Browsing by Subject "public safety"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    The Cost of Saving Money: Public Service Motivation, Private Security Contracting, and the Salience of Employment Status
    (Public Performance & Management Review, 2018) Merritt, Cullen C.; Kennedy, Sheila Suess; Kienapple, Matt R.
    The growth of government outsourcing has triggered significant legal and social science research. That research has focused primarily on issues of cost, accountability, and management. A thus far understudied question concerns the relevance and importance of public service motivations (PSM), especially when a government agency is proposing to outsource services that are considered inherently governmental. This exploratory study centers on the use of private security guards to augment government-provided public safety, and investigates the public service motivations of part-time and full-time employees of private security firms that regularly partner with—or seek to protect the public independent of—local police. Findings reveal that the presence or absence of motivations consistent with PSM was not attributable to private sector employment, but to whether informants were part-time or full-time employees.
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    Daily Situational Brief, May 11, 2011
    (MESH Coalition, 5/11/2011) MESH Coalition
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    Improving social harm indices with a modulated Hawkes process
    (Elsevier, 2018-06) Mohler, George; Carter, Jeremy; Raje, Rajeev; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    Communities are affected adversely by a range of social harm events, such as crime, traffic crashes, medical emergencies, and drug use. The police, fire, health and social service departments are tasked with mitigating such social harm through various types of interventions. While various different social harm indices have been proposed for allocating resources to spatially fixed hotspots, the risk of social harm events is dynamic, and new algorithms and software systems that are capable of quickly identifying risks and triggering appropriate public safety responses are needed. We propose a novel modulated Hawkes process for this purpose that offers flexible approaches to both (i) the incorporation of spatial covariates and leading indicators for variance reduction in the case of rarer event categories, and (ii) the capture of dynamic hotspot formation through self-excitation. We present an efficient l1-penalized EM algorithm for estimating the model that performs feature selection for the spatial covariates of each incident type simultaneously. We provide simulation results using data from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department in order to illustrate the advantages of the modulated Hawkes process model of social harm over various recently introduced social harm indices and property crime Hawkes processes.