John's primary research interest centers on policing with specific focuses on environmental and organizational contexts as well as contemporary issues in the field.
In regard to the former, his recent work has attempted to study discretionary police behavior by placing officers in their larger social contexts. Influenced by the Chicago school and the broader social ecology perspective, he is interested in how the characteristics of both the communities and the departments in which officers are employed affect not only their perceptions of the job and citizens but also a host of policing outcomes such as use of force and traffic stops/searches. For example, John has co-authored a study appearing in Police Quarterly, which tested the impact of five organizational characteristics of departmental professionalism (e.g., education/hiring requirements, training) on violence during police-citizen encounters. Another effort in this research area includes a competing test of an agency’s degree of representative bureaucracy (i.e., minority diversity), which draws from the public administration literature, and the racial/ethnic composition of a community on racial/ethnic disparities in traffic stops in an article in Policing: An International Journal. His dissertation used data from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN) to examine how the features of the patrol beat, such as levels of concentrated disadvantage and crime, influence officer perceptions and police culture more broadly. The first paper from John's dissertation is online first in Crime & Delinquency; a second is forthcoming in Policing: An International Journal with another manuscript in preparation to be sent out for review.
*Click on the images below to be directed to each article's host.
1) Environmental & Organizational Influence on Discretionary Police Behavior
John has also spent the last few years focusing on contemporary issues in policing, particularly the increase in attention directed toward law enforcement since the summer of 2014 in the wake of several high-profile deadly force incidents (e.g., Michael Brown; Eric Garner; Walter Scott). One co-authored study published in the Journal of Criminal Justice examined national-level crime rates to determine if there is evidence of "Ferguson Effect." Another study, also recently published in the Journal of Criminal Justice, explored whether police departments in Missouri have engaged in "de-policing" - or officers' withdrawing from active police work - since the shooting death of Mike Brown, and if de-policing has subsequently had an effect on crime rates in those municipalities. He plans on continuing this work on relevant, current event-related topics in policing by concentrating on issues of officer safety and emerging technology.
2) Contemporary Issues in Policing
