Issues and Patterns in the Comparative International Study of Police Strength
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Published studies have examined patterns of police strength in only a handful of industrialized, and mostly English-speaking, democracies. There are primarily two reasons for this. First, practical limitations, especially language, make it difficult to collect international data on police strength. Second, even when such data are available, they are often riddled with errors related to erratic reporting and other reliability and validity problems. Perhaps the most important source of these problems is simply confusion among researchers and/or survey respondents about the meaning of the term police. We begin by reviewing existing research and theory on police strength. Using a new data set compiled from multiple sources, we then explore differences in police strength, both between nations (cross-sectionally) and over time (longitudinally). After summarizing what is and what remains to be known about police strength from a comparative perspective, we close with an explicit agenda for future theory, research and data collection on this topic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.060 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".