Law enforcement officers are frequently tasked with addressing and responding to public safety and community concerns related to issues of homelessness. While interactions between law enforcement and individuals experiencing homelessness occur frequently, issues of homelessness also span public health, policy, and housing spheres. Because of this, several communities in the United States also lean on outreach workers to address issues of homelessness. Recent research has described both law enforcement officers and outreach workers as street-level bureaucrats. Both groups grapple with unique shift demands, lack of supervision, burnout, and issues such as turnover, all while leveraging their personal knowledge and connections to make decisions on a case-by- case basis.In two studies, this dissertation explores the role of the police and outreach workers in responses to issues of homelessness. This is important to address because there is evidence that these two groups have a high degree of contact with individuals experience homelessness and have similar decision-making processes. Yet, they are largely siloed from one another making it difficult to generate policies related to issues of homelessness that are informed by both groups. In study one, responses to close- and open-ended responses (N = 1,163) drawn from a survey distributed to law enforcement personnel are analyzed, merged, and interpreted. The second study of this dissertation is an ethnography of outreach workers in Maricopa County, Arizona. The collective findings from these two studies underscore a remarkable similarity between outreach worker and law enforcement decision making, as well as a growing need to strengthen the relationships between these two groups to support longer-term solutions. Co-created training guides and events can be constructed to enhance the relationship between these two groups and to support mutually beneficial outcomes. Portions of this research were supported by a Law and Science Dissertation Grant, via the National Science Foundation, award SES-2016661 to Arizona State University. This project was also supported by Arizona State University’s Graduate College and Graduate Student and Professional Association’s Graduate Research Program Award. The findings and conclusions are those of the author and do not reflect the position of the National Science Foundation or Arizona State University.

The influence prison staff have on experiences of incarcerated individuals is important for maintaining professional and respectful interactions. These interactions maintain the legitimacy of the institution and in turn influence responses to staff by incarcerated persons. However, correctional scholars often suggest that interactions with staff are typically not positive and ultimately contribute to the negative experiences reported by those incarcerated. Additionally, it is important to recognize that experiences may be racialized as different racial identities come with varying experiences, stigmas, and expectations. These realities leave the challenge of identifying ways to improve these interactions and subsequently the overall experience of incarceration. Acknowledging the positive interactions with staff that may go unnoticed within prisons can inform on better practices for fostering positive, professional staff-incarcerated relations. To address these positive aspects, this study thematically analyzes the responses of 200 incarcerated women to the question “tell me about your best experience with a member of staff in this prison.” Major themes were then condensed into ‘instrumental’ or ‘relational’ groups based on their connotations in order to conduct a multinomial logistic regression to predict likelihood of reporting a certain type of support based on racial identity. Results of this study contribute to an area of research that centers the humanity and complexity of interactions between staff and incarcerated women. Findings of this study have important implications for the practices that prison staff could be leveraging as means of improving the experience of incarceration.

Participatory action research (PAR) is a methodology that emphasizes the importance and benefits of doing research with people rather than on people. A PAR approach prioritizes people-centered work that can help facilitate change within communities. Past work has utilized a PAR approach to research in corrections, but less is known about how PAR can be used as an intervention in prison. There are also certain aspects of the carceral setting which bring into question whether PAR would be as effective as it is in free communities. The current study uses data from semi-structured interviews with 200 incarcerated women in Arizona to explore whether incarcerated women perceive that including people in prison in the design and implementation of a program is going to enhance that program. Participants are presented with one of four vignettes describing a scenario in which new programs are brought to the prison. Vignettes contain a single variable measure who designed and taught the programs and had four conditions: correctional staff, incarcerated women, university researchers, or incarcerated women alongside university researchers (akin to a PAR scenario). A series of questions are asked after the scenario that measure perceptions of program quality. Results indicate mixed support for the PAR approach to programming and call for PAR researchers to be clear on the intended effects of the approach, particularly as it is applied to social change and developing programming in a prison environment.

This thesis addresses two research questions: how are police officer activities in high crime areas influenced by training on procedural justice?, and how do differences in the activities among trained and untrained officers help explain changes in the perceptions of residents about police procedural justice and police legitimacy? Written activity logs used by police officers during a hot spots policing project in Tucson, AZ were transferred to a database and coded for the types of activities officers were taking part in. Surveys administered to residents before and after the project were used to create scales for procedural justice and police legitimacy. These data revealed that police officers trained in procedural justice emphasize different principles in their activities than untrained officers. Procedural justice trained officers did not speak to as many citizens as officers who did not receive additional training, nor did they engage with the community as much, but they did perform more foot and high-visibility patrols. The findings also reveal that resident perceptions are minimally affected by such training and their perceptions of procedural justice and police legitimacy are not significantly hurt. Based off these findings, recommendations for moving forward with procedural justice training include emphasizing how the department would like to see their officers behave and making clearer objectives part of the training. Future research should focus more on better understanding how resident perceptions can be influenced by officer activities.

Intelligence, or the “critical and substantive products that support law enforcement decision making” (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. v), is a vital component within contemporary law enforcement in the United States. It has been used in a multitude of ways to address problems with specific crimes, populations, or locations. Often, this is accomplished through an intelligence-led policing (ILP) framework. ILP frameworks encompass the utilization of intelligence and analysis to achieve “crime and harm reduction, disruption and prevention through strategic and tactical management, deployment and enforcement” (Ratcliffe, 2016, p.5). While related strategies can be incorporated within an ILP approach, attempts at adopting intelligence-led frameworks in law enforcement typically target specific crimes or are orchestrated from the top down. Patrol-driven ILP initiatives are particularly uncommon, and there have been no known evaluations of such efforts to date. This dissertation addresses this gap in the literature by analyzing and evaluating the Phoenix Police Department’s (PPD) Intelligence Officer Program (IOP). More specifically, it explores how communication and information sharing function in the program, the program's perceived value to the patrol function, and whether the program impacts officer behavior, specifically in terms of productivity and proactivity. Data for examining these three key areas originate from various sources, including surveys of three different groups of stakeholders (patrol officers, intelligence officers [IOs], and IO supervisors), Intelligence Officer Reports (IORs), executive reports from the program, and official activity data from the Crime Analysis and Research Unit (CARU). Results suggest that patrol officers and IOs are involved in communication and information sharing, and perceptions suggest that the IOP is improving these. Diverse information is shared within the program, which is also reflected by success stories that arise from it. Broadly the stakeholders examined seem to be receptive to and supportive of the IOP, with more awareness and familiarity with the program resulting in more supportive views of it. In terms of tangible measures, IOP training and resources appear to decrease both productivity and proactivity. The implications of the aforementioned findings for both practice and research are discussed.

The opioid crisis has become one of the most persistent public health crises in America, killing over 100 people a day. The opioid crisis emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s when opioid overdoses began to dramatically increase due to prescription painkillers. Heroin subsequently became a popular drug that was obtained through illicit markets in 2010. More recently, fentanyl, a potent and illicitly manufactured synthetic opioid, has driven a notable increase in the number of opioid overdose deaths. The opioid crisis has impacted many communities across the country. However, some communities are more susceptible to higher rates of opioid use. In order to determine which neighborhoods in Tempe, Arizona are more vulnerable to opioid use the author uses Tempe Emergency Medical Services (EMS) calls for service data and American Community Survey data to address two research questions: 1) What sociodemographic factors at the census-tract level are associated with calls for service to opioid related incidents and 2) are aspects of the physical environment associated with calls for service to opioid related incidents (e.g. vacant units, lack of complete plumbing, multiple unit housing structures)? Understanding community-level risk and protective-factors is essential for furthering the discussion on interventions that aim to address problematic opioid use in vulnerable communities. The current study finds that communities that are economically disadvantaged, and have a higher percentage of units that are vacant have more EMS calls for service to opioid related incidents. However, counter to the proposed hypothesis of social disorganization theory, residential instability was associated with fewer calls for service to opioid related incidents (i.e. higher levels of residential transience). Additionally, racially and ethnically diverse communities had fewer calls for service to opioid related incidents albeit statistically non-significant. These findings have implications for future research and for possible policy implications directed at reducing opioid overdoses.

Policing is often described as a craft in which officers develop their own working style through a process of apprenticeship and time spent handling unique citizen interactions. For police, experience is thought to be integral in nearly every facet of their role including developing suspicions, making discretionary decisions, defusing potentially dangerous situations, or using coercion. With that being said, the study of police experience itself has received scarce attention and a number of limitations are present within the work that does exist. The current study advances police research on multiple fronts. First, it centers on reframing police experience in a more precise manner, with special attention paid to identifying and detailing how shift, crime area, duty assignment, and training experiences accumulate and vary across officers. Second, it examines the impact of police work experiences on officers’ perceptions of confidence. Third, an additional qualitative approach is included to provide context for how work experiences impact officers’ confidence in performing job related tasks. Using data collected from a large metropolitan police department located in the western portion of the United States, the results add much to what is known about how police experience is acquired throughout a career and how it is related to officer self-efficacy. Independent variables such as officer tenure, the number of shifts an officer has worked in their career, the completion of additional in-service training, and duty experience were all significant predictors of increased confidence in performing different service-oriented, order-maintenance, and law enforcement tasks. To explain these findings, the officers’ qualitative responses largely focused on how exposure and repetition at handling unique situations made these experiential factors important to the development of confidence. Finally, these results are translated into a number of policy recommendations and avenues for future research.