College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/8
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
Browse
4 results
Search Results
Item RACE AND GENDER’S EFFECT ON POLICE OFFICER STRESS AND BURNOUT: A CASE STUDY OF THE BALTIMORE POLICE DEPARTMENT(2021) Duka, Leila; Xie, Min; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Law enforcement is an inherently stressful profession because officers deal with unique strains. Experiencing extensive and consistent amounts of stress ultimately leads to burnout, ineffective, and inefficient officers. Guided by several theoretical frameworks, the current study will examine the gender and racial differences in police officers’ stress and burnout in the Baltimore Police Department (N = 878). Specifically, I use several OLS regressions to understand the scaled responses of the officers’ psychological stress, physical stress, and burnout levels. I found female officers are more likely and black officers are less likely to experience both manifestations of stress. Further, I found no sign of increased burnout levels for either group. When analyzing a potential moderation between these demographics, I also found no difference between minority groups. While only a case study, the conclusions drawn can help identify which officers are most vulnerable to high stress and burnout levels.Item The Pretrial Process in Baltimore City: An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Predicting Flight Risk(2010) Ferguson, Sharlene Anne; Paternoster, Ray; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines and provides a preliminary update to Baltimore City's Bail- Risk Assessment Scales. It is based on a sample of 757 recent arrestees in Baltimore City, and specifically examines factors relating to current charge severity, prior record, substance use, and community stability and their impact on Failure to Appear (FTA) in court in conjunction with guidelines set forth by the National Association of Pretrial Services Agency (NAPSA) and the American Bar Association (ABA). Results suggest that Baltimore City's Bail- Risk Assessments can be condensed into one scale and be made more simple and effective. Additionally, the results suggest that Baltimore City uses and applies reasonable risk factors, but the measures are inappropriate. Finally, the results suggest that future risk assessments must be tailored to the population for which they are applied.Item BUILD to WIN: Community Organizing, Power, and Participation in Local Governance(2009) Bullock, John Thomas; Kaufmann, Karen; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on community organizing and uses it as a mechanism to compare the political environments in Baltimore and Washington over the last three decades. By conducting comparison case studies, I identify the contextual circumstances that affect the ability of grassroots organizations to achieve desired ends. The fact that both cities have functioning Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) affiliates - Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD) and the Washington Interfaith Network (WIN) - provides the opportunity to investigate the conditions that give rise to community organizing. Examining the interactions between BUILD/WIN and mayoral administrations over time sheds light on the varying temporal contexts while also explicating the different managerial styles of central political actors. By conducting these case studies, I highlight the optimal political conditions for the inclusion of grassroots organizations representing the interests of neglected neighborhoods.Item The emergence of a local memorial landscape in the aftermath of violent tragedy: a study of Baltimore's Dawson murders, 2002-2005(2007-02-27) Steele, Christopher Perry; Geores, Martha E.; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Memorial landscapes are inextricably linked to the processes of national, regional, local, and individual identity formation; and are tightly bound to notions of place and space. A rich body of literature exists in the social sciences on the structure and function of national scale memorial landscapes. A nascent body of literature on informal memorial works and landscapes is emerging in the social sciences. The current study bridges these bodies of literature by investigating the collection of memorial interventions as elements of a single memorial landscape and by focusing on local, human-scale remembrance over a three years period. A triangulated, multi-method, qualitative research design has been applied to the investigation of the material, discursive, and representational components of the memorial landscape which has emerged in Baltimore's Oliver neighborhood in response to the murder of all seven members of the Dawson family on October 16, 2002. The memorial landscape is viewed here as the manifestation of the community's negotiation between the production of space and the making of place. The data reveal that the initial years in the formation of a local-scale memorial landscape are bound up with complex sociopolitical processes. The outcomes of this research are that the formation of the local-scale memorial landscape is a complex and dynamic expression of sociopolitical identity and power; that memory work is transformative with regard to space and place; that there is merit in a more inclusive definition of the memorial landscape; that multiple geographic scales produce the memorial landscape; and that participation in local-scale memory work diminishes over time. Future research should focus upon the variability of memory work across race, class, gender, faith and geography at the local scale. Such an investigation has the potential to yield greater degrees of understanding of complexity and ambiguity of local-scale identity formation..