligations were bound to be raised – not least once public opinion became fully aware that the mental condition of Christian VII meant that absolutism could not operate in the normal way. Although the Copenhagen police provided a tool for more co‐ordinated implementation of social policy in the 18th century, there were no sudden changes in domestic agenda.     

Greening America's Skylines: The Diffusion of Low-Salience Policies

The diffusion literature is replete with examples of highly salient policies spreading across subnational governments. However, low-salience policies that do not benefit from a groundswell of public opinion also spread across jurisdictions in patterns that appear similar to those of other, more well-known policy ideas. This research is an investigation of the mechanisms that propagate low-salience policies. I analyze the adoption of the U.S. Green Building Council's (USGBC) Leadership in Energy Efficient Design standard across 119 U.S. cities from 2000 to 2008. The investigation indicates that a knowledge broker, in this case the USGBC, occupies critical roles in linking a low-salience policy to a broader set of widely held societal values, developing a common policy vocabulary, providing a base policy that jurisdictions may freely adapt, and creating a diffusion infrastructure by acting as a communication hub for existing and interested jurisdictions to discuss innovations and progress.     

‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys’: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London

In December 1932, police raided a private ballroom in Holland Park Avenue. They found almost sixty men dancing, many in female clothing and make–up. An ongoing encounter between the police and working–class queer social worlds drew the ballroom into a public domain within which masculine sexualities were contested, produced and consumed. The ensuing trial gripped metropolitan opinion, becoming the most notorious and widely reported ‘pansy case’ of the 1930s. This paper explores the complex nexus of spaces and practices that cohered in the case as a site at which the queer subject was definitionally produced. During the trial both legal authorities and newspapers and the defendants sought to produce a stable contradistinction between queer and normal, though the meanings they invested in that difference diverged radically. Yet focusing upon the intersecting sites through which this queer subject was constituted – the city, the body and the police/policed interface – suggests the unsettling ambiguities undermining the stability of that difference. Throughout the case, the difference between queer and normal often seemed anything but self–evident, and the arrested men appeared an electric threat to the metropolitan cultural landscape.     

The ICC pre-trial chamber decision on jurisdiction over the situation in Myanmar

The transfer and deportation of ethnically Rohingya people from Myanmar into Bangladesh is a crime against humanity demanding an international response. What role, however, should the International Criminal Court (ICC) play? On 6 September 2018 an ICC Pre-Trial Chamber ruled that the Court has jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute such crimes as they are completed on the territory of a State party, Bangladesh. Myanmar is not a party to ICC Statute and has invoked the principle that treaties do not bind third parties without their consent. The case put in this commentary is that while the Pre-Trial Chamber’s approach to the law was arguable as an interpretation of the ICC Statute, it was unwise as a matter of policy. The argument is threefold. First, the Pre-Trial Chamber’s ruling is as a matter of legal method only the first-move in a process of norm-creation and persuasion. Second, it does not follow that because territorial jurisdiction in international law includes ‘objective’ jurisdiction over transboundary acts completed on a State’s territory that such jurisdiction was delegated by member States to the ICC in all cases. Finally, it is argued that international criminal tribunals do not succeed when the cooperation of necessary territorial governments (here, Myanmar) is withheld. Proceeding in this case risks becoming a quagmire of the ICC’s own creation at a time when it can little afford further risks to its legitimacy.