Posts

August 22, 2026

Do Deceptive Interrogation Bans Affect Juvenile Case Resolution? Nine-State Results, Forthcoming in Crime & Delinquency

Nine states banned deceptive interrogation tactics for juveniles between 2022 and 2024, raising concerns among some that the tradeoff would be fewer cases solved. Across 510,582 juvenile-involved incidents in NIBRS (2021-2024), arrest clearances did not decline after adoption --- estimates are null to modestly positive across every method --- and prosecution declinations, the one measure that fell, fell for adults in the same states too.

juvenile justice interrogation deception bans NIBRS

July 18, 2026

Seeing Confessions Clearly: Why the Standard Score for Interrogation Methods Rewards Silence

For two decades, interrogation research has graded techniques with a single ratio: true confessions divided by false confessions. That ratio cannot tell the difference between a method that is better at separating guilty from innocent suspects and one that simply makes confessing harder for everyone. An interactive dashboard demonstrates the problem.

false confessions interrogation signal detection theory measurement

July 25, 2025

Mapping Public Misperceptions of Police Use of Force

How accurate are Americans' perceptions of police use of force?

public opinion police use of force misperception misinformation

July 25, 2025

State-Level Patterns in Support for Calling Off Police Pursuits

Where do Americans most support calling off police pursuits---and what factors drive those differences?

public opinion police pursuits termination decisions state variation

February 19, 2024

Staffing Levels are the Most Important Factor Influencing Police Response Times

A Bayesian analysis of seven years of daily data finds that patrol staffing levels are the most consistently significant factor affecting police response times across all priority levels.

policing staffing response times bayesian

May 1, 2023

Decoding the Narrative: Using Machine Learning to Uncover Trends in News Coverage of Police Use of Force

Using structural topic modeling on a corpus of 29,035 news headlines spanning 1990-2021, this analysis identifies eight latent media narratives about police use of force and examines their association with public opinion.

topic modeling text analysis police bayesian

February 5, 2021

Don't Forget the Good with the Bad and the Ugly: Topic Modeling a Policing Commission Listening Session

A structural topic model analysis of public comments from a policing commission listening session reveals four distinct themes---including one of appreciation for officers that the local news coverage missed.

police topic modeling text analysis

December 16, 2020

Fleeing Police: Evaluating and Forecasting Police Turnover

A Bayesian structural time series analysis finds a 388% increase in police resignations causally attributable to the post-George Floyd period, with probabilistic forecasts indicating continued increases.

police bayesian turnover

December 13, 2020

Policing in a Pandemic: How Pracademics and Data can Help

A case study showing how pracademics used data analysis and research synthesis to drive a police department's internal COVID-19 infection rate below city, county, and state levels.

police COVID-19 data

December 2, 2020

Explaining Federal Crime Control Policy with Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

Using data from the Comparative Agendas Project, this analysis applies Punctuated Equilibrium Theory to explain the episodic, non-incremental nature of federal crime control legislation and criminal justice assistance funding from 1947 to 2017.

criminal justice policy punctuated equilibrium

August 20, 2020

Police Twitter Rhetoric post George Floyd: Differences by Party in the US Senate

Text mining analysis of US senators' tweets in the two months following George Floyd's death reveals distinct differences in policing rhetoric between Republican and Democrat senators.

police text mining political parties